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

17. A hooligan on the road

In May 1942 the South-Western Front troops began their advance in the direction of Kharkov. We, the airmen of the Southern Front Signals Squadron, were always abreast of events on the front line. We would be advised of the situation before a sortie and we would narrow it down, making flights either to this or that army, corps or division. The troops of the South-Western Front would have to destroy an enemy army grouping and liberate Kharkov. Two of our frontline armies — the 9th and the 57th — were supposed to work together with the South-Western Front. And on 20 May they ordered me to fly to the 9th Army with a top-secret package. I don’t remember why I had to fly alone. Usually we would fly with navigators, signals officers, special messengers or with someone else but this time I had taken off alone. I remember that approaching the town of Izyum I saw on the roads and simply across fields the movement of our troops. Many fires showed themselves in the Severnyi Donets Valley, near Svyatogorskiy and in Izyum.

Fires had always aroused in me unreasoning alarm and anxiety since childhood. “A thief will leave the walls at least, but a fire will leave nothing!” the people of our village used to say. It had stuck in my memory for the rest of my life how the harvested corn had burned. Before threshing the corn was usually dried in barns. The sheaves would be stacked on grates in covered bays and a large stone oven — a teplinka — would be heated underneath. Heat would come up and dry the sheaves for threshing. Our corn barn caught fire from failing to watch the teplinka. A heart-rending cry resounded in the middle of the night: “Fire! We’ve got a fire!” Everyone jumped out of bed and began to rush about the house. My half-dressed brothers dashed out of the house, and mum couldn’t even make it to the door, holding in her hands the first thing that had fallen into her hands — the samovar…

Now there was a war: whole cities, our whole land, were burning but still I couldn’t get used to the fires. And now my heart thudded anxiously at the sight of the burning valley. And above me in the sky an aerial battle was raging. A couple of our I-16s were fighting against six Me-109s. The odds were not even but our pilots were skilfully avoiding the Messerschmitts’ fire, closing in for head-on attacks, and the Fascists, fearfully keeping their distance, couldn’t do much. Our guys obviously had the advantage. They shot down one Me-109: it crashed, and I must admit I was gloating and didn’t notice when a German fighter pounced on me like a black kite. A fiery spurt cut the air in front of my eyes. I wished I could dive into a ravine or a gully but there were only flat fields with loose piles of last year’s corn before me nearly up to the very horizon. On the right there was solid forest, on the left — the town. My machine caught fire: it immediately became hot and stuffy in the cockpit. The tail was burning — now it was going to reach me, the engine, the fuel tank and then… Having barely touched down I jumped out of the plane and tearing off the smoking rags of my overalls ran towards the woods. The German seemed to have gone berserk. He descended to contour level and turned the whole fire of his guns on me. In 1941 and also in 1942 the Hitlerites could afford this luxury — to chase a lone Russian soldier across the fields in a tank, to strafe someone with all cannons and machine-guns, diving from the sky… But I kept on running and falling over. At times I would fall down pretending to be dead and hiding my head under the corn stalks, arms and legs spread out. When the Messer went away to turn around I would jump up, clasp the secret package to my bosom and run again…

Having expended all his ammo the Fascist flew away. I was in a forest. It was quiet — there was no one around. And suddenly I wanted so much to lie in the glade, as in my childhood, to shut my eyes and switch off! Young foliage had already appeared on the trees — the spring was coming into its own. I had never been afraid of death but suddenly now I wanted to live so much! It would be bad to die in the spring. One’s life is much, much dearer in the spring…

Whilst I was on the run my plane had burned to the ground. The bag of mail and my leather jacket that were in the fuselage had burned too. What could I do now? How to find the 9th Army headquarters? Looking around I saw a telephone cable hanging on some tree branches. I followed it, hoping it would lead me to some command post. I had barely walked thirty paces when I met two soldiers who were winding the cable onto a reel.

“Where’s the CP?” I asked them.

“What do you mean the CP, the Germans are there!” they yelled without stopping. “It was evacuated long ago, everyone’s gone.”

“Where to?”

The soldiers didn’t know — their business was to wind the cable. Coming out of the forest I ran towards the road across a field — but the road was empty. Lone soldiers and small groups of horsemen moved however they could, staying away from the road. A truck racing past rode around me as I stood in its path with my arms stretched out. Then an Emka86 appeared — I tried to wave it down but in vain — the Emka dashed past me without slowing down. Then without stopping to think I pulled out my revolver and fired into the air. The driver reversed and stopped not far away from me. Then a front door opened and a dashing captain with a medal on his chest effortlessly leaped out of it. He deftly snatched the weapon from my hand, twisted my arms behind my back and then thrust his hand into a breast pocket of my blouse for my papers. I couldn’t allow him to treat me this way! No less deftly I bowed my head and bit the captain, who screamed from pain, on the hand — the blood actually spurted! I saw a chubby General get out of the car. He began questioning me: who I was and by what right I was behaving outrageously on the road.

“And who are you?” I blurted out, but handed him my certificate. This certificate was quite impressive — issued personally to me it recommended all military units and civil organisations render all assistance to the presenter of this document in the performance of his duties.

“Where are you headed?” the General asked, more politely now.

“To the 9th Army headquarters.”

“Get in the car,” he offered and courteously enquired: “Where did you get burnt?”

I told him what had happened to me and suddenly… burst into tears — I don’t know whether it was from resentment or from pain. My burnt hands hurt really badly and to top it off that captain had stripped off the skin when twisting my arms and now they were bleeding.

“Don’t cry, girl” the General began to calm me down, “otherwise your face will smart from the tears. We’ll get you to 9th Army headquarters in a flash…”

But the “now” and “in a flash” are quite imprecise concepts in war. Only after three hours did we find the Army headquarters where I handed the package over to the head of the operations department. They swabbed my face and dressed my hands in the medical post. They fed me in the canteen and by evening they had sent me off to the aerodrome.

I got a fraternal reception in the squadron. Narodetskiy the Quartermaster even brought me sweets instead of the hundred grams of vodka we were issued with for sorties. He knew that I wasn’t drinking my ration and was giving it away to the mechanic or the pilots and he was trying to give me a treat for the occasion with sweets or something tasty. When we had been based near Voroshilovgrad and living in tents in the forest we didn’t do much flying. Narodetskiy invited me to go on an excursion to Voroshilovgrad once. Having had a look around the city we dropped into a supermarket and there I saw a wide-brimmed hat with a splendid spray of artificial flowers. I stood for a long while admiring it and then the catering officer, catching my gaze fixed on the straw wonder, whispered something with the sales-girl and she handed it over to me… The hat was hung on a nail in my tent. But once I was coming back from a mission and what did I see?… our pet Drouzhok87 — a dog travelling with the squadron since we were at the Tikhiy farmstead — in that hat! My brothers in arms had cut holes in it for his ears, tied it on firmly with twine and the dog was rushing about in that stylish apparel, barking. Of course, the pilots were hiding from me in the tents… Then they laughed and Kravtsov scolded me: “That’s for taking presents from the Quartermaster!

Now, when I had returned alive, although with burns on my face and arms and in scorched boots, everyone was happy.

“Don’t feel bad about the plane, Egorova. The main thing is that you are in one piece and you delivered the orders to the troops…” Malikov the squadron engineer soothed me. “And you can always get another plane…”

Of course you could always get another plane. But how bitter and hurtful it was to be shot down and unable to avenge it. The pilots were saying new equipment was coming to the front: Petlyakovs, Yaks, Lavochkins… Every plane was a dream! But I had been greatly impressed by another machine. Only once or twice had I seen it in flight but remembered it always. A small monoplane of classic shape, its wings were slightly swept back. If you looked at it from aside it might seem a torpedo was flying. Legends were circulating about this plane… It flew swiftly just above the very ground and climbed up to the sky like a hawk! The plane was manoeuvrable, with a good field of view, well-protected. There was a lot of talk about it. Once I heard a pilot describing it in glowing terms: “It doesn’t break off into a spin during an uncoordinated turn, on the straight it flies steadily even hands-free. And landing? It almost lands by itself. In a word, it’s as simple as a stool. It won’t let you down in a dogfight and will knock a ground target for six. To cut a long story short — it’s a Sturmovik88”. Of course that was something to get dizzy about.

However, a dream is only a dream, but again I had to fly a U-2 to the 6th and 57th Armies surrounded by the Hitler’s troops. Down there our troops were short of ammo, food and fuel, and there were a lot of wounded men. Attempts to break through the encirclement had come to nothing. The armies suffered heavy losses in men and materiél. Due to reverses in the Barvenkovo-Kharkov area the situation had become quite grave. We were flying a lot as always — and the Fascists pilot were hunting us as before. We were getting our share from the ground as well and we pilots were in trouble.

Having lost their machines, Serezha Spirin and Victor Kravstov returned to the squadron. A badly wounded Vanya Sorokin was sent to hospital. It had been five days since Sborshchikov with his navigator Cherkasov had flown on a mission and not returned…

Naum Sborshikov was a heaven-born pilot! Before the war he had worked as a pilot instructor and taught more than forty students to fly. I’d known him from the times of the Ulyanovsk aviation school where we studied in the same section of the class. Then our paths had diverged but when I arrived at the front and the squadron he welcomed me like one of the family. By nature he was a private, quiet man, but he protected me as much as he could and helped me with everything. When Sborshchikov didn’t come back I couldn’t accept his death for a long while and kept waiting. When five days had gone by everyone stopped waiting — even his plane’s mechanic. I also had little hope for his return and when no one could see it tears would unexpectedly well up in my eyes. I felt sorry for Cherkasov too. An always joyful, smiling fair-haired man of no great height, in his faded blouse and then-fashionable canvas boots — looking at him it was hard to imagine how much suffering had fallen to his lot… He had volunteered to defend Republican Spain and flew in a bomber as navigator. During one of the combat sorties the plane was shot down. The pilot and the navigator were captured by the Fascists and after long interrogation and torture both of them were sentenced to death. But the Soviet Government managed to protect them and just before the War they both returned to the motherland.

“I was born in a shirt89”, Cherkasov liked to repeat with a laugh.

How I wanted to believe that the one “born in a shirt” would soon join us with the latest joke he had thought up, at which even gloomy Sborshchikov would laugh. And they came back! They came back completely unexpectedly when we had all given up waiting. Naum’s head was bandaged so that only his eyes were visible through the chinks. There was no boot on his right leg and it was wrapped in something as well, his blouse bore rusty blotches all over it. One of Cherkasov’s arms was bandaged slung on a belt and he was leaning on a big stick with the other…