Over Fields of Fire: Flying the Sturmovik in Action on the Eastern Front 1942-45

10. This is war, girls!

Flying had dragged on till evening and a June night comes late. I was already tired but couldn’t go home: I still had to do debriefing with the trainee pilots, and write up paperwork. As soon as I had sat at the desk my friend Mashen’ka59 Smirnova stuck her head in the door, “Don’t sit up late, Anyuta60, we’re going to the forest in the morning. We’ll have you up with the sun!” she said and flitted away.

“Of course”, I recalled, “It’s Saturday today!” So many weeks in a row we’d worked with no days off — we could afford one. The girls’ idea was a good one — off to the forest. The weather was as if ‘on demand’. And the area around Tver’61 is crawling with inviting places. And there’s no need to walk far — get on a tram and it’ll take you right to the pine-forest, the one beyond the ‘Proletarka’ Textile Factory.

When the first tram left we left with it. The instructors were glad — after all this time we’d got together. The car was filled with laughter, jokes and songs… The conductor was outraged, “You’re playing up like schoolkids — there’s no keeping you in check!”

There were five of us girls there: two aircraft mechanics, two Marias (Nikonova and Piskounova), two volunteer pilot instructors (Tamara Konstantinova and Masha Smirnova) and the two of us, pilot instructors via the Kherson aviation school: Katya Piskounova and I. Later, during the war, at night the latter would drop ammunition and provisions from her defenceless Po-2 down to the marines of a landing party at Eltigen.62

…But for now we were walking, feasting our eyes on marvellous spaces… The fading lilies of the valley showed through the grass in places — like a gift of nature… We came out on the Volga river, chose a comfortable spot on her high right bank and sat down, admiring the passing steamships. But usually music was heard from them and it was uncommonly quiet. And suddenly we heard the distinct voice of a radio announcer echoing in the forest: “We are at war…”

All nature’s colours faded then and there. Our cheerful mood had vanished somewhere. In a moment we became older than our years. All of us standing in that Sunday morning forest were certain: the country was rising to a mortal battle. And each of us who had mastered a military profession decided for herself not to stay out of it. Someone said briefly: “Time to go home”, but in less than an hour we all encountered each other at the city military commissariat. Our little ruse against each other hadn’t worked but our visit to the commissar’s office turned out to be futile.

“Do your job, girls”, the military commissar responded to our request to send us to the front. “You’ll have enough work in the rear now.”

I had enough patience to stay at the aeroclub’s peaceful aerodrome only for a month and a half. The alarming reports of the first days of war were stirring us up and at the same time we were informed that it had been ordered to evacuate the aeroclub into the deep rear. The day came when I walked to a train heading off to Moscow. Mousya Nikonova, my plane’s technician, saw me off. Her husband, a tankman, had been badly wounded and was dying in one of the city hospitals. Mousya didn’t cry but her beautiful face with brown almond-shaped eyes had become thin and dull. Another tanker who’d lost his arm lay in an adjacent ward. He was the husband of Tatyana Nikoulina, with whom we’d studied in the Metrostroy aeroclub. She’d come to him from Moscow, leaving her small daughter in the care of neighbours, and sat in the ward next to her maimed husband day and night, comforting and tending him as best she could. The war was already making itself felt — very brutally, sometimes irremediably…

At the train station Mousya Nikonova kissed me and putting a silver rouble into the left breast pocket of my blouse said quietly, “It’s a talisman. You’ll give it back to me when the Fascists are smashed.” This talisman… It would be with me through the whole war. By some miracle I saved it but managed to return it to Mousya only many years later. She considered me dead and only through one item in a newspaper got to know my approximate address and found me. I remember standing near the house gate and seeing a woman with a vaguely familiar face coming towards me from the bus stop. She came up and began asking if I knew where to find… and then she fell silent and began to cry, having recognised me…

But all this was a long way off and at the moment I was on my way to Moscow to the OSOAVIAHIM Central Council. I found my way with difficulty to Three Stations Square63, I noticed the camouflage on the buildings: they were covered with something like theatrical scenery. I was also astounded by the white paper crosses on the windows. The absence of the customary train station hustle and bustle was depressing. Men in military uniform walked about the station halls and words of command rang out loudly. When I was running across the square I nearly ran face first into a silvery gondola — soldiers were cautiously leading a balloon… I was also astonished by the flak guns in Krasnosel’skaya Street, these stood on the roofs of the many-storied buildings like cranes on long legs. And this was the atmosphere all along my way to Toushino: flak guns in parks, columns of troops, recruitment posters on the walls, a stern reserve in the behaviour of people in the streets. Not only the outskirts but the central thoroughfares of the capital were cluttered with lines of anti-tank hedgehogs64 and barred with barricades. Moscow — now a frontline city — was becoming more and more austere day by day. Every day Levitan’s65 voice gave the Moscovites more and more alarming reports on the radio: “After stubborn and fierce fighting in the course of which…” The Sovinformbureau66 communiqués reached people everywhere: at home, at work, in the street. It was impossible not to get sick of them…

I am slowly riding a frequently-stopping bus and, pressing my face to the window-glass, look at a girl in military uniform standing at an intersection with an energetically raised red signal flag. She’s a traffic controller letting a troop column through. It was an ordinary tense day of war… I get to the building I need, a Colonel has a brief glance at the document I hold out to him and says in a hoarse and tired voice: “Egorova? And what do you, Egorova, want from me? What has happened back at your Kalinin? No petrol? Not enough planes? Please report quickly. You can see how many people are waiting.”

Indeed the room, stained black with tobacco smoke, was crammed with airmen: old and young, in civilian clothes and in field uniform. All of them were talking, exchanging the latest news, awaiting here — in one of the offices of the Central Aeroclub — resolution of their issues and their fate. I had no intention of wasting their time.

“Actually, I have only one question. A personal one”, I said loudly trying to talk over the noise.

The Colonel threw out his arms, “Is this the time to deal with personal issues?”

“Sorry, I’ve didn’t express myself properly”, I was embarrassed. “I’m only asking you to send me to the front.”

“Oh, come on, ‘only’”! The owner of the office unbuttoned the collar of his blouse. “You all repeat over and over again — to the front, to the front. If I do it your way OSOAVIAHIM’s work will have to be wound down completely. And who, I ask you…”, by the way the Colonel angrily looked around the whole office one could guess he was responding not only to me. “Who, I ask you, will train personnel for the front? No, sweetheart, go back to Kalinin and do what you’re supposed to do! Who’s next?”

But I was not going to back off. On the contrary I moved even closer to the desk.

“Our aeroclub is to be evacuated to the rear. I’m not going to the rear. I request a transfer to the front. You have to understand, I have a lot of flying experience. At the moment it is more important up there, over the battlefields…”

“You know what, Egorova? Allow us to be the judge of what and where is more important now…” The Colonel growled. However, he obviously understood it wouldn’t be that easy to get rid of me. Becoming thoughtful for a minute, he turned over some piece of paper in his hands and, looking at me askance, said “Alright, whatever, we’ll send you a bit closer to the fire, to the Stalino aeroclub” — that was the name of Donetsk back then.

“What, to Stalino? in 1938 that’s where my brother…” I gulped but managed to say firmly: “Write the order!”

On the way to the train station I dropped in to my kinfolk’s place on the Arbat. Katya was somewhere on defensive works, and the sixth-grader Yurka, having come home from school, was happy to see me and fussed about wanting to treat me to something. But in the sideboard there was nothing left but bread and a lump of sugar. He began to tell me that in his school the geography teacher had volunteered for the front but the director couldn’t get permission to go.

“If I were him I would have run away to hit the Fascists long ago but he’s still waiting for permission, a strange man…”

“Have you heard anything from your dad?” I interrupted my nephew.

He drooped a bit straightaway, then stood up, took some sheets of paper from a desk and handed them to me.

“Read this. Yesterday a Colonel came and said that he’d worked recently with dad somewhere far away in the North. It’s night all day long up there in winter and in summer the sun doesn’t set. Dad is building a beautiful city up there, like Leningrad, and a big mining and processing operation”, Yurka said without pausing for breath. “The Colonel and many other former military men had been sent to the front. He’d managed to drop in to his home and also to our place and was very sorry not to find mum in.”

I was reading the sheets of paper covered with my brother’s writing. On one of them there was a letter to his wife and son, on another — his request to be sent to the front to defend his motherland from the Fascist invaders.

“Soon dad will go to the front”, Yurka said confidently. — And I will ask to join him. If he doesn’t take me I will go on my own. After all Vit’ka Timokhin and I decided long ago to go to the front. Vit’ka is not tall enough but they will let me do that for sure because I’m the tallest in my class! It’s a pity you, Aunty Anya, aren’t going to the front, otherwise I would be heading off there with you. It is never too late to study. Once we smash the Fascists you can study as much as you want…”

That night there was an air-raid warning in the city but we decided not to go to an air raid shelter — so we talked all night long. In the morning, sending Yurka to school and getting ready to go to the train station myself, I asked him to pledge his word not to make a step towards the front without my knowledge. Yurka promised but on one condition: if I managed to get to the front I would not fail to make arrangements for him to join me but in the meantime he would be studying at school and would do his best to master the rifle and the machine-gun. With that we parted.

Yuri waited in vain for my call to the front and his father’s visit. He would see his father many years after the war when my brother received banishment after ten years of imprisonment. Vasya as well as many other ‘political’ prisoners survived thanks to the kindness of Zavenyagin, the director of construction and then director of the Norilsk mining and processing operation. To provide the construction works with high-level professionals, he recruited specialists from amongst the political prisoners, softening their regime. My brother was brought to Moscow under escort by plane more than once to get some plans approved. Of course, he wasn’t allowed to visit his family on the Arbat or even ring them. He would stay in a NKVD hotel in the Mayakovskiy Square… I often called Katya, my brother’s wife, a dekabristka67. When her husband received banishment, at her own risk she took Yurka with her and headed to faraway Norilsk by water: it was cheaper that way. It took them three months to get there — they barely survived. But the joy of the meeting instilled faith and hope into the family… In 1953 Vasya was fully rehabilitated but he stayed in Norilsk with his family. Now he worked as a deputy director of the Zavenyagin Mining and Processing Operation in Norilsk, and Katya in a tailoring shop. At the age of 75 my brother retired, but nowadays the third generation of the Egorovs works in Norilsk — my brother’s grandchildren, Victor and Andrey. Life goes on…