A Thousand Sisters: Parts IV–V

Irina Rakobolskaya, the deputy commander for the 46th Guards, said that “a single incendiary bullet could turn it into a flaming torch.”

As their Po-2 climbed away from the carnage below, Nadya yelled, “They caught another aircrew!”

Zhenya Rudneva was utterly heartbroken by the death of the brave, eloquent, determined Galya Dokutovich, who’d suffered so much already and hadn’t let it stop her from flying.

One of her original ideas was to make sure her regiment was always in training. That way, if people were transferred or killed in combat, there were always competent airwomen ready to fly the open-cockpit Po-2s on their nightly harassment missions.

“We flew two planes at a time to the target. The first attracted all the searchlights and antiaircraft guns, 
and the other would glide in over the target, with its engine idling so the Germans couldn’t hear it, and bomb the target. With all the attention on the first plane, the second could make a successful attack.”

In a few seconds, we found ourselves under a veritable hail of antiaircraft fire.

With full power roaring, it was Nadya's turn to caper around in the searchlights while Marina climbed out of view, then idled her own engine to glide silently back to the target.

“When I was flying very low I would close the throttle and say, ‘Hey brothers, how are you?’ and they would light their torches.”

There was even nasty and deliberate sabotage, presumed to be by American men: practical jokes such as sugar in a fuel tank, which could—and did—prove deadly.

A 1944 Hollywood movie called Ladies Courageous portrayed the WASP fliers as hysterical airheads prone to flirtation and pilot error.

She and Sasha had to crawl into the back of the plummeting plane and clamber out through the lower hatch, too.

Enemy shell explosions were jolting and rocking the planes as they flew toward their target, and suddenly, the Pe-2 flown by Klava Fomicheva lurched as its left fuel tank was pierced by one of the shells.

Antonina’s father, who worked in an ore extraction factory, aggressively disapproved of her flying.

They still weren’t seeing frontline action, but when a fighter pilot of the 586th was involved in an aerial battle, it could be fierce and grim. You could lose a friend as quickly as you made one—men as well as women.

The “second front” had been a dream for so long that everybody in the USSR had started to make cynical jokes about it—but now it was really happening.

The celebrated Russian aviator Pyotr Nesterov—who, incidentally, was the first person ever to fly an aerobatic loop, in 1913—also made the first known taran attack.

In the spring of 1944, as poor weather kept the challenging, powerful Pe-2 dive-bombers on the ground, there had been a lull in the aggressive fighting as the USSR prepared for their offense in Belorussia.

They sent their best wishes to the city, hoping the damaged buildings would soon be fixed, and that—in Masha’s own words—the inhabitants would “flourish, continue peacetime jobs, and help people survive, while we continued our job at the front.”

“Around this time, all kinds of booby-trapped trinkets were being scattered on our airfield,” said Vera Tikhomirova, the 586th Regiment’s deputy commander for political affairs. “Plastic toys, colored little balls, and fountain pens charged with explosives.”

Belorussia was still crawling with Nazi forces, who would clearly resort to the dirtiest and deadliest of attacks, and that’s where the invigorated Red Army concentrated their efforts now.

As they lay on the grass trying to sleep one day, a ragged and haggard old woman came up to them, followed by a few staring children, and offered the resting aircrew a small basket of berries she’d picked in the forest.

One Missouri paper, in a story aimed at women’s interests, called Valentina Grizodubova a "buxom Amazon of the civil air force”—then transitioned effortlessly into fashion tips for “that problem child—the teen-age girl”!

In the same month, American radio fans could hear a dramatized version of the 588th Night Bombers’ exploits through the weekly broadcast series Treasury Star Parade.

The newcomers settled into a formation with them, escorting Kaleriya and Nadya in their struggling aircraft. The very company of planes from their own regiment cheered them up as they coaxed their unreliable Po-2 homeward.

Not only did they have to deal with the turbulent explosions, but they also had to try to stay in formation behind their leader as everyone’s planes were buffeted about in the angry sky.

“Dancing transformed her. She moved her shoulders somewhat coquettishly and her eyes and entire face were laughing and exuded joy.”

This time, Tonya herself managed to destroy an enemy plane with the machine guns in her tail gunner’s turret in the back of their Pe-2.

One night, the visibility was so poor that only a single Po-2 was able to complete the supply run—not because anyone was being prudent about continuing into bad weather anymore, but simply because none of the other pilots could figure out where they were heading, and had no navigators to guide them because the navigators’ cockpits were full of supplies.

“The airplane was hit all over like a sieve, and I was wounded in the leg.”

But anyone who fell afoul of them was still put through the ordeal of inquisition as a traitor.

But anyone who fell afoul of them was still put through the ordeal of inquisition as a traitor.

Even ordinary German homes seemed extravagantly comfortable to the Soviet soldiers. They were staggered by the wealth they saw in Prussia, and the 46th Guards were no exception.

On May 5, 1990, nearly fifty years after Lilya’s disappearance, Soviet Chairman Mikhail Gorbachev signed a decree honoring her as a Hero of the Soviet Union.

The award was presented to Lilya’s brother, Yuri, who’d been waiting so long for his charismatic older sister’s name, and his own, to be cleared.

Article 122 of the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union guaranteed that “Women in the USSR are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life.”

But, Kalinin advised the young female veterans, “Do not give yourself airs in your future practical work. Do not talk about the services you have rendered, let others do it for you. That will be better.”

His opinion was that women were “physiologically” unsuited for warfare.

The general Soviet sentiment, often shared by the women soldiers themselves, was that although women had done their part to drive out the invading enemy, their real role was to nurture, not to kill.

The very notion, the very sense of defending the Motherland, was the duty of all the men and all the women too.

Each of these women, on her own, gauged the wind of her nation and used it to help her sister pilots get off the ground.