In flying weather the fighter pilots often made several sorties a day and, when they landed, were so exhausted by the stress of combat they did not have the strength to climb out of the plane immediately. Valya Krasnoshchyokova remembered that sometimes, after flying a third or fourth mission, the exhausted pilots would have to be literally pulled out of their aircraft by Pleshivtseva and herself.412 The Germans were less formidable in the air than a year ago, but still strong.
Baranov’s pilots no longer had any misgivings about the girls, especially Litvyak whom most considered an “average to good pilot.”413 In March, her name crops up frequently in the records of the unit, now known as 73 Guards Fighter Regiment after receiving the honorific title of “Guards.”
On March 7, 1943, Litvyak “made a forced landing at the Selmash [in fact, Rostselmash] airfield.” The cause, as the political adviser reported, was “being investigated.”414 Before it was discovered there had been a mechanical failure, there were many jokes circulating among the men. It was held, and may have been true, that Lilya did not have much of a grasp of technical matters. People recalled the reprimand she received from the regimental engineer when she arrived back at the airfield with only a few drops of petrol left, having failed to take account of the direction and speed of the wind. “Oh, lassie!” he scolded. “As long as the wee stick on the front keeps going round and round you think everything’s fine!”415 Very soon, however, Lilya again proved she was not to be laughed at. “During the period March 22, 23 and 24 the regiment was providing air cover for the city of Rostov,” wrote Major Krainov in his routine report to the political department. “At the time of raiding by hostile bombers of the city of Rostov, air battle was conducted, as a result 2 aircraft of the enemy of type Junkers Ju-87 and 1 of type Junkers Ju-88 and 1 Messerschmitt Bf-109 were shot down. In the air battle there distinguished themselves: Member of the Communist Party Lieutenant Kaminsky (shot down 1 Junkers Ju-88, which fell in the district of Gorodishche), Senior Sergeant Borisenko (shot down 1 Junkers Ju-87 enemy aircraft), Member of the Komsomol Junior Lieutenant Litvyak (shot down 1 Junkers Ju-87), Member of the Communist Party and Hero of the Soviet Union Captain Martynov damaged 1 aircraft of type Messerschmitt Bf-109.” Further on, he returns to Litvyak. “Showing courage, Junior Lieutenant Litvyak wounded made a safe landing at her airfield, her plane was hit in the air battle and requires repair.”416
In his more comprehensive monthly report, Krainov noted that “On March 22 Member of the Komsomol Junior Lieutenant Litvyak courageously engaged in combat a group of enemy Junkers Ju-88 bombers, was wounded in aerial combat, but despite the pain continued to fight the enemy heroically and at close range shot down a Junkers Ju-88, leaving the battle only when her air system was punctured. Of such combat are capable only daughters of the Russian people,” Krainov concluded on a note of suitable hyperbole.
Lilya became a celebrity. She was featured in Komsomolskaya Pravda. The Tur Brothers, well-known playwrights who went to the front as war correspondents, wrote about her in Stalin’s Falcons. Needless to say, in an article entitled “The Girl Avenger,” they could not omit to describe her appearance. “Lilya Litvyak is 20 years old, a lovely springtime in the life of a maiden! A fragile figure with golden hair as delicate as her very name—Lilya.”
The article described how Lilya, on her third sortie at Stalingrad, had shot down a German pilot who had been “awarded three German crosses.” It added that she now had a reputation as “one of the Front’s outstanding pilots,” and related that, after being wounded, she managed to save her stricken plane. Noting that this young woman was quite without affectation, the reporters quoted her as saying, “When I see a plane with those crosses and the swastika on its tail fin, I experience just one feeling—hatred. That emotion seems to make my grip firmer on the firing buttons of my machine guns.”
The article was printed immediately, and a day or two after the wounded Lilya was taken to hospital in Rostov, the whole town knew about her and her exploits. Lilya Litvyak did not just have visits from Katya, the girl mechanics and the male pilots in her regiment. There were features about her in the Rostov and regional newspapers, and streams of residents came to see her, bringing gifts and sweets, despite the fact that after the occupation most of them had almost nothing left.417 Lilya did not stay in the hospital long, however, and within a few days had returned to her regiment with heaps of gifts, happy, proud, and limping heavily. The wound was superficial, to the soft tissue of her thigh, but it hurt.
She really needed a longer stay in the hospital but insisted on being discharged. Instead Batya, and possibly Sidnev himself, offered her something she could not refuse: a leave in Moscow, and moreover with Katya Budanova, who was detailed to accompany her friend. They were seen off in style. “They drank, and ate bottled apples Baranov brought,” and sang songs.418
Lilya’s brother Yury was fifteen years old, and remembered the return of his beloved sister from the front very well. The next day, after catching up on all the news with her mother, she ran off and returned with two friends. Katya Budanova joined them after she had spent time with her sister and nieces and given them the food she had brought with her. There was a lot of noise and fun that day in the room where Lilya’s family lived. The girls cranked up the gramophone and played “Rio Rita” very loudly. Lilya’s mother, Anna Vasilievna, patched her clothes and mended her uniform.419
Lilya had returned home in uniform, but Yury recalled she brought in her rucksack “a dress with some green bits.” He had no idea what the dress was made of, but we have. “That’s right. Our girls were the prettiest in 8 Army,” the pilots of 73 Guards Regiment recalled. “Do you remember in Rostov we got them German fishnet stockings? They sewed everything themselves, you understand. They sewed amazingly pretty dresses out of German parachutes. Basket-weave silk! The way they trimmed them was, they took German anti-aircraft shells. The gunpowder in them was in little green bags made of viscose. They chucked the gunpowder out and used the green viscose for trimming their dresses. You couldn’t take your eyes off them!”420 A waitress in the Aerodrome Maintenance Battalion who recalled Lilya very well remembered this dress. In Rostov the Red Army captured such quantities of German air munitions that all the girls in 8 Air Army could have been dressed like that, but Lilya sewed better than any of them.
In the cold Moscow of late March, where it was no warmer in people’s apartments than outside in the street, the dress was not very suitable. While her newly laundered uniform was drying, Lilya and her mother together very quickly ran up a suit from an offcut which was either a left-over or which Lilya had brought home with her. Anna Vasilievna kept that suit, and today, faded, it is conserved behind glass in a school museum in Krasny Luch near where Lilya died.421
Lilya did not stay home for long, in a hurry to get back to her regiment, her friends, and Alexey. She was too embarrassed to tell her mother anything about her intimate relationship with Salomatin. Even in letters home, she called it a friendship.422
Katya Budanova was held up in Moscow, most probably on Komsomol business. “Where is she?” Lilya asked in letters home.423 She missed her friend, but Katya returned only at the end of June. In Moscow, she met a lot of people, including the poet Samuil Marshak whom she already knew. After Katya’s death, Marshak wrote his “Song of Katya Budanova,” which was set to music. In June, Katya gave a talk at an aircraft factory where she had once worked. She told her audience, “It is not at all frightening in battle, girls, but afterward, when you are sitting on the ground and close your eyes and think back through all that happened, that is when you get frightened, and go hot and cold, and shake with fear.”424
While Litvyak and Budanova were away, Valya and Faina were settling into a community of women, which was something new for them. There were still a few girl armorers in 296 Regiment. One night Batya Baranov descended on the house in Rostov where they were living, drunk and in a sportive mood. He went to every girl’s bed, pulled off her blanket, and “watered” her with a kettle. The girls shrieked. Only Faina Pleshivtseva kept her head. She got out of the bed where she slept next to Valya, padded in her bare feet over to the bucket, scooped up a mugful of water and poured it over his head. Batya immediately sobered up and departed. After that he was very wary of Faina and Valya.425 When drunk he was apt to pinch the bottoms of other girls. Valya, however, had already decided that he was basically a good man and an outstanding pilot, and shrugged it off on the basis that everyone has their weaknesses. Someone living constantly under that level of stress does sometimes just need to get drunk.
Litvyak was back in her regiment within a week. Had she stopped off somewhere on the way back? Gridnev, commander of 586 Fighter Regiment, in memoirs written late in life, claimed that Litvyak had suddenly turned up in the women’s regiment. According to Gridnev, she had been seconded back to 586 Regiment and came to demand that he should allow her to return to Baranov’s regiment in which her fiancé was a pilot. She was very forward and talked on equal terms with Gridnev, but he understood that he was not dealing with an ordinary pilot: Litvyak was already a celebrity. Gridnev told her he had no authority in the matter, and that the order could only be canceled by Air Defense Command.426 No challenge was too great for Litvyak, who promptly went to Moscow to have the order rescinded there. She evidently succeeded, because that was the last the women’s regiment saw of her.
The regiment’s veterans disagree with Gridnev’s account. They did not care at all for his memoirs, and even demanded that the manuscript should be burned.427 Unfortunately, it seems likely that we will never know for sure how true his often sensational recollections are. Almost no veterans of 586 Regiment are still alive, and those who are decline to talk about this topic, as if they have something to hide. However, bearing in mind how many myths and outright lies proliferated around Lilya’s good name, it may be that Gridnev’s account is the only true one and that she did not go to Moscow on leave, but to talk to people in positions of power and petition Air Defense Command to let her return to Alexey. Perhaps that is also why Katya Budanova spent so long in Moscow. Was she seeking permission to remain in Baranov’s regiment? But why, in that case, did only Litvyak go to speak to Gridnev?
There certainly was an attempt to bring back to Gridnev’s 586 Fighter Regiment the other pilots who left it at the time of the Battle of Stalingrad and later refused to go back. These were Klava Blinova and Tonya Lebedeva, and later also Masha Kuznetsova and Anya Demchenko, who joined Kuznetsova heaven knows how. Blinova and Lebedeva had the benefit of knowing Vasiliy Stalin, but Kuznetsova and Demchenko willfully remained in a male regiment, persuaded by the pilots, who included Masha’s future husband, that this insubordination would go unpunished. They were soon summoned to Moscow.428 Masha and Anya were dripping with sweat in their winter pilots’ uniforms, which they had been unable to get changed out of because they were not attached to any regiment. When they reached Air Defense Command headquarters, General Osipenko subjected them to such a barrage of abuse that even Anya Demchenko, not usually noted for her reticence, was abashed. At this point, General Gromadin, commander of Air Defense Forces, himself came to their aid. “Give them aircraft and let them fly,” he ordered Osipenko. The girls were given overcoats to change into and sent off to a rest facility in the countryside. Masha managed to get permission to spend a day in Moscow to introduce Anya to her family.
The next day they were summoned and told to be at a reception at the Mongolian Embassy. Mongolian women had raised money for planes, and it had been decided to give these planes to the girls. Only a couple of days before, Osipenko had been giving them a blistering dressing-down and threatened to have them arrested; now they were to be the principal guests at a banquet in the Embassy of Mongolia. There was a meeting in their honor at the airfield where they were to be presented with the new planes, fresh from the factory. These were Yaks, with an inscription along the side reading, “From the women of Mongolia—for the front!” They flew off in the aircraft, albeit reluctantly, back to the women’s fighter regiment in Voronezh.
Masha Kuznetsova continued to fly successfully until the end of the war, but had no more victories in the air. The regiment remained on air defense duties in the rear, and it was extremely rare for enemy planes to be shot down.