After several hungry weeks of idleness 586 Fighter Regiment finally got the order to move, but it came as an unpleasant shock. “Everybody is devastated, and how could they not be?” Nina Ivakina asked.151 For a moment she saw her wards as children who had had their favorite toy taken away from them. Their move to Moscow, they were told, was now some time in the future and for the present they would have to show their mettle protecting Saratov from any German bombers that might chance to appear over it. Although Saratov was home to a number of important facilities, it was well in the rear and had not so far suffered any bombing raids. The women pilots felt this order could mean only one thing: they were not trusted to do anything more serious. They had no option, however. An order was an order. They started preparing for the flight to Anisovka airfield from which they would perform their air defense duties.
It was a role that would have been seen as enviable by some fighter pilots in the Second World War. Taking to the air to protect strategically important sites in the rear required pilots to lie in wait for German bombers and their fighter escorts. There were risks, of course, but they bore no comparison with the casualty rate of fighter pilots at the front. In air defense they would shoot down fewer enemy aircraft and receive fewer medals, but they had a better chance of surviving. However, if many male pilots dreamed of sitting out the war in that manner, the women of 586 Fighter Regiment saw it as a humiliating option.
They flew “up to the Anisovka Front,” as Nina Ivakina noted sarcastically, on May 14. She went on, “Morale among the pilots is at rock bottom. This is the rear.”152 All around, the peaceful steppe was covered in spring flowers. In the orchards of the village that had sprung up around a railway junction the blossom was falling. The airfield was excellent, with a large landing area. Ivakina immediately organized a volleyball court, but the murmurs of discontent among the pilots were growing. They did not like not being sent to the front; they did not like the food served in the canteen, which was based on rear rather than front-line ration norms; and they did not like Tamara Kazarinova, the non-flying commander of their regiment who continued to give them a hard time. “Kazarinova says we are not ready yet,” Lera Khomyakova wrote to her family. “Everything has changed,” she continued. “Kazarinova does not get on with Raskova.”153 Needless to say, not getting on with their adored Raskova did nothing to enhance the popularity of their regiment’s commander.
Nina Ivakina, who meticulously documented the conflict in her diary, noted that people were in such a bad mood that Second Squadron’s leader Zhenya Prokhorova was giving her pilots permission to fly without Kazarinova’s authorization.154 Komsomol Administrator Ivakina’s principal informant about the mood among the pilots (which she probably reported straight to Tamara Kazarinova and the regiment’s political commissar) was the chief navigator, Zuleikha Seydmamedova. It was she who told Ivakina the Second Squadron pilots had written a letter to Stalin that they would ask Raskova to forward. The pilots complained that the conclusion of their combat training was being artificially delayed and that it was quite wrong that there should be so little confidence shown in them when they all had around 2,000 flying hours. Seydmamedova also passed on to Ivakina the nugget of information that pilots had been heard to remark it would be a good thing if “that lame witch” died in a crash, only it would be a shame to lose the plane. “After extensive surveillance,” Ivakina established that the person giving voice to these resentments was Lieutenant Lera Khomyakova.
With exuberant youthful overstatement, pilots Klava Blinova and Olga Golysheva openly expressed a widely held view: “We hate the commander. She is a coward!” It had become clear to everyone that it was not Kazarinova’s limp that kept her from going near the Yaks. She was perfectly well able to pilot the old, primitive fighter planes but had not previously encountered the Yak and saw no reason to learn to fly it now.
The commanders of the other two women’s regiments well understood how essential it was for them to fly alongside their pilots. Yevdokia Rachkevich held that even as commissar of the night bomber regiment she had to be competent to fly. In Engels she made time to learn, if not as a pilot, then at least as a navigator. Overcoming the air sickness which constantly plagued her, she flew whenever she was allowed to. Raskova herself, although trained as a navigator, had long ago decided she had no moral right to command the heavy bomber regiment without herself being able to pilot the capricious Pe-2 dive-bomber.
Raskova had comparatively few flying hours to her name, but she was fearless, talented, and tenacious. She studied alongside the others, whose flying experience was dozens of times greater than her own, and showed on her first solo flight in a heavy bomber that she had assimilated the theory well. No sooner had she taken off than white smoke began streaming from one engine, which then failed. The pilots watching from the ground were desperately worried. Masha Dolina crushed her fists together. How would the relatively inexperienced Raskova get out of such a dangerous situation? “God, just help her to maintain speed!” Komsomol activist Dolina prayed to the Almighty, and in that she was not alone.155
As if in answer to their prayers, Raskova did the right thing by immediately preparing to land and, without veering off course, did so perfectly, not on the fuselage but with the undercarriage down which, with only one engine, was much more difficult. When Masha and her friends, overcome with joy, ran to the plane, Raskova climbed out of the cockpit and gave them her usual calm smile. “Masha, stop gaping or a bird will fly into your mouth,” Masha’s friend nudged her. As she gazed in admiration at Raskova, Masha was reminded of Nikolai Tikhonov’s lines, “Nails should be made out of people like these; the world would not know any stronger.”
The fighter pilots believed relations between Raskova and Tamara Kazarinova were strained over precisely this issue; Raskova would never have allowed herself to be in Kazarinova’s flightless situation. Like them, she must surely have interpreted the commander’s behavior as cowardice, and she had no time for cowards. The pilots of 586 Fighter Regiment blamed Tamara Kazarinova for their having been shunted off into air defense. It was galling that far less experienced male fighter pilots were being sent to fight at the front. How could a regiment with a commander like her be taken seriously by anyone?
The conflict intensified with every passing day, escalating into open revolt. During the war this kind of situation was not uncommon on the front line. Unpopular commanders of reconnaissance units were often found shot in the back, but in an air regiment in the rear such mutiny was unheard of. The Majorette, as they contemptuously called her, tried to bring her subordinates to heel by intimidation but proved no match for her pilots. Fuel was added to the fire by the fact that 588 Night Bomber Regiment had already gone off to fight.
In late May 1942, the night bombers had circled in farewell over Engels aerodrome. Ahead flew Raskova, who had decided to lead them to the Southwestern Front and then return to her own heavy bomber regiment in Engels. The Saratov Young Communists gave the girls an accordion as a parting gift, of which the redoubtable mechanic Nina Danilova immediately took charge. For the rest of the war it raised the spirits of her comrades and herself alike.
This was the day they had dreamed of and prepared for, but they did not manage to fly all the way to their destination in graceful formation. Mistaking the Soviet fighters that joined them after they had passed Stalingrad to provide them with air cover for enemy aircraft, the girls panicked and scattered. It took them a long time to live that down. Raskova was annoyed but, with her usual ability to present setbacks in a favorable light, wrote to Militsa Kazarinova, “We flew from Stalingrad with an escort of I-153 ‘Seagull’ fighters. They accompanied us for a long time because the Yaks were playing against Messers above the clouds. I had to drag everybody along at treetop height. In addition there was a headwind and terrible turbulence. People found it very trying. Before we reached Morozovskaya we met up with the Seagulls again and they covered our landing.”156 Raskova went on to say that the girls had changed out of all recognition. “They have suddenly become real servicewomen, which is more than could be said of them in Engels.” After seeing the night bombers safely settled she intended, she said, to fly on to Moscow for a day or two to see her daughter and mother.
Raskova gave a moving farewell speech to her wards, hoping they would win many medals and become a guards regiment.157 She told them they must show that women can fight as well as men, “and then in our country women too will be welcomed into the army.”158 Her students, as always, hung on every word. None of the night bombers would see her again, but for most of them she remained a guiding light for the rest of their lives, in war and in peace. Many years later, when they had made the transition from recklessly brave girls in uniform to ordinary Soviet women, when they faced some major task or challenge they would recall Raskova’s words, “We can do anything.” They adopted that as their motto.
The commander of 4 Air Army, forty-year-old General Konstantin Vershinin, received Yevdokia Bershanskaya courteously and questioned her about her airwomen. He was particularly anxious to know whether they could fly in the glare of searchlights, and whether they knew how to land using only navigation lights, without turning on their landing lights. This meant the ground was not visible until the last moment and the plane’s instruments had to be particularly closely monitored. They did know how to land in that manner, but had no experience of flying in the blinding beam of searchlights. Only too soon they were to run the gauntlet of these disorientating conditions that lit their little planes brightly and made them highly vulnerable to German anti-aircraft batteries and night fighters.
Vershinin handed 588 Night Bomber Regiment over to Colonel Popov’s air division, where their U-2s were desperately needed. Popov, however, was far from pleased to learn he was receiving a women’s regiment. “What have we done to deserve this? Why are we being sent reinforcements of this variety?” he asked.159 When he arrived to inspect the regiment, Popov first taciturnly strode from one plane to the next, and was hard pressed not to laugh out loud when a girl sentry moved her rifle from her right to left hand to greet him. When introduced to Raskova and Bershanskaya, Popov was “silent and unsmiling.” “Well, Comrade Colonel, do we have a sale?” Raskova asked breezily. Popov paused meaningfully before replying, “It’s a deal.” He had little choice.
Popov’s division was providing support to the Soviet troops defending the remnant of the Ukraine that was yet to fall under German occupation. Again, as in Engels, for as far as the eye could see there stretched the steppe which Galya Dokutovich found so boring by comparison with the lush forests and green fields of Byelorussia. Here, in the Donetsk coal-basin in the vicinity of Voroshilovgrad, the scenery consisted of vast flat expanses separated by strips of tall poplars or gullies, muddy fishponds, and little villages with small white houses. The only raised land was oddly shaped mounds scattered here and there, slag heaps from the mines. It was late May, however, and even such unpromising scenery was pretty. In the village of Trud Gornyaka near Krasnodon, which was the first stop on their journeyings along the front line, the daisies flowered in the grass and the birds were singing. The girls were billeted in cottages and issued dazzlingly white bed linen. They found it difficult to believe that the front line was only thirty kilometers away at the River Mius. The night bomber regiment stayed in Trud Gornyaka only briefly. Soviet troops were in retreat. The repulse of the Germans from Moscow was the only major military success of 1941 or the first half of 1942. The second year of the war was no less terrible than the first.
The first military mission the women’s night bomber regiment were given was to harass the German units advancing on Rostov-on-Don. The Germans had taken the city on November 21, 1941. A week later, the Red Army was able, albeit at a heavy cost, to recapture it because the Germans did not have enough troops to retain it. The enemy army had holed up for the winter on a fortified line along the River Mius, and in the spring re-launched their offensive with fresh forces. By retaking Rostov-on-Don the Germans would not only have opened up the prospect of continuing through the Caucasus to the oil reserves of Baku, on which the U.S.S.R. depended, but would also be in a position to capture Stalingrad, a major transport hub and the center of the U.S.S.R.’s military production. Fighting on the Southern Front resumed with renewed ferocity.
The 588 Night Bomber Regiment were tasked with attacking the German ammunition and fuel dumps, vehicles and ground troops. Those German soldiers they could not kill had to be demoralized and deprived of sleep by nighttime bombing. Arriving in the mining town of Krasnodon not far from Trud Gornyaka, the girls were amazed at how remote from the front line it felt. The Germans had come close to Krasnodon but been driven back, and now the local people seemed completely unaware that the situation might recur with a very different outcome. Only a few days earlier Galya Dokutovich, still indignant about flirts in uniform, had written in imitation of Pushkin:
While one girl in the washroom splashes,
Galya Korsun paints her lashes.
Attends her physiog’s every need.160
Now everything had changed, and instead she was indignant that their staging airfield was so far from the front line. She also felt their first combat missions were little more than dummy runs, a suspicion shared by the other pilots and navigators. Nobody was firing at them when they were over the targets. They had a sense that they were not trusted and were being fobbed off with missions to soft targets, which were little different from training flights.
Three hundred miles northwest of Rostov-on-Don, Anna Yegorova, who as yet had no inkling of the existence of Raskova’s all-women regiments, was flying out to armies retreating from Kharkov who would soon be surrounded by the Germans. The disastrous Kharkov operation, intended as a strategic offensive to recapture the city that had surrendered the previous October, resulted in complete encirclement and the almost total destruction of the Soviet forces, trapped ultimately in a fifteen-square-kilometer patch of land. In late May, the Soviet armies attempted to break out of the encirclement and the German General Lantz later recalled horrifying attacks by massive numbers of Soviet infantry. Ninety percent of the Soviet troops in the encirclement were killed or disappeared along with their generals. These included the deputy commander of the Southwestern Front.
On the morning of May 20, flying to the town of Izyum with a secret package for 9 Army headquarters, Anna looked down to see troops retreating along the roads or through the fields. In the valley of the River Seversky Donets and at Izyum everything was in flames. There were dogfights in the sky. Anna’s plane was attacked by a German fighter and set on fire. She landed the burning aircraft in a field of maize, tore off her smoldering overalls, and ran to the woods, under fire from the pursuing German pilot. The Messerschmitt finally flew off and Anna just wanted to lie down on the grass, close her eyes and forget everything. The new leaves were breaking through on the trees and she suddenly felt a tremendous urge to live. She had never been afraid of dying, but now felt how wrong it would be to die in springtime. The plane had burned to ashes, together with the bag of mail and a raglan coat that had been her pride and joy. How was she now to deliver the secret package? Her only option was to follow a telephone cable, laid on the tree branches, in the hope that it would lead to a command post of some sort. Almost immediately she came upon two soldiers coiling up the wire. When she asked where the command post was they shouted, without stopping what they were doing, “What do you mean command post? The Germans are there!” Everywhere isolated soldiers and groups of soldiers were retreating. Anna ran to the road, but found it empty. A truck careered past, ignoring her signals. Then an M-1 saloon, which she assumed was carrying some top brass, also rushed past totally ignoring her. Anna pulled out her pistol and fired in the air. The driver immediately reversed, jumped out of the car, boldly disarmed her and twisted her arms behind her back. When he delved into her breast pocket for her I.D., Anna sank her teeth into his arm. There is no knowing what might have happened next, had not a well-fed general emerged rather cumbersomely from the car and started questioning Anna, who still had her arms pinioned, as to who she was and why she was behaving so badly.
Anna, beside herself with resentment and pain from her burns and twisted arms, shouted, “Who the hell are you?” She asked for her arms to be released and pulled out a rather impressive card that requested all military units and organizations to render the bearer every assistance.
The fat general immediately became polite and asked where she needed to go. He seated Anna in the car to take her to 9 Army headquarters and asked how she came to be so badly burned. While she was telling him, Anna burst into tears. Her hands were hurting as the captain had stripped the skin off them.
“Don’t cry, my dear,” the general comforted her. “The tears will only make your face smart too.”
Three hours later they found the army headquarters, Anna handed over the package, and went to the medical unit where she finally had ointment put on her face and her hands bandaged. She returned to her squadron, where they had almost given up hoping for her return.