The Fighter Regiment received its Yaks in late January 1942. On the day the aircraft were to be delivered everyone ran to the windows the instant they woke to see whether the weather was suitable for flying. It was bright and sunny and could not have been better. The snow on the aerodrome sparkled so dazzlingly it hurt their eyes, but they all looked up squinting into the sky and waited. They heard the long-awaited roar of engines around midday and were breathless when the Yaks appeared.
On January 28, Nina Ivakina wrote that the first Yak-1 to be delivered was “a sign of spring . . . It was a little airplane as white as snow and equipped with skis, two rapid-fire machine guns and a cannon.” Ivakina was surprised how awestruck the pilots were at the sight of it, and how impatient they were to see who would receive this gift from the gods.99 Everybody abandoned what they were doing and gathered in a “heaving crush” at the aerodrome. Very soon the rest of the Yaks were flown over from the Saratov Aviation Plant on the other side of the Volga. When the order was received, “Prepare to receive equipment,” the mechanics rushed to check their tools yet again and to check and re-check the readiness of their aircraft stands, to repeat the rules for receiving the planes and escorting them there.
The girls were ecstatic: these Yaks too were in white winter camouflage and on skis. In fact they were the only white planes they flew during the war, which is why they all remembered so vividly those first planes that flew in on that sunny winter’s day. White camouflage was soon abandoned—it was a waste of time to repaint the planes twice a year—and once it became clear that replacing wheels with skis in wintertime was impractical, all planes were fitted only with wheels. Saninsky, the unit’s chief mechanic, kept up an endless stream of banter to counter the other mechanics’ fatigue, and made them work all day in the freezing cold. By evening the aircraft were ready.
Other fighting units that received Yaks from the Saratov Plant, recently re-tooled to produce aircraft instead of combine harvesters, could not believe their luck. The I-16 aircraft in which they had been fighting up till then, nicknamed “the Donkey,” was “a small, poorly armed aircraft, and slow.”100 Its weaponry consisted of a single machine gun that proved inadequate in combat. “You would press the firing button and, before you knew it, were out of ammunition.” When the Yaks were delivered to 296 Fighter Regiment, to which Masha Dolina so longed to return, its pilots immediately appreciated that this was a qualitatively new aircraft: it had an outstanding specification and serious armaments with its machine guns, cannon, and six rocket-propelled missiles. They found landing on skis tricky at first because “there were no brakes,” but at last they had “an aircraft you could use to fight.”101
On January 29 Lilya Litvyak wrote to her mother that she had finally flown solo in a Yak, a day she had been looking forward to for months. “I am now a fully fledged fighter pilot,” she wrote.102 She was particularly pleased that her training period, before she was allowed to fly a Yak without an instructor on board, had been minimal. The real training, when they would learn about flying at high altitude, aerobatics, and air combat, was yet to come.
The pilots also started studying fighter tactics and photo reconnaissance. They now each had their own plane, which the mechanics polished until they were gleaming. As before they all got up at 0600 hours, and flew from 0900 to 1700 hours. The only drawback was that, as a result, they had a huge gap between their early breakfast and the chance to eat again at 1800 hours. Even pilots were now sometimes being underfed. “We get 20 grams of butter once every five days and now, for the first time, we only get one egg,” Lera Khomyakova wrote home. “I leave the canteen still hungry.”103 The mechanics, who got less than pilots, would try not to eat their bread at lunchtime and take it out with them to the aircraft. When the hunger became too much, they would take it out and gnaw it, frozen hard by the cold, and feel better.
On the same day that Lilya Litvyak was writing about her first solo flight in a Yak, Nina Ivakina heard at a closed meeting that there were plans to send them to the front in February. For the time being this was to be kept secret. The intention was to send the night bomber regiment, which would be flying U-2s, before that, since training them was a simpler matter.
On the day mobilization of the night bomber regiment was announced, the instructor teaching the navigators Morse code was in high spirits. On his key he tapped out various humorous sentences, and now and then laughter rippled through the class. He suddenly started tapping away faster, at a speed few could keep up with. “The order has come to mobilize the night bomber regiment. If you have understood this, you are free to leave the classroom quietly.”104 Several girls got up and went out with a secretive smile while the rest, flustered, looked on. When everyone found out, it was as if the girls had sprouted wings. “In no time now we’ll be going to the front!”
The long-awaited U-2 light bomber aircraft were delivered in early February. They were exactly the same as the old ones the girls had trained on: light, slow-moving, their wings covered with fabric. No parachutes were issued. In the view of the authorities, and of the crews themselves, if this type of aircraft suffered engine failure there should be no problem gliding it down to land, so no provision needed to be made for bailing out. The fact that the plane was made of plywood and percale cotton fabric, burned like tinder if it caught fire, and that the crew might burn to death before they could land, seemed not to occur to anybody. Sometimes U-2 pilots were told that, since they would be flying behind the front line, it would better to die in their aircraft than land and be taken prisoner by the Germans. It was commonly held that death was preferable to German captivity, the horrors of which were written about at length in the newspapers. Most, however, gave no thought to the possibility of captivity or death. At twenty you do not think about such things, even in wartime.
Girls like Galya Dokutovich, who combined an administrative position with flying, were not given a fixed partner. The idea was that they would fly in the time left over from their administrative duties, but there was little of that, and so they were assigned to pilots who, for whatever reason, were temporarily short of a navigator. Galya found this very upsetting: she really wanted to fly. “I have a problem,” she jotted in her diary. “I have been appointed squadron adjutant. I suspect that means I can forget flying.”105 Sitting every day on the training courses of the headquarters staff group that were supposed to make them “fearfully clever,” Galya envied those who instead were flying in the heavens. She greatly appreciated her infrequent training flights, especially the more testing ones that took place at night. On February 5, 1942, she wrote, “It was funny how elated we were yesterday when we came into the canteen after our night flights. Red-faced, our hair all over the place, our eyes bloodshot, we turned up in the morning still in our flying suits and boots. We sat there eating our meal, and Zhenya Zhigulenko’s head kept leaning over onto Vera Belik’s shoulder, her eyes closing completely.”
The night bomber navigators had not only to find their way to the target at night and get their aircraft back to base; it was also their job to drop bombs accurately on the target. After they were delivered, the quiet, peaceable little U-2s were converted into bombers in the simplest imaginable manner. An improved version, specifically adapted for carrying a bomb payload, began coming into service only in 1943. Until then, bombs were slung under the wings with rudimentary attachments, and the small flare bombs used to illuminate a target were carried like luggage in the navigators’ laps. The planes could carry a payload of 200–300 kilograms of bombs. Galya wrote in her diary that, as soon as they had familiarized themselves with “the equipment,” they would be sent to the front. Major Bershanskaya was expecting at any moment to fly to Moscow to be given the order.
The pilots of 587 Heavy Bomber Regiment envied the fighter and night bomber crews: they were still waiting for their planes, and training in the meantime on the “bitchy” Su-2s. Their navigators were being trained on the huge Tupolev TB-3 bomber, which they were all loaded onto together. Before the first flight they timidly approached the huge aircraft and stared in perplexity at the parachutes dumped under the wing. “Don parachutes,” the instructor ordered, but nobody knew how to do that. Little Tonya Pugachyova, nevertheless, confidently took one and started putting it on. The parachutes were intended for men, with the result that the shoulder straps hung down to Tonya’s legs, which she slipped through them. The male bomber crew roared with laughter, but the instructor was unabashed, told the men to behave, took Tonya’s parachute and explained to the girls how to put it on.106
The planes they finally got their hands on were the most up-to-date available at that time, thanks to Raskova. She had flown to Moscow to see the People’s Commissar of the Aviation Industry, Alexey Shakhurin, whom she knew well. When asked the purpose of her visit, Raskova replied that she had come to ask him to supply her regiment with the latest Petlyakov Pe-2 dive-bombers. Shakhurin almost laughed in her face: “Those are a bit different from your U-2s!” he exclaimed.107 Production of the twin-engined Pe-2 ground attack bomber had begun even before the outbreak of war, but in 1942 very few units were yet equipped with them.
Its designer, Vladimir Petlyakov, designed the aircraft in prison, having been found guilty in 1937 of the fanciful charge of attempting to establish a Russian fascist party. Initially the Pe-2 was to be developed as a fighter, but when it became evident that a dive-bomber was more urgently needed, the fighter was rapidly converted. The country’s leaders were pleased with the result and rewarded the designer with a Stalin Prize. They even let him out of jail. This cutting-edge dive-bomber had a payload of one and a half tons of bombs, a top speed of 540 kilometers an hour, and could fly at high altitude. It could also dive at an angle of 50–60 degrees, enabling more accurate placement of its bombs. Moreover, no other aircraft had an undercarriage as robust as the Pe-2.
Needless to say, like all aircraft, it had its disadvantages, and unfortunately these were major. Fundamentally it was an extremely difficult plane to handle. It could only land at high speed, which was dangerous. The precise angle at which the plane landed was also crucial: the slightest mistake could prove fatal. This was said to have been the cause of Petlyakov’s death in an air crash in 1942 when he was flying to Moscow in his own plane. He was buried in a cemetery near Kazan close to where the aircraft crashed, and a chiseled inscription appeared shortly afterward on his stone monument. It read, “Thank you for the undercarriage, but the flight characteristics you’ve experienced for yourself.”108 This rueful inscription was clearly made by someone with inside knowledge.
Nevertheless, nothing Raskova heard about the difficulties of flying this new aircraft discouraged her. Unlike raw graduates from flying school who were sent to the front with very little experience (usually less than 100 hours) the pilots in her regiment had thousands of hours in the air, which meant that retraining them to fly even this trickiest of planes was a more straightforward matter. Raskova did not back down, and Shakhurin succumbed to the insistent arguments of this heroic aviatrix. He promised to let her regiment have the Pe-2 even ahead of those front-line regiments which were in desperate need of it.
The news that they would be required to master this problematical plane was not met with great enthusiasm in 587 Regiment. Even the squadron leaders were disconcerted by the prospect of training their crews to fly the huge Pe-2 at short notice. Raskova urged them not to be disheartened, and as soon as the Pe-2s arrived joined the training classes herself. For her it was even more difficult than for others because of her relatively modest flying experience.
Raskova’s regiment tamed the capricious aircraft and came to love it. They soon called it their little Peshka (Pawn) and their Swallow. The regiment did not suffer a single fatality during the training, unlike the neighboring reserve regiment where cadets straight out of flying school, some with 100 hours in the air but some with only twenty, were grappling with the complexities of the Pe-2. Accidents occurred because pilots simply could not master the controls. There was a regulation that, if there was a crash, flying would be abandoned for the day but, in the face of so many fatal accidents, the regulation had to be repealed and flying continued even if one their friends had just been killed.