On the evening of July 16, 1943, taking to the sky to patrol the area around the village of Kuibyshevo, Lilya Litvyak and seven Yaks from other units engaged some thirty German bombers which, the Soviet pilots reckoned, were escorted by eight Messerschmitt fighters. It was an evening sortie, the last of the day. Litvyak shot up a Ju 88 bomber which “after the attack banked steeply and at low altitude and with flames appearing from its surfaces flew off in a westward direction.” The pilot, the report mentions, “did not see the plane crash as she was attacked by Messerschmitts.” Litvyak was lucky. She managed to land her plane safely in rough country near the village of Darievka, not at all far from her airfield. Lilya’s plane had taken punishment. Another document details that, “The plane has perforation of the fuselage, the left fuel tank, the water and air systems.” Because of this major damage it was sent off for a factory repair. It was not the plane Lilya usually flew. The following day she climbed into the cockpit of her own Yak, No. 16131 that Kolya Menkov serviced and in the cockpit of which, while on standby, she had scratched “Mum” and her initials, “LL.” Despite an injury she refused to take a day’s rest, saying, “I want to fly a mission. This is no time to rest.”480
Eight Air Army continued to support the armies of the Southern Front, who were regrouping for a counter-offensive against the Germans on the Mius. At first the forces—tens of thousands of soldiers, thousands of guns and hundreds of tanks—were moved up only under cover of darkness, but the nights are short in July, and from July 14, the commander allowed the troops to march during the day.481 Twenty-four hours a day huge columns of vehicles were moving along the roads at the front, and they needed protection from the air. They were being attacked by major groups of bombers redeployed by the Germans from many areas, including Kursk. The troops were required to be fully ready by July 17 to strike at a thirty-kilometer-long section of the front extending through Dmitrievka, Kuibyshevo and Yasinovsky and to break through the enemy’s defenses.
On the afternoon of July 18 there remained only a small Soviet bridgehead of about ten-square kilometers on the right bank of the Mius. In support of 5 Assault Army, 2 Guards Army was brought into action. This was to attempt to extend the attack and reach the line of the River Krynka. It was there, while providing cover to the ground attack bombers, that Katya Budanova was killed.
Lieutenant Katya Budanova and Junior Lieutenant Alyokhin provided an escort of just two fighters for eight attack aircraft flying to the area of Pokrovskoye, not far from Artyomovsk, where they were engaged by six Messerschmitts. The fate of Budanova and Alyokhin was described by pilots of the attack aircraft, which the two Yaks successfully defended, seeing off all the enemy planes. Alyokhin’s damaged Yak headed “home,” accompanying a stricken Ilyushin, but did not make it back to the airfield. The second Yak, according to the report, “after the Messerschmitts had left, at an altitude of approximately 2,000 meters, nosedived, hit the ground and burst into flames.”
A secretary from the field hospital of the Second Assault Army, Ye. Shvyrova, was the first to reach the crash site. She described what she found in a letter to No. 63 School, Moscow which set up a Katya Budanova museum. She wrote, “In July–August 1943 there was an assault on the Mius River when we were stationed in the village of Novokrasnovka.”482 Shvyrova recalled that the fighting was so intense that the shell explosions and roar of aircraft meant that in the headquarters they could make themselves heard only by shouting into each other’s ears.
“I happened to be outside,” she continued, “and saw an aircraft coming down fast. I realized the pilot was wounded or already dead. It crashed and instantly burst into flames. The village is situated in a hollow and the plane crashed on a hill. When I reached the top the plane was already almost burned out and the pilot (it was Katya Budanova) was lying next to it covered in blood, as was her parachute.”
It was not until they discovered her documents that the people who found Katya learned the charred corpse was that of a woman. The village women buried her, and Shvyrova and her colleagues read and reread the letters they found with Katya, and looked again and again at the photos, only some time later sending them on to her sister, Valya, in Moscow. Among the letters, they found one from Mikhail Baranov and an unfinished letter from Katya to her mother. There were several pictures of Katya herself, in uniform beside the plane, in civilian clothes, and one when she was very young wearing a pretty hat. Shvyrova remembered these photographs well. It was hard to believe the girl in them was the broken and bloodied body she had found by the wreckage of the plane.
The girls at army headquarters had seen many terrible sights, but were deeply affected by the death of this young woman pilot. Just one day later a German plane came down on the same hill and burst into flames. “As one, we all muttered, ‘That’s for Katya!’”
Katya’s obituary in the newspaper Stalin’s Warriors was signed by the senior officers, the pilots, her comrades in the regiment including Lilya Litvyak, and others who had known her at the front.483
The biographers of Litvyak and Budanova have written, supposedly citing others in her regiment, that a few days after Katya’s death a short, blonde girl flew to Novokrasnovka, asked where she was buried and went to the grave.
Alas, there is no truth in this. Novokrasnovka had no airfield, and a Yak did not have the same capability as the U-2 for putting down on rough terrain; there was nowhere it could have landed there. A woman drove a truck with several people from the regiment, pilots and mechanics, everybody who was able to go at this moment of intense fighting, to Katya’s funeral.484 Lilya was not among them. She was flying constantly. On July 19, the day of the funeral, she shot down another German aircraft.485
After Katya’s death Valya Krasnoshhyokova saw almost nothing of Lilya Litvyak. She was in a different squadron and the fighting was so ceaseless there was no time to breathe.486 Valya often thought about her, and felt deeply sorry for her. She was now completely alone. Valya decided that when there was a free moment she would ask the commander of their regiment to transfer her to the same squadron. Two days after Katya Budanova, however, Golyshev was himself killed.
The 21st of July 1943 was a bad day. Commander Ivan Golyshev, Lilya Litvyak, and her wingman Dimitry Svistunenko did not return from their mission of escorting Ilyushin Il-2 attack aircraft. Major Krainov wrote in his report that the commander had been drunk as he took off. Attempts to stop him were made by Chief of Staff Smirnov and the regiment’s N.K.V.D. officer, Lieutenant Perushev, but Golyshev “told Perushev to stuff himself.” This was highly unusual behavior for the educated and disciplined Golyshev, but evidently the intolerable stress of recent weeks, the dangers of escorting the attack aircraft, and the endless losses in the regiment had taken their toll.487 Golyshev, no doubt because he was drunk, considered himself in great shape to fly and brushed aside the N.K.V.D. official whom, like most other members of the regiment, he strongly disliked.
They escorted six Il-2s to the vicinity of Krinichka, a village near the River Krynka. The aircraft came under attack from a large group of Messerschmitts.
When the mechanics back at base calculated that the plane they looked after would be running low on fuel, they would start looking out for its return. They were somehow able to recognize them while still far away. “Here comes mine,” someone would say. Those whose aircraft had not returned would wait for some time more, even after the point when they knew that their plane must already have run out of fuel. Eventually they would walk back from the stand despondently, clinging to the hope their plane had crash-landed somewhere and that the pilot would return. That day it was the turn of Nikolai Menkov. His plane did not come back, and he could only wait and hope for the best.
Litvyak, with her face scratched but otherwise unharmed, appeared back in the regiment the following day.488 She related that they had encountered a large group of Messerschmitts and taken them on, but could give no specific information about the fate of Golyshev and Svistunenko. Chief of Staff Smirnov duly reported, “Litvyak returned to the unit on 22/07/43 and stated she had been winged in combat and pursued by a Messerschmitt Bf 109 to ground level. She crash-landed on the fuselage near Novikovka.”489
Nikolai Menkov went with a woman truck driver to recover the plane. There was no one to ask for information because they were very close to the front line and all the local people had been evacuated, so they drove cluelessly around until Menkov stumbled by chance on the right village. Nearby, lying in tall grass, was Yak 16131, which he knew like the back of his hand.490
It was obvious that the plane had been in combat. The radiator was punctured, the engine damaged, and the propeller had been bent when it landed on its belly. Some signalers appeared who had witnessed the crash landing. One of them from Central Asia told Nikolai, “The plane come down. Like it just fall down in the weeds.” They ran to help and called out, hoping to find the pilot. Then, as they laughingly told him, they heard a piping voice say: “I am the pilot.” They could not see anyone because the grass was much taller than Lilya. It was probably also the grass that had saved her life by concealing the aircraft from German ground troops. Her face had been smeared with blood and engine oil because in the bumpy landing her nose hit the gunsight. She had a meal with the signalers, spent the night with their unit, and in the morning got a lift on a passing vehicle.
“The plane’s right assembly and crankcase were broken,” Nikolai recalled. The signalers told him Litvyak had barely made it back over the front line, landing just 700–900 meters on the Soviet side. Nikolai and another mechanic brought the plane back, lifting it with air bags and attaching its tail to the truck. “No. 16131 is being repaired within the unit,” Smirnov reported. They replaced the plane’s engine and airframe belt, and five days later it was again ready for service. Nikolai Menkov remembered very exactly that Litvyak flew seven more sorties on his plane before her disappearance.
The fate of Dmitry Svistunenko, who came to the regiment after fighting at Stalingrad on a U-2 night bomber and was remembered as a very nice lad, only became known in September. Following the breakthrough at the Mius Front, the regiment’s representative of S.M.E.R.S.h., Guards Senior Lieutenant Perushev, was able to visit the approximate area of his crash that Lilya Litvyak had indicated. The local people to whom he turned for help showed him Svistunenko’s plane by Mikhailovsky hamlet: the Yak-1, with a “28” painted on the tail. There was a “decomposed corpse next to it” which had not been buried because that same night the local people were evacuated to the rear.
According to the villagers, Svistunenko’s plane was apparently hit, by a machine-gun burst from a German tank. He turned back to the east but the engine started to misfire so he crashed the plane on a slope. Two German motorcyclists approached him and he raised his hands as if to surrender. As the Germans started getting off their motorcycles, he took his pistol and shot both of them. German submachine gunners were already running toward him. Svistunenko bade farewell to his aircraft before shooting himself: “The pilot turned round, took off his cap, waved toward the plane, then shot himself.” Perushev buried Svistunenko, who would have turned twenty-two in November, at the village cemetery, and fired a salute over the grave. As for Regimental Commander Golyshev, nothing was known about him until thirty years after the war. He was found by a school expedition that was looking for the remains of Lilya Litvyak and her plane.
Anna Zakutnyaya from the village of Artyomovka told the expedition she had seen a plane catch fire in the area of Krasnaya Gora after it was hit by a German anti-aircraft battery. It fell straight on top of the battery. The pilot did not bail out. The explosion threw him out of the cockpit and he was still alive when the Germans came running. They immediately shot him. Once they had gone, the local women buried the body next to his crashed plane, which became, as was often the case, a memorial to its dead pilot. His face remained in Anna’s memory, and she recognized it at once when, many years later, she saw him in a group photo of pilots: “Oh, look, children, that’s him!” The chairman of the village soviet gave them a horse and cart and the old woman took the schoolchildren and their teacher, Valentina Vashchenko, to a high cliff. At the bottom of it and scattered around were fragments of an aircraft. There they later found the remains of Ivan Golyshev, commander of 73 Guards Fighter Regiment.