A Thousand Sisters: The Heroic Airwomen of the Soviet Union in World War II

Dedication

FOR MY AGENT,

GINGER CLARK,

WHO DESERVES IT

Epigraphs

Life is life, and war is war.

—GALINA TENUYEVA, PILOT, 125TH GUARDS

* * *

War is war, and life is life.

—ANTONINA BONDAREVA, PILOT, 125TH GUARDS

* * *

If the women of the world united, war would never happen!

—ALEXANDRA AKIMOVA, NAVIGATOR, 46TH GUARDS

Map

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraphs

Map

Battle Cry: A Prologue

Part I

The Future War

1The Early Life and Times of Marina Raskova, Navigator and Pilot

2Learning to Fly in a Nation That’s Learning to Fly

3Marina Navigates

4The Flight of the Rodina

5A Generation Not from This Universe

6Now Europe Is Mine!

Part II

The Great Patriotic War

The First Year: 1941–1942

7The Storm of War Breaks

8Dear Sisters! The Hour Has Come . . .

9The 122nd Air Group

10Now I Am a Warrior

11Winter Training

12Ground Crew

13The Aircraft Arrive

14Not Quite Ready for War

Part III

The Great Patriotic War

The Second Year: 1942–1943

15The 588th: In Combat at Last

16Dive-Bombers for the 587th

17Not One Step Back

18Battle of the Sexes

19Trouble in the 586th

20Life Is Life

21Winter Comes Early

22Marina in the Wind

23Valentin Markov

24Exhaustion and Honor for the Night Bombers

25Two against Forty-Two

26A New Start for the 587th

27The 46th Guards in Taman, 1943

28The Heat of Battle

Part IV

The Great Patriotic War

The Third and Fourth Years: 1943–1945

29Our Planes Were Burning like Candles

30Night Witches

31Loss and Honor for the Dive-Bombers

32Over the Black Sea

33Crossing the Line

34Allied Forces

35The Edge of the Clouds

36From the Volga to Berlin

Part V

After the War

37One Thousand Nights in Combat

38Do Not Talk about the Services You Have Rendered

Source Notes

Bibliography

Author’s Note: A Few Excuses and a Lot of Gratitude

About the Author

Books by Elizabeth Wein

Back Ad

Photo Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Battle Cry

A Prologue

Imagine a blockbuster movie about a world united in battle against Nazi oppression. In this sweeping international epic, black and white American soldiers protect each other under enemy fire in the African desert. A Chinese grandmother leads an army of thirty thousand guerrilla warriors against Japanese invaders. A beautiful French spy escapes murderous Gestapo agents in Paris; in the North Sea, British navy sailors brave a suicide mission against enemy submarines. A starving Greek community defies Nazi soldiers by hanging out thousands of forbidden national flags. And in the fiery skies above Russia, women drop bombs and fly fighter planes in aerial combat against German pilots.

This is the outline for Battle Cry, a movie optioned for Hollywood by director Howard Hawks in the middle of World War II.

In July 1943, Hollywood was fighting World War II along with the rest of the world. The streets of Los Angeles were full of uniformed men and women—not just American, but also British, Canadian, and French. Soldiers, sailors, pilots, and nurses were on their way to war in the Pacific. New bomber planes roared overhead in flight tests.

And moviemakers did their part by creating inspiring war films, designed to help raise people’s spirits and support the troops—even though film sets struggled to hang on to staff, because so many young men were leaving to join the army. Director Howard Hawks’s new movie, Battle Cry, would be Hollywood’s most sweeping war film of them all.

For six weeks in Los Angeles during that turbulent summer, the American writer William Faulkner worked frantically to turn Battle Cry into a screenplay. Several writers had provided stories for the ambitious outline, and William Faulkner had the tough job of smoothing out its clunky transitions and pulling the whole thing together.

The novelist would later win the Nobel Prize, but he was already famous for his classic Southern epics like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. When Warner Brothers offered him a contract to work on patriotic war films, he took it. He needed the money, and he was disappointed he couldn’t go to war himself—for William Faulkner was a pilot. The First World War had ended before he completed his flight training, but he often wrote about combat pilots and aerial performers in his fiction. When the United States entered World War II, he tried to enlist as a navy pilot. But he was over forty years old by now, and wasn’t accepted.

So working on Battle Cry was William Faulkner's way of contributing to the war against the Nazis. He could use his writing to inspire acts of patriotism and bravery. He could champion freedom and tolerance. He could still help win the war.

Battle cry . . . rises from the throats of free men everywhere, he wrote, imagining the movie opening with a prophetic voice-over. A defiance, an affirmation and a challenge . . .

William Faulkner was excited to be working on a plot that starred men and women flying together to defeat the Nazis.

By the end of that hot July, the dry hills of California were the tawny brown of a lion cub that had been rolling in dust. In Los Angeles, thousands of people found their eyes and throats stinging with mysterious fumes. Terrified that the Germans or the Japanese might be targeting the United States mainland, a front-page headline in the Los Angeles Times blared on July 27, City Hunting for Source of Gas Attack. Ironically, the real source turned out to be air pollution from cars and factories. It was LA’s first serious battle with smog.

The weather didn’t stop director Howard Hawks from getting the cameras rolling on Battle Cry. On July 28, forty actors spent twelve grueling hours filming scenes in a burning wheat field. Meanwhile, William Faulkner rewrote the Russian sequence of the film and typed up the full screenplay.

The Russian story for Battle Cry was based on a short radio play that had aired the year before as part of Treasury Star Parade, a weekly patriotic radio program featuring A-list stars in dramas of wartime heroism from all over the globe. In their play Diary of a Red Army Woman, writers Violet Atkins and William Bacher introduced their American audience to a fictional Russian female bomber pilot.

A woman flying in combat? This was something no one had ever heard of. Even though the war weighed on everyone’s mind, the full scale of it still surprised people.

The full scale of World War II still surprises people today.

In the year following 1939, the German army, under Adolf Hitler, had taken control of almost every country in Europe. On June 22, 1941, Hitler broke a peace treaty and invaded the Soviet Union, sending his army storming across the huge nation in a battlefront that stretched for over a thousand miles. Hitler detested the eastern European Slavic peoples nearly as much as he detested Jewish people, and from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, the German invaders seized crops and burned communities, pushing toward the Soviet Union’s major cities.

In Diary of a Red Army Woman, the fictional pilot Tania is furious about the German army’s destruction of her village and the murder of her family. She joins the Soviet Air Force with her best friend, Nina, and they form a pilot-gunner team in a bomber plane. Together, the vengeful young duo fights to stamp out Nazi aggression in the Soviet Union.

At that time the Soviet Red Army was the only military in the world that officially allowed women to go into combat. American women spent years persuading the government to let them deliver military planes, but only Soviet women could fight air battles in them. Tania’s fictional story on Treasury Star Parade gave American audiences a taste of how Soviet women were able to meet and kill the enemy in battle—not just on the ground, but also, incredibly, in the sky.

The original writers show Tania scoring kill after kill as she guns down German planes and drops her bombs on German troops. William Faulkner added his pilot’s know-how to the scenario, getting technical as he described exactly what Tania would have to do to make her plane turn and swoop and dive.

On August 3, 1943, after more than a month of intense conferences, writing, and typing, William Faulkner put his own name on the cover page and delivered the full screenplay of Battle Cry to the Warner Brothers Story Department.

Battle Cry’s Tania was fictional, but there were real women like her. While William Faulkner sweated in California trying to imagine what their lives must be like, hundreds of young airwomen were flying and fighting and dying over the battlefields of the Soviet Union.

One of these young pilots was twenty-one-year-old Lilya Litvyak. During that last week of July in 1943, literally on the other side of the world from California, Lilya was fighting for her life in the battle of Stalingrad.

Lilya was an eccentric beauty, a petite blonde who regularly sent her aircraft mechanic to pick up peroxide from a nearby hospital so she could bleach her hair. She flew combat missions with little bouquets of flowers stuck on her dashboard. But she was a deadly foe in the air. For nearly a year, Lilya had been flying for the Soviet Air Force in a single-seat fighter plane called a Yak-1.

Two weeks earlier, Lilya had been wounded in the shoulder and the leg. It had happened when she and five other Soviet fighter pilots had flown into battle against a swarm of three dozen German bombers and fighters. Lilya’s aircraft was so badly damaged by gunfire that she’d had to crash-land it.

But that didn’t stop Lilya. She got her injuries treated locally and refused to be hospitalized. Three days later, her closest friend was killed in combat. Even that didn’t stop Lilya. The following week she was back in the air, in a desperate battle that ended with her having to parachute out of her crippled plane.

To be considered an ace, a fighter pilot has to shoot down five aircraft. By July 1943, Lilya was a double ace. In less than a year she’d shot down eleven enemy planes by herself, as well as an observation balloon. On August 1, 1943, with another pilot’s help, Lilya added a shared kill to her score.

While most nations dragged their heels to let women to become transport pilots, how could Lilya Litvyak be shooting down German planes in aerial combat—in the same week, fighting the same war, even if it was on the other side of the world? What was so different about the Soviet Union?

It was partly because it was so new. The Motherland was a nation of ideals and contradictions. In 1917 the Russian Revolution had put an end to an empire that was centuries old and, after years of civil war, replaced it with a new system of government called communism. The idea was that the people of the new Soviet Union would share everything according to people’s needs. In reality, it didn’t work out that way at all—war always seemed to be on the horizon, and the changes forced on Soviet citizens were so harsh that millions lost their homes and starved to death.

But one thing that the new government got right was that it gave boys and girls a completely equal education. A generation of young people exactly the same age as the Soviet Union itself grew up expecting to have to go to war, and believing that young women would be able to fight alongside young men when they did.

The driving force behind Soviet women flying in combat was the world-famous pilot and navigator Marina Raskova. In 1938, she and two other Soviet women had splintered a world record in a long-distance flight they made across Siberia. When Lilya Litvyak was a teenager learning to fly, she’d admired Marina Raskova so much that she’d carried a picture of the Soviet record setter around in a notebook with her.

When the Soviet Union entered World War II in 1941, Marina Raskova took command of a thousand female aviators and trained them to fly in three separate bomber and fighter regiments. By the summer of 1943, these women were all fighting in combat against the German invaders.

Marina Raskova’s regiments were the inspiration for Tania’s story.

And Battle Cry?

Sadly, the epic project never got off the ground. That one hot July day of filming in the burning wheat field produced the only shots ever taken for the movie. It’s not clear why, but it probably had to do with cost—the film was wildly over budget. It’s also possible that Tania’s Diary of a Red Army Woman sequence, which was full of Russian nationalism, was a little too controversial for American audiences.

But the real Tanias had to keep fighting whether or not Hollywood brought their story to the silver screen.

By the end of August, William Faulkner left California to return to Mississippi. His hard work on Battle Cry was a brief glimpse into the real-life drama that was happening on the other side of the world. Meanwhile, a thousand airwomen in the Soviet Union continued their battle against the Nazi war machine.

This is the story of those young women.

It’s the story of three regiments of aviators, only three out of a thousand aviation units fighting for a common cause. Along with a scattering of individual women who served in the Soviet Air Force alongside men, the young aviators in these three regiments were the only women of any nation who flew combat missions during World War II.

Some of these soldiers flew as many as eighteen combat missions in a single night.

Some of them perished in flames.

Some of them worked in the dark, feeling their way blindly, in cold so fierce their hands froze to the metal tools they held as they made sure their companions were able to fly.

Almost all of them were in their teens when they went to war.

This is the story of a generation of girls who were raised in the belief that they were as good as men, and who were raised to believe that it was their destiny to defend their nation in battle.

It’s the story of a thousand young women who grew up inspired by Marina Raskova and who were ready to follow her into the air.

It’s the story of a generation of young people who learned to work with the wind—those who soared and those who came back to earth.

This is the story of a thousand sisters fighting and flying.

Part I

The Future War

1

The Early Life and Times of Marina Raskova, Navigator and Pilot

A pilot has to work with the wind. You need to know which way it’s blowing, and how strong it is, so you can take off and land safely. Birds do this without thinking about it. They even sit facing into the wind so that they can take off at any moment.

A flying aircraft is affected by the wind just the way a bird is. With a strong wind behind you, you’ll fly faster; but if you fly straight into that same wind, it will slow you down. If the wind comes at you sideways, it’ll blow you off track.

One of the most common poor decisions made by pilots is to continue flying into bad weather. Then, blinded by snow or cloud or fog, or with your wings heavy with ice, you can fly steadily into a mountainside and crash. Sometimes the wind becomes so violent or unpredictable that it tosses your plane into a deadly spiral dive. Even with twenty-first-century navigation improvements, a pilot is always encouraged not to continue flying into bad weather.

But in emergency situations, a coast guard helicopter crew risks their own lives to save the passengers of a sinking ship. Pilots might brave canyon winds to pull off a mountain rescue, or penetrate a blinding blizzard to rush someone to a hospital. The boundary of a weather pattern, often moving across an ocean or landmass, is called a front, just like the line that marks out the edge of an invading army. Flying straight into either one is very likely to kill you; but in war, sometimes there is no turning back.

Navigating your way through life is like flying a small plane in a windy sky. To say that the wind is blowing with you or against you is too simple. Sometimes you need the wind behind you to speed things up; sometimes you need to head directly into the wind to help you take off.

Your life is influenced by the events and politics of your time. Your personality will be shaped by the world you grow up in. How you navigate that world will depend on how directly you face it at any given time.

Your future will depend on how you decide to adjust to the winds of change around you.

Aviation, the Soviet Union, and Marina Raskova grew up together. Marina would become an aviation adventurer, pioneer, and record setter; the wind was exactly right for her to lead her Motherland’s young airwomen into battle in World War II.

And Marina Raskova was a good judge of wind.

MARINA RASKOVA

The airplane is probably the most exciting technological development of the early twentieth century. When the Wright brothers made their famous first powered flight on December 17, 1903, aviation fever seized the world. Over the next ten years, all over the world, aircraft designers competed to make early planes safer, more powerful, and more efficient. And men and women everywhere took their lives in their hands for a chance to ride in these amazing machines, or better yet, to take the controls themselves. In August 1911, Lydia Zvereva became the eighth woman in the world—and the first woman in Russia—to get a pilot’s license.

Less than a year later, on March 28, 1912, another Russian aviator came into the world. She was born into a family of musicians in Moscow, the second-largest city of the Russian Empire after Saint Petersburg. Her name was Marina Mikhailovna Malinina, and she was the girl who would grow up to be Marina Raskova.

When Marina was two years old, in 1914, Europe plunged into World War I. For the next four years, most of Europe’s young men fought, and millions died, on the battlefields of France and Belgium.

The Russian Empire entered the war right away. But its army was badly equipped and Russia lost nearly two million lives, fighting mainly against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Russians at home grew angry and unhappy, resentful of having to pour their lives and resources into this war. The capital of Russia, Saint Petersburg, was renamed Petrograd in 1914 because burg sounded too German. When the Russian Revolution started in 1917, a year before the end of World War I, it was partly in response to the awful wartime leadership of the imperial ruler, Czar Nicholas II.

For some years before the war started, women all over the world had been campaigning vocally and often violently for their own rights. Now, throughout Russia, young women felt that they ought to be allowed to fight in World War I alongside the nation’s young men. Thousands of them enlisted—many in men’s regiments, sometimes disguised as boys to reduce the possibility of being turned away or sexually assaulted. The Soviet Union didn’t exist yet, but the actions of Russia’s women in the world’s first Great War led the way for the women who would fight for the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War, the name for their part in World War II.

Maria Bochkareva, who’d married a soldier when she was sixteen, was desperate to play a part in the fighting. She joined a men’s battalion and went into combat with them. A fierce and focused soldier, she was awarded a medal for rescuing fifty of her wounded comrades in one battle, and was even made a commander.

But Maria grew frustrated because the soldiers who fought alongside her were miserable about the way the war was going for the Russian army. She decided that a group of fighting women might embarrass these unhappy men and make them leap into action.

So Maria got permission from Czar Nicholas II to form her own regiment composed entirely of women. Terrifyingly, they were known as a Death Battalion. Before World War I was over, four other Russian women’s regiments formed based on Maria Bochkareva’s battalion, along with many smaller units.

With so many Russian women joining the army as foot soldiers so they could fight in World War I, it’s no surprise that several of Russia’s first female aviators also went to war. A dozen nations were using the new technology of aircraft for bombing, for taking photographs of enemy troops, for shooting at soldiers on the ground, and for aerial combat against enemy pilots. Between 1915 and 1917, at least four Russian women—two of them princesses!—served as reconnaissance pilots (scouts who gathered information).

Nadezhda Degtereva, who disguised herself as a man so she could go to war, became the first woman to be wounded in air combat—though the medics who treated her wounds discovered her secret. One of the princesses, Yevgeniya Shakhovskaya, had been a flight instructor in Germany before the war. Like Maria Bochkareva, she went to Czar Nicholas II himself to get permission to fight. She persuaded the czar to let her fly for Russia as a military reconnaissance pilot, scouting out the best direction for soldiers on the ground to fire their guns. Though we don’t know if she flew combat missions, she was without a doubt working as a pilot on the battle lines in a war zone.

Women of other countries served in World War I as nurses, ambulance drivers, and communications personnel. Their work was always dangerous and often dirty, and required endurance and bravery. But it wasn’t combat work. Only Russian women went directly into battle to fight and kill other human beings. There weren’t many of these women, but they paved the way for Marina Raskova and for the next generation—the generation that would fight in World War II twenty-five years later.

In 1917, Marina Raskova was five years old. She was probably too young to understand grown-up politics, even though she might have heard her parents talking about the terrible war news. But the war in Europe was only one part of Russia’s troubles. Beyond the fragile security of the familiar walls of Marina’s home, her Motherland was exploding.

Workers and intellectuals in Petrograd were hungry for political reform and for Russia to get out of World War I. They finally took matters into their own hands and took over the government, finishing off the three-hundred-year reign of the Romanov czars. The last czar, Nicholas II, resigned his power in March 1917.

That was the end of the Russian Empire.

The problem was that nobody agreed on who should run the country now, or on how to run it. A Provisional Government took the place of imperial rule in Petrograd and granted equality in law to Russian women, giving women the right to vote and to hold office. This made Russia the first country to give women the same legal rights as men.

But the Provisional Government didn’t last long. In October 1917 the radical Bolshevik Party took advantage of people’s anger over World War I and overthrew the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks were led by Vladimir Lenin, a man of bold and energetic ideals who had been urging revolution for more than twenty years. Lenin’s vision of a better future for the working poor was so ambitious that he hoped World War I would inspire everyone in Europe to get rid of their old-fashioned governments. That clearly wasn’t going to happen, so Lenin did what he felt to be the next best thing for his own people: early in 1918, he negotiated a treaty with Germany to get Russia out of the war.

World War I didn’t end for the rest of Europe until November 1918. Marina was six years old. In the same year that the Bolshevik Party carried out the murderous execution of the former czar, Nicholas II, and his wife and four children, Marina started going to elementary school and took lessons at the Pushkin School of Music in Moscow twice a week.

Around her, the Red Army of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party was fighting to crush opposition groups that sprang up after the fall of the Russian Empire. Now, fierce disagreements within Russia itself over how to run the country began a bitter and bloody civil war.

The winds of change blew harshly around young Marina. When she was seven years old, her musician father was hit by a motorcycle and killed.

There is a Russian saying that people use with resignation at times like this: Life is life. Marina’s widowed mother worked as the director of a boys’ home near Moscow and then got another job in the city working at a childcare center, which made it easier for Marina and her older brother, Roman, to go to school. In 1920 Marina’s mother managed to get a government-assigned room for her family in a shared apartment in Moscow.

So Marina must have known, from very early in life, that it is possible for a woman to be in control of her own destiny.

Marina was ten in 1922 when the last armed clashes of the Russian Civil War took place.

Her country’s new leaders were now attempting to improve life with an untried system of government called communism, in which property, goods, and services are owned by the community and shared according to need. Their efforts weren’t always made with the clearest of intentions or the best of success. An estimated one million soldiers, both men and women, fought and died to make these changes possible. Another eight million civilians perished because they were caught in the cross fire, or struck down by the starvation and disease that war brings with it.

Those numbers are so enormous they’re almost meaningless, even to an adult. And Marina was only ten years old. She was just beginning further education in music at the Moscow State Conservatory, one of the most respected music schools in the entire world.

Marina’s home city of Moscow now became the capital of a nation so new that it hadn’t even given itself an official name yet. The scouring winds of the civil war, which had lasted five years and spread across two continents, left the population of her country struggling to feed itself and to rebuild its industries. From the ruins, the Bolshevik Party would become the Communist Party, and Lenin would emerge as the head of a new nation with a new form of government.

What was left of the old Russian Empire would become known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the USSR, or Soviet Union.¹

Either way, it was still Marina’s Motherland.

2

Learning to Fly in a Nation That’s Learning to Fly

Marina Raskova’s school years were bent and shaped by the harsh winds of change that swept her nation.

There were droughts in 1920 and 1921. The new government was unable to cope with its country’s needs, and failed crops resulted in a horrific famine that lasted into 1922 and killed millions. Disease was everywhere. The streets of Russian cities were filled with homeless children Marina’s age who hadn’t been as lucky as her. They lived rough, their families torn apart by the events of the past ten years.

Also, Lenin now struggled with poor health. He died in 1924 at the age of fifty-three. Josef Stalin, who’d been the general secretary of the Communist Party since 1922, became the dominant party leader, though his official job title didn’t change.

Lenin made a lasting impression on the people of the USSR. Even today he remains a cult figure. His body was preserved so that a continuous stream of mourners could view him lying in state in a special tomb on Red Square in Moscow. Five days after Lenin’s death, Petrograd, the former capital of Russia, was renamed Leningrad in his honor. Marina, twelve years old in 1924, was no doubt aware of Lenin’s passing; living in Moscow, she may even have been one of the tens of thousands of mourners who visited Lenin’s tomb to get a glimpse of his eerily waxlike body in the weeks following his death.

Many of Lenin’s modern ideals stayed in place as Josef Stalin first took over leadership of the USSR. Now Stalin and the Communist Party nailed together a haphazard structure for a country that, in principle at least, treated men and women with