Orders for the fighter and night bomber regiments to begin active service arrived simultaneously. Both were brought from Moscow by Raskova on March 7, the day before International Women’s Day, which was celebrated enthusiastically in the Soviet Union.
Sending her mother greetings on “this day that proclaims the strength and power of Soviet woman,” Lilya Litvyak told her that on this “joyful day the major has brought us wonderful news from Moscow.”133 For Lilya the news was all the more wonderful because the fighter regiment was being sent to defend her home town, Moscow. “We have the happy duty and honor all fighter pilots dream of. We did not even dare to hope that the Party and government would entrust to us the defense of our glorious capital city. Very soon we will be near Moscow on our unconquerable wings, and if we do not see each other, our closeness will be some consolation for how much I miss you.”
Raskova read out the order in the familiar hall of the officers’ club. She wished them all a happy International Women’s Day tomorrow, and announced that the U-2 night-bomber regiment would fly to the Western Front in one week’s time, on March 14, as part of the effort to build on the successful counter-attack which had driven the Germans back from Moscow. The fighter regiment, she added, would follow shortly after. The girls leapt to their feet, applauding. Katya Budanova spoke very eloquently after Raskova, saying that the fearsome wings of her plane would protect the heart of the Motherland. She too was thrilled to be defending Moscow. Katya’s mother and her little niece were living in their home village of Konoplyanka under German occupation, but in Moscow there lived her sister, her friends from the factory, and the Young Pioneers on whose upbringing she had lavished so much care before the war. For the girls who were Muscovites, defending Moscow meant protecting their home town as well as the capital, but for the others too this was the most important combat mission they could be entrusted with. Moscow was the heart of the U.S.S.R., the city that, even in the moment of utmost peril, Stalin had not abandoned. As far as they were concerned, Moscow, the U.S.S.R., and Comrade Stalin were an indivisible trinity.
Lilya wrote to her mother that they would be leaving Engels very soon now, “apparently before the snow melts,” and of course she was jealous of the night bombers who had only a couple more days to cool their heels in Engels.
March 14 was not, however, to be the day of departure for the Night Witches, as the Germans were to call them. Major Bershanskaya recalled that initially the weather on the evening of March 9 was entirely favorable for training flights. “The crews set off along their designated routes to drop their concrete bombs on the parade ground. Soon, however, the wind picked up and it started to snow. The horizon disappeared and even the lights marking the aerodrome vanished. It was like flying through milk. We could not see anything beyond the instruments in the cockpit.”134 Bershanskaya’s experience and familiarity with the route helped her get back to the airfield, but her students had as yet very little experience of night flying.
Pilots know how dangerous it is to encounter snow, especially in a U-2 that is virtually unequipped for flying blind. They know too how serious it is to become disorientated. The pilot loses awareness of how the plane is flying and, worse still, can become subject to delusions. She may begin to think she is veering right and try to correct that when in fact she is banking left, so that the action taken only exacerbates the situation and the plane spirals to the ground. These false perceptions can be so strong that the pilot ceases to believe the readings on the instrument panel. It is perhaps the worst thing that can happen to a pilot during a flight.
Even today, small recreational aircraft, unlike airliners that can fly blind on their instruments, do not take to the air in bad weather. In a U-2, which had only the most basic kind of instruments, it was only too easy to come to grief in unfavorable conditions. If you were caught in a sudden storm, the only solution was immediately to turn 180 degrees and fly back to your airfield, monitoring your altitude, speed and direction from the instruments and working out (one of the tasks of the navigator) how long it would take for you to be over the airfield (assuming you were on course), descend and circle over where you believed the airfield to be, and try to make out any familiar features on the ground. If that did not work, you needed to continue to circle, changing the radius and looking for the airfield. If you could not see anything and were running low on fuel (which you calculated by the amount of time you had been in the air), you needed to make a precautionary crash landing, which in bad weather and in the dark, was terribly dangerous. As you descended, trying to see the ground, you were in danger of crashing into the high bank of a river or a ravine, or into trees. Even if you succeeded in landing the plane, the wheels might hit a pothole and the aircraft overturn. Anyone who found themselves flying a U-2 at night in bad weather was lucky to escape with their life.
That night a heavy snowfall hid the earth and sky, everything was flickering before their eyes in a whirl of snow. “Lights on the ground twinkling through the heavy wall of snow began to seem like distant stars, while the real stars began to seem like lights on the road.” Three of the crews failed to return. Before dawn a terrible phone call came through: “There has been an accident. Prepare a room where the bodies can be laid.” Four girls had died: Lilya Tormosina and her navigator Nadya Komogortseva, Anya Malakhova and Marina Vinogradova. Only a few hours previously, getting ready for the flight, Lilya had joked with Nadya Komogortseva, “Navigator, I’m giving you a chocolate, only make sure you hit at least one of the lights today! If you can put all three of them out, I’ll give you two more.”135 Miraculously the crew from the third missing U-2 survived. Their plane crashed, but they climbed out of the wreckage almost unscathed.
On the night of March 9 the possibility of dying while on a night mission ceased to be an abstraction and became a reality. Four open coffins were placed side by side in the hall where the girls had so enjoyed dancing. Despite their crushed faces, broken limbs and twisted backs, the pilots and navigators were still recognizable. Many remember that Lilya Tormosina’s face was just as pretty in death as it had been in life, except that it had lost its rosy glow.
Nina Ivakina wrote that these senseless deaths left them all dreadfully sad.136 Everybody was crying. “We tenderly put the coffins with our friends, who only yesterday had been so full of fun and laughter, on the truck and to the strains of the ‘Funeral March’ slowly accompanied our dear young falcons on their last journey, to the graveyard.”
Raskova organized every detail of the funeral herself. She “carefully laid flowers in the coffins, positioned the lids on them, and was the first to throw a parting handful of earth into the graves.” At the meeting at the graveyard her words of farewell were deeply sincere. “Sleep, dear friends, in peace. We shall fulfill your dreams.” Raskova was a woman of many talents, and every word resonated in the hearts of those assembled.
“The pilots are depressed,” Ivakina noted a few days later. “They have been very upset by the death of the girls. The U-2 regiment is not leaving for the front.”137 That had been canceled in view of the disaster, the position evidently being taken that the night bomber regiment was not yet psychologically ready for the front, or that they needed more training. Their departure was postponed indefinitely.
Dusya Pasko, a navigator in the night bomber regiment, was one of the first to hear that not all the missing crews would be returning, and from an unexpected quarter. She had grown up in a large rural family with three sisters and six brothers. All the brothers were at the front, but from their infrequent letters home it was difficult to tell where. One can only imagine her surprise when she was called to the garrison’s security entrance on the morning of March 10 to find her brother Stepan waiting for her. She closed her eyes, thinking she must be imagining things, but when she opened them there was Stepan standing right next to her.138 He had graduated from a military college in Alma-Ata, was now the commander of a machine-gun company, and was on his way to the front with his men. Dusya did not even find out where he was going because, as her senior, he did most of the talking. He wanted to know everything about his sister’s work and life. “You have a really hard, dangerous job, then, with this flying?” he kept asking. Not knowing why he was so worried, Dusya assured him that everything was fine and there was nothing to worry about. Finally, with a rueful smile, Stepan told her that he had had to conduct a meeting at dawn about the death of some girls from her regiment. They had crashed near the road along which Stepan’s unit was marching and he had seen the accident. After that it was useless for Dusya to continue telling her brother how safe she was going to be at the front. Dusya came back from the war as a Hero of the Soviet Union without a scratch, but never saw Stepan again. He was killed in the Ukraine.
Galya Dokutovich had thought before about the possibility that she might die in the war, but had not been frightened. She imagined she would surely die a fine, heroic death in a crashing plane but now, after these first funerals of her comrades, “a whole lifetime older,” she smiled wryly at those childish ideas, and at those of her friends who still clung to such fantasies.
On March 13, still hardly able to believe that her “dear, honest friends” had been taken from them, she confided to her diary that their deaths had been the result of overconfidence; that they were all imagining they were marvelous pilots when that was far from being true. After the disaster she felt her comrades were suffering a drastic loss of faith in their flying skills, and specifically their ability to maintain their orientation when conditions were tough. What could she do to restore their confidence? Galya felt she should be sent out with a pilot on an equally dark night with poor visibility to fly a route and drop practice bombs, and that any pilots and navigators still suffering from self-doubt should be fully informed about it. But the exigencies of war took over, and this never took place.
The single Air Group 122 created by Marina Raskova no longer existed. All three regiments were still based in Engels, and old friends, if no longer living under the same roof, ran into each other in the canteen and on the airfield. They were, however, no longer all members of the same team. Coming over to one of the other regiments for an evening of homemade entertainment, the girls of 586 Fighter Regiment “seemed awkward, and there was no longer that sense of rapport which we had felt before the separate regiments were established.”139 How that had come about no one was sure. Perhaps it was just that now they were living and working apart and had different aspirations for the future. Ivakina supposed the cooling of relations was inevitable, but many of them were saddened by it. Air Group 122, which so recently had meant everything to them, was already history.