Alexey Salomatin outlived his friend and teacher, Regimental Commander Nikolai Baranov, by just two weeks. Those who were with him on that warm, cloudy day in May grieved for the rest of their lives that this young, brave, kind boy who was in love should have died in such a useless, dreadfully absurd manner.
In later years a succession of people writing sketches and stories about Lilya Litvyak described the touching scene of the death of Salomatin. Shot in battle by the fascist invaders, he limps back in his stricken plane to the airfield where Lilya is waiting, and then expires. The less mendacious wrote that Salomatin was killed during a training dogfight because of a serious technical fault in his plane. Not one of the authors of the dozens of articles written about this couple has told the truth. His disorderly conduct in the air did not fit the propaganda image of a Communist and Hero of the Soviet Union, even if he was still just a boy of twenty-two. Here the story is told for the first time without invention, on the basis of evidence documented by the regiment and of eyewitness memoirs. That day Lilya was on duty, sitting in her cockpit and waiting for the signal to take off. It was warm on the ground and she was over-dressed, uncomfortable, bored and generally fed up. Valya and Faina, who were servicing her plane, sat on the wings at Lilya’s invitation.438 Alexey, they knew, was currently somewhere in the clouds engaged in a training dogfight with a new pilot. The girls were already familiar with Lilya’s peculiarities. When she had nothing to do, which was usually only when she was on duty in readiness to take off, she liked to moan. Nothing was right. It was boring, and probably in any case there would be no signal to take off today, and she had not had any letters from home for ages. They got depressed themselves just listening to her.
Suddenly they heard the sound of an engine, barely audible at first but quickly rising to a deafening roar. The mechanics jumped down from the wings. It was not the kind of sound a plane made unless something was wrong. The growl of the engine suddenly ceased and the ground trembled under a terrible impact. Valya and Faina rushed toward the far end of the airfield where the crash had occurred. “Find out who!” Lilya shouted after them. She needed to unstrap herself from the cockpit before she could follow.
It never occurred to the people running from all directions that the victim in the wreckage could be Alexey Salomatin, Hero of the Soviet Union, squadron leader and flying ace. Obviously it must be somebody from the new reinforcements, somebody inexperienced who had lost control in the course of the aerobatics.
That, at least, was what Kolya Menkov thought as he ran toward the wreckage.439 He had seen someone flying a Yak come out of the clouds and start doing rolls: a first, a second, then a third when he was already near the ground. “He isn’t going to make it!” flashed through Kolya’s mind in the split seconds that sealed the pilot’s fate. He did not make it. The plane smashed into the ground. When they reached the crash Valya and Faina saw to their horror that the dead pilot was Alexey. Lilya arrived just after them.440 People who witness a catastrophe often have a detail etched in their memory for the rest of their lives. Kolya Menkov remembered the light brown hair on Alexey’s shattered skull was very short. He had probably just had a haircut.441
Major Krainov wrote, “Undue self-confidence, self-regard and lack of discipline on the part of Hero of the Soviet Union Guards Captain Salomatin was the cause of his death.”442 Probably everybody serving in the regiment, deeply saddened as they were by the death of Salomatin, would have had to agree with that harsh verdict. Alexey liked to fool around, to try to pull off outrageous tricks in his plane, but that kind of aerobatic hooliganism was reckless and irresponsible.
Members of the regiment later recalled Alexey’s funeral in detail. They were rarely able to be present at the funerals of comrades, who usually died far from where the regiment was deployed and were buried by local people. Often they simply disappeared without trace, so that not only was there no grave, but it was not even known whether the pilot was dead or living in captivity.443 The entire regiment turned out for Alexey’s funeral as well as other soldiers who were in Pavlovka, and all the residents of the village. His family would have been proud to see how well it was organized. Wailing mourners even came from the settlement to accompany Alexey to his final resting place with traditional Russian peasant lamentation, as they did also in his home village.
The photograph of the funeral is blurred, but we can recognize the stern, grim faces of the regimental commander Golyshev, Alexey’s friend Sasha Martynov, and next to them, in profile, much shorter than the others, Lilya Litvyak. Her numerous biographers later made groundless claims that she wailed and flung herself on the coffin. The less dramatic truth is that she just cried quietly, standing in the line-up of soldiers according Alexey his final honors.
She cried a lot after the funeral too.444 Alexey was buried in the central square of the village and the path to the airfield passed his grave. Faina and Valya tried to be there for her and were very worried. Lilya would often “hide away from everybody and cry.”
After Alexey’s death, Lilya asked the regimental commander to transfer her to the Third Squadron under Captain Grigorovich. After that, Valya Krasnoshchyokova saw little of her and knew almost nothing about the work she was doing. There was not much coming and going between the squadrons. Faina Pleshivtseva liked to claim she had been Lilya’s mechanic right up until her death, and that it was she who saw her off on her last flight. These tales, which have misled biographers, are pure fiction that Faina, after she had repeated it often enough, probably came to believe herself. She did have a great fondness for Lilya, and after the war was involved for many years in searching for the wreckage of her aircraft and her remains. The reality, however, is that from late May Lilya was in the other squadron, her plane serviced by a different mechanic. By June Pleshivtseva was no longer in the regiment at all but in the hospital after an illegal abortion went wrong.445 She never returned to the regiment and went instead to study at the Air Force Academy. Some thirty years after the end of the war, at a reunion of the veterans of Baranov’s 296 Regiment, someone ridiculed her storytelling. Somebody else took pity on her, but still chided her gently, “Really, my dear, how can you say these things when you know they are untrue!” She never attended the reunions again.446
In the Third Squadron Litvyak flew almost invariably on a plane serviced by Kolya Menkov. This young man, almost the same age as her, got to know a little better the “small, blonde girl with wavy hair” he had previously seen occasionally at the airfield. Lilya was amiable enough, although naturally, as a decorated pilot and officer, she talked down to him rather.447
At Stalingrad, and indeed after it, the mechanics worked long and hard in freezing cold, in wind and rain, and in blazing heat. Nikolai Menkov had no fear of hard work or bad weather. Tall and slender, this raven-haired, brown-eyed boy had been well used to both since childhood. In 1943, Nikolai was just twenty-one, but was already familiar with all the things urban lads had to learn in the war: to work tirelessly, never to complain, often to go hungry, to mend your own clothes, and always to look out for your mates. He was born near Belozersk in northern Russia, a region of mossy pine forests, lakes, and long, light summer nights. His parents were simple people who had to feed a large family by the sweat of their brow. The northern summers are short, the land infertile, and all they could store up for the winter was mushrooms and berries gleaned from the forest. Summer and winter, the people who lived in Nikolai’s village went out to the lake to catch fish. It was backbreaking work that could only be done if everybody worked together. If anybody slacked, they would not be included in the group next time.
Kolya was initially a bit skeptical about Litvyak, a petite blonde who took so much trouble over her appearance and who trailed in her wake the myth of having accidentally shot down a German ace. However, she immediately demonstrated the kind of pilot she really was.
In early June, still operating from Biryukovo airfield close to Pavlovka where Alexey was buried, Lilya, with Sasha Yevdokimov as her wingmate, brilliantly executed a tricky mission to set fire to two enemy artillery observation balloons.448 The balloons were tethered behind the front line and observers on them were very effectively helping the German artillery with its range-finding. German anti-aircraft guns made sure Soviet aircraft were unable to approach them. Litvyak asked her regimental commander, Ivan Golyshev, for permission to try to bring them down by flying along and then over the front line, approaching the balloons from behind and taking the Germans by surprise. Golyshev and her squadron leader agreed. Lilya’s maneuver was successful, and she and Yevdokimov each set fire to a balloon.
When she returned, Litvyak excitedly described seeing the observer fall to the ground. Senior Sergeant Borisenko used the same maneuver later that day to set a third balloon on fire. The operation was the talk of the whole battalion.
There was constant heavy fighting. Lilya was flying a great deal, most often as lead pilot with Sergeant Yevdokimov as her wingmate. She instructed the young pilots reinforcing the squadron, and continued to notch up kills. Anya Skorobogatova’s heart stood still when she heard over the radio the familiar voice of Seagull say, “Here goes!” as Lilya attacked.449 Anya was desperate for this girl pilot to survive. She was the radio contact for several flying units and boys she heard in the ether were dying almost every day. She would see the young pilots in the canteen where, after a sortie, they would ask the waitresses to bring them borshch that was “really hot and so thick the spoon stands up in it!” She sensed that for them the soup was a symbol that they had lived to fight another day.
In mid-June Litvyak was already commanding a flight, having earned the confidence of Golyshev and her squadron leader. They praised her highly for her attack on June 16, again paired with Sasha Yevdokimov, when they flew out to intercept a Frame range-finding aircraft. Even though the engagement proved fruitless, it was regarded as a win. The pair was met by four Messerschmitts, the Frame flew off, and Litvyak and Yevdokimov attacked the fighters. Sasha’s plane was hit and he was lightly wounded, but managed to land safely.450 Litvyak got back to base with ten bullet holes in her plane, which Menkov and another technician patched up overnight.
If Lilya had not died in the summer of 1943, she would certainly have been put forward for the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. She was hugely popular throughout 8 Air Army: loved, respected and admired not only by her fellow pilots and the technical staff, but also by her superiors. So much so that she even got away with a very serious incident for which another pilot would have been severely punished, perhaps even sent to a penal battalion.
On the morning of June 16, before she flew out to intercept the Frame, Litvyak, taking off in response to a call from the airspace monitoring service was, by all accounts, responsible for the death of Sergeant Zotkin, her young wingman.451 The airfield at which they were stationed, near the village of Vesyoly Khutor, was so small that both taking off and landing were hazardous. As she became airborne, Litvyak veered off the approved course to the left and so, behind her, did Zotkin who had only recently arrived in the regiment. He apparently deviated just slightly from the incorrect path set by Litvyak, snagged one aircraft hangar with his wing, lost control and crashed into another. “The plane caught fire. The pilot was killed and is buried in the center of the park in Vesyoly Khutor,” Major Krainov reported, but even he kept quiet about the real cause of the tragedy, covering up for Litvyak. “The cause of Sergeant Zotkin’s death was a lack of personal discipline in ignoring the foresight and instructions of the regimental commander to take off singly, and of Flight Commander Guards Junior Lieutenant Litvyak who did not demand that her wingman repeat the instructions for taking off.”452 He mentioned that a penalty was imposed on Litvyak, but that was a pure formality. The other pilots and technical staff in the squadron tacitly held her responsible for what had happened. They had no need to say anything. Lilya herself was deeply upset. Her comrades saw how she cried over Zotkin’s death, how despondent she became, and tormented by guilt at the senseless death of a wingman entrusted to her care. It was also a gratuitous accidental loss of an aircraft at a time when the regiment was losing so many in combat on the obstinately unyielding Mius Front.453