On July 19, 1941, Masha Dolina became a military pilot in an unusual way.10 Earlier that month German troops, implementing the Barbarossa campaign plan, broke through the last line of defense in Soviet Byelorussia on the River Berezina and, heading into the Ukraine, dashed toward the line formed by the Western Dvina and Dnieper rivers. Here they encountered unexpected resistance from regrouped forces of the Soviet Western Front, but these were unable to hold them back for long. Further up the Dnieper, German armies, which in early July had taken the cities of Zhitomir and Berdichev in Western Ukraine, soon came close to the Dnieper itself, encircling and capturing two Soviet armies along with their commanders at Uman. Beyond the Dnieper lay Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, which Stalin had only recently assured the Allies would never be surrendered.
That same July, Konstantin Simonov, a young but already well-known and fashionable poet, prose-writer and playwright, and now war correspondent, witnessed the terrible chaos of the retreat over the Dnieper. He saw refugees whom he was powerless to help and, like most of the soldiers, felt terribly ashamed. Many years later, Yakov Khalip, a photographer for the Army newspaper Red Star, who had been with Simonov, asked him, “Do you remember that old man at the crossing on the Dnieper?” Simonov suddenly did remember an old man who had harnessed himself in place of a horse and was pulling a cart with children in it. Khalip had started photographing the scene when Simonov snatched the camera and pushed him back into their car, yelling, “How can you photograph such misery?”
Thinking back now, Simonov saw they had both been right: he in saying it was unforgivable for a man in uniform to climb out of a vehicle and start photographing “this appalling refugee exodus” and the old man hauling children in a cart. It had seemed immoral. He could not imagine how to explain to the disconsolate people going past why they should be photographed. With the war in the past, however, he accepted that, if it was legitimate for him to write about these things, the only way a photojournalist could capture the misery was by photographing it.11
At the flying club1 in Nikopol where Masha was working there was total confusion. As the fighting had already reached the suburbs of Kiev, Nikopol, which was 400 kilometers away, was hastily evacuated, but the flying club was completely overlooked. Masha, who found herself in charge as all the more senior instructors had been sent to the front, did not know what to do. With German tanks only eighty kilometers away, she rushed in desperation to the commander of the retreating fighter division. “Comrade Colonel! Take us together with our aircraft as volunteer pilots.” The colonel had no time for her and just waved her away angrily, saying he was far from certain he would be able to save even his own aircraft.
The next day, by which time the Germans were even closer, Masha appealed to him again. In the division everyone was “running around in disarray.” At first the colonel did not even notice her, giving her his attention only when she shouted in tears at his back that to abandon the flying club members and leave their three U-2 aircraft to fall into enemy hands would be treason. The colonel stared at her very intently, before ordering her to destroy the flying club’s hangars and fuel tanks, and fly her planes across the Dnieper at night. If her pilots managed that he would enlist them in his division. Masha and her friends destroyed their beloved flying club with their own hands, not looking at each other in order not to break down. That night, with no experience whatsoever of night flying, she and two colleagues flew their first and most terrifying combat mission.
She was to remember the Dnieper in 1941 for the rest of her life: the flash and thunder of explosions, the impenetrable smoke and blood-red glow. Down below, blown-up ferries flew into the air, tanks burned like huge black bonfires, planes fell from the sky like wood shavings. The water of the Dnieper, which they glimpsed through breaks in the smoke, seemed also to be engulfed in flames. Miraculously, they managed to get all three of their planes through this vision of hell and land them safely at the airfield, which was completely blacked out because of the bombing. The divisional commander was as good as his word and duly enrolled them in 296 Fighter Regiment.
Many of the regiment’s pilots had fought in the Russo-Finnish war and were already highly decorated. And a good number, like the commander, Nikolai Baranov, had been fighting since the day the war began in June. At first, finding herself alongside these battle-hardened fighter pilots, Masha’s throat was dry with excitement. She began to develop a crazy determination, which grew stronger by the day, to become a fighter pilot herself. From her earliest days she had told herself that, “to live without a goal is completely pointless.”12
Masha Dolina was the eldest in the family of a whole horde of children. Her mother could neither read nor write and earned a living for them by taking in washing; her father was paralyzed from the waist down and confined to an invalid’s cart. It was a hard, hungry life. There was no food for Masha to take from home to eat at school, but sometimes kind classmates shared theirs with her. Her clothes had been endlessly patched, and her first real felt boots were bought for her by a whip-round among her teachers after her feet were frostbitten. For years her family huddled in a corner of the village pottery, until they made a dugout for themselves that had walls of bricks which her mother and all the children, from the oldest to the youngest, made together from clay mixed with horse dung. They were thrilled with their new house, which rose seventy centimeters above ground level and had a tiny window—but in darker moments Masha feared she would never escape such dire poverty. When she completed seventh grade at school she had to go in search of work to feed the family. Masha sensed that only the currently fashionable profession of aviation, with its seemingly limitless prospects, offered a way out. Now, at twenty years of age already a seasoned pilot and flying instructor determined to devote her life to aviation, Masha wanted to scale the heights of her profession and become a fighter pilot.
This, however, was not a good moment to fulfill that dream. The regiment was in constant retreat, abandoning one airfield after another. They abandoned the Ukraine, Masha’s homeland, to the Germans. “God forbid you should ever witness a retreat and have to see that dismay, that child-like helplessness and forlorn hope in the eyes of your fellow countrymen.”13 When they were very close to Masha’s village of Mikhailovka, where her family were still living, she plucked up the courage to ask Baranov to give her leave to say goodbye to them before the Germans came. She promised she would just fly there, give them food, hug them, and come straight back. Baranov, a broad-shouldered man of thirty or so, with curly, slightly ginger hair and a big round head, fixed his gray eyes on Masha “as if checking my trustworthiness.” He would be risking not only a pilot but also a plane, and yet he could hardly refuse.
“Just mind that when you land in your village you unload your gifts, hug your parents, but under no circumstances turn off the engine,” he said. He knew from that morning’s intelligence report that the Germans had already reached the station at Prishib, just seven kilometers from Mikhailovka. Masha was given the coordinates that would enable her to catch up with the regiment.
Baranov was an intrepid pilot and an extremely able commander who was loved as well as respected. After his talk with Masha, he gathered the other pilots and had a word with them. Right away, one after the other, they came over to Masha’s plane bearing an extraordinary array of gifts. They brought out the emergency rations of chocolate, biscuits and tinned food stored in their aircraft against the eventuality of a forced landing. They brought all the food they had, as well as greatcoats and tunics, soap and first aid kits and piled these offerings into the plane. It was after midday before Masha took off for Mikhailovka in her overloaded U-2.
As she flew over her home she could see no people in the village streets, but spotted the airfield where she had flown a glider, then the school, then her family’s humble dugout. Masha circled and saw people beginning to come out of their homes. She landed the plane in the street by the village soviet and people came running from all directions. Her father was brought in his little cart, with Masha’s mother running beside him, heavily pregnant again. Masha tearfully hugged all her relatives, unloaded the presents, and ran back to the plane saying, “I have to go!” but people swarmed round and it was evening before she was able to take off.
By the next day Mikhailovka was in German hands, and from then on Masha lived in constant fear for her family. Now, however, she had another family of loyal front-line friends among whom she already felt thoroughly at home. This meant she was stunned when Baranov summoned her one day to relay an order: “Comrade Junior Lieutenant, you are required to report for duty to Hero of the Soviet Union Raskova!”
Masha burst into tears. The name of her icon was no consolation; she could not forgive even Raskova for taking her away from the front to waste time on a lot of square-bashing when she was within striking distance of becoming a fighter pilot. Baranov knew her for a fine, courageous U-2 pilot and needed her for liaison—a complex and challenging role that involved everything from communicating with division headquarters to transporting the wounded and ferrying supplies. He had no wish to lose her, but told her he could not disobey orders.
1 Flying clubs had first appeared in the U.S.S.R. in the early 1930s and were immediately extremely popular. Although they trained amateur pilots, they also offered a route to the flying schools, both military and civilian, where one received professional pilot’s training.