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

20. “Not a woman, a combat pilot”

The group of pilots headed off to Derbent by train before dark. I was amongst them — the first female pilot who had got admission to the Sturmoviks… Since my childhood I’d been lucky enough to meet good people. Wherever I studied, wherever I worked I would meet loyal friends, kind-hearted tutors. I was trained at the factory school by the old craftsman Goubanov, I was assisted by the engineer Aliev, who was the shift boss, in my transfer to the most important sector of operations — the tunnel. I was trained by the superb instructor Miroevskiy in the aeroclub, the secretary of the Ulyanovsk District Comsomol Committee gave me a hand at a very hard moment of my life, then there was Maria Borek from Leningrad, the Secretary of the Smolensk District Comsomol Committee, the Commissar of the Smolensk aeroclub… Was it really possible to count all those who had warmed my soul with their sympathy and human kindness and helped me to realize my dream!

But not everyone met me with sympathy in the ground attack regiment. There were some (for some reason, especially many of those belonged to the technical staff) who grumbled under their breath “What good is a woman in ground-attack aviation?” But the regiment navigator Petr Karev shushed them: “The Regiment’s not getting a woman, it’s getting a combat pilot…”

So there I was in the ground attack regiment. The Battalion Commissar Ignashov — deputy commander for political affairs — summoned us, the newly arrived pilots, by turns for interview. I didn’t know what he had spoken about with my comrades, but I was stunned by his very first question: “And what’s the point of putting yourself in mortal danger?”

“Mortal all of a sudden?” I growled, displeased.

But Ignashov went on: “A Sturmovik is too hard for a woman. And take into account, our losses are rather great. I’ll tell you confidentially that in the latest fighting over Gizel village we lost nearly all our airmen. Although our plane is armour-plated, more airmen die in it than in any other kind of plane. Think it over properly and go back to the training regiment. The Sturmovik isn’t suitable for a woman!”

“And what is suitable for a woman at war, Comrade Commissar?” I asked challengingly. “To be a medic? To drag a wounded man from the battlefield under enemy fire, strained beyond her strength? Or being a sniper? To stalk the enemy under cover for hours in all weathers, kill them, get killed herself? Or maybe, a surgeon would be easier? To receive the wounded, to operate under bombing and, seeing people suffer and die, suffer herself?”

Ignashov wanted to say something but I was already hard to stop. “Obviously it would be easier to be dropped off behind enemy lines with a radio transmitter? And maybe now women are better off on the home front? They smelt metal, grow corn and bring up kids at the same time, they get the death notices of their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, daughters? It seems to me, Comrade Commissar”, by now I had began to talk quieter, “now is no time to see any difference between a man and a woman until we cleanse our motherland of the Hitlerites…”

I finished my impromptu ‘performance’, and then Ignashov smiled: “That’s right, my daughter is as cranky as you. She used to work in a base hospital as a surgeon, but no way: she had to be at the frontline. Currently she’s somewhere near Stalingrad… We haven’t heard from her for a long while — neither my wife nor me. My wife suffers especially — she’s alone at home… Do you write letters to your family?” Ignashov asked, taking some pills out of his pocket. Only now did I discern how ill he was. He had ‘bags’ under his eyes, blue lips, and a pale and puffy face.

“I do write letters but haven’t had any from home for a long time. I feel very sad sometimes. Then I convince myself that it’s the field mail’s fault…”

“At your age you can convince yourself even of something pleasant”, the Commissar said, addressing me with ‘thou’ for the first time. “Are you married?”

“No”, I replied in one word, and suddenly, as if I had at long last found someone to speak my mind to, to disclose my innermost thoughts to, I burst out: “But I love very much one man, a pilot. He’s a fighter pilot, in combat somewhere near Leningrad. We wanted to get married before the war but I kept postponing it. One time I said that we should graduate from the flying school, another time that I had to turn out one more group of cadets, and then the war came…”

The conversation with Ignashov clearly took too long but we parted like old friends.

“You can come to me with all your questions, joys and sorrows. We will sort everything out together”, he said, sort of casually, in farewell, and stretched his hand out to me. Ignashov was popular in the regiment. As for the political commissar who had been his predecessor in the 805th, once they had even bashed him! According to the stories he used to just walk around giving orders. The regiment was in combat, men were dying, everyone was having a hard time, but he would just give orders… Ignashov was a completely different man.

We were given only two days to study the Sturmovik equipment and get ready for examination by the senior regimental engineer. All the newly-arrived men were distributed among the squadrons straightaway. The pilot Vakhramov and I were sent to the 3rd Squadron. Puny, short Valya98 Vakhtramov looked like a boy. And when we’d found out that he was only about nineteen we were surprised: this little chap, with this height, had managed to put up his age so as to join an aviation school!

When we reached the Ogni aerodrome Vakhramov lagged behind the train. There were very few passenger trains back then and he had to catch up with us on a tanker of fuel oil. Of course he was stained badly and had also lost his papers. In short, when Valentin arrived at the regiment nobody would believe he was a pilot: my confirmation was required. The regiment commander himself met Vakhramov out and said just one thing: “Clean yourself up!”

The regimental chief-of-staff Captain Belov told us the regiment’s war stories, told about the airmen who had distinguished themselves in combat. We found out that our 805th Ground-attack Regiment had been raised from the 138th High-speed Bombers. It had been in combat since the first day of the war. The airmen flew bombing missions against the columns of German troops advancing from the Western frontier towards Kiev and losses in the regiment were very heavy. When almost no fighting machines were left in it, the regiment moved by railroad to Makhachkala99 and then across the sea to Astrakhan100 where the pilots were going to learn to handle the new Pe-2 plane — a dive-bomber of Petlyakov’s design. I disliked it — but I didn’t fly it, just watched it.

However, before the regiment had time to get quartered a new order arrived — to set about studying the Il-2 Sturmovik. And we were on the road again — this time to pick up the combat aircraft. And here the regiment received the name “805th Ground-attack Aviation”. The staff learned to handle the new equipment and the regiment relocated to the frontline where it joined the 230th Ground-attack Aviation Division. Thus the combat life of the regiment began with flying the famous Ilyushin Sturmovik.

The Regimental Engineer began the traditional examinations on knowledge of the plane’s design, engine, aerodynamics. The engine of A. Mikoulin’s design had 12 cylinders — one of the most powerful engines of that time, developed specially for the Sturmovik. I knew well all its technical characteristics. It was incomparable with the U-2 engine. The U-2 engine had 5 cylinders and the exhaust nipples were located in the collector. On the Il-2 all the nipples extended outside, and that was why when the engine worked it roared mightily.

The Armament Engineer Senior Lieutenant B. D. Sheiko — still quite a young chap — checked our knowledge of gunnery. Like us, he had apparently just found himself in the ground-attack regiment.

“So, how should we aim when shooting rockets?” We asked him almost with one voice.

“Well, you put the crosshair on the armour glass101 over the target and get it roasted!”

“And how do you set the electric ejector for bomb delivery?”

“It depends on what you’re bombing. You can set it on single, batch or salvo”, he answered.

“Tell us, what’s the flight trajectory of a rocket launched from a dive? And how do you set up the rocket ejector?”

Questions poured as if from a horn of plenty and the young engineer went mad. “Who’s the examiner? You or me?” he asked, turning the kicker handle left and right. Not finding the right position he cursed, climbed out of the cockpit and went away from the aerodrome.

New examiners were waiting for us at the parking bay. The head of the aerial gunnery service, later to be a regiment’s deputy commander of flight training — Captain Koshkin — greeted us gloomily. He was a man of quite non-athletic appearance, in a uniform which hadn’t undergone cleaning and ironing since pre-war times. The phlegmatic captain, with his sad green-grey eyes and dolefully downturned lips, seemingly harboured some undivined grief. But you had to see Alexey Koshkin in combat! We’d been told about his duel with some remarkable Fascist contrivance. The Germans had designed a devilish machine which could destroy 12-15 kilometres of railway in one hour. And how much time and materiel, how many hundreds of soldiers’ labour it took to restore all that! It turned out this disguised steam-engine dragged behind it something like a huge plough-share that tore up everything in its way — both rails and sleepers. And once the Ground Troops Command asked the airmen to destroy the enemy’s machine. Regiment Command ordered Koshkin to destroy the engine. But how to find it? Only yesterday they’d seen the steel threads of rails and today there were none. Koshkin had flown many times and run himself ragged but couldn’t find the steam engine. But one day Alexey noticed a shadow in the beams of the setting sun. It was the large, improbable and ugly shadow of a steam-engine. “But where was the smoke? Where was the engine itself?” — Koshkin depicted his perplexity later. Having descended to low level, at last he saw what he’d been looking for so long. The Germans had installed a platform coloured like trees and bushes on top of the engine. The disguise was superb. Alexey attacked this ‘theatre’: he closed in from aside, took aim at the engine and opened fire. All in vain — the engine-driver sharply sped up and the shells sent by Koshkin shot past. He attacked again, again with no result.

The duel between the plane and the engine lasted for quite some time but when a shell hit the boiler a cloud of steam shot up and the engine stopped. However, Koshkin kept pounding it time and again: with the cannons, with the machine-guns — he launched rockets point-blank, so greatly had that German devilry vexed Alexey! The engine turned into a heap of metal. Having photographed the results of his work the captain made it home with not a single shell-hole, although the Germans had shot at our Sturmovik from the ground and from that very engine with everything they had.

That’s the kind of people who ended up in our regiment. It was impossible not to marvel at them, but I have to admit I began to doubt myself a little bit: would I cope with it like them, would I be able to?

After we passed our tests all our group was assigned to fly the UIl-2 — a training plane with dual control. It became known to us that Captain Karev would accompany our flights. The regiment navigator Captain Karev appeared before us surprisingly elegantly. He seemed to have on the same military uniform as Captain Koshkin — but his carefully-ironed blouse with snow-white under-collar, breeches with enormous flaps, polished box calf jackboots cleaned to shining and gathered into a ‘concertina’, peaked cap with a star on the cap-band, all this fitted him somehow especially smartly without breaching the regulations. For some reason I remembered his mischievous laughing eyes and his hooked nose from the first introduction. Karev walked me to the desired machine and stepped aside — as if to say, ‘let her get to know it on her own…’

And indeed I was looking at the plane and couldn’t get my fill of it. In front of me there was a beauty with an elongated streamlined fuselage, a glass cockpit and a pointed engine cowling sticking out far forward. The blued barrels of two rapid-fire cannons and two machine-guns menacingly jutted out of the front edges of the wings. Eight metal slats were fixed under the wings — guides for the rockets. I had already known there were four bomb bays in the central section. In there as well as up on two clamps under the fuselage six one-hundred kilogram bombs could be hung. Basically it was a cruiser, not a plane! I rubbed the cold panelling with my palm. Metal! Not like on the U-2. The engine, the fuel tanks, everything was covered by durable armour. And a bird like that was entrusted to me! Staying silent for as long as was proper for a first date Karev asked at last: “Do you like it?”

“Very much!” I replied with a kind of special emotion.

“Well, let’s do some flying now and see if you like the Ilyusha in the air”, and smiling, gallantly, he invited: “Be my guest!”

I made two circles in the dual-control plane, and after landing the regimental navigator asked me via the intercom to taxi to the parking lot and turn off the engine. “Well, now he’s going to rip into me!” I thought. “I didn’t suit the captain for some reason!” He hadn’t dropped a word during the flight and had only whistled tunes from some operettas.

“Permission to hear your remarks?” I said trying to look cheerful.

“But there aren’t any” Karev replied. “Go to the combat plane, tail number ‘6’ and make a circuit flight on your own. Altitude 300 metres, landing as normal.”

But I hadn’t expected such a rush in the transfer to a combat plane. The UIl-2 had seemed to be ‘blind’ and cramped to me and I asked Captain Karev in a hoarse voice:

“Comrade Captain, do one more flight with me in the dual-control.”

“No point ironing the air for nothing! Nowadays every kilo of petrol is counted”, the navigator cut me off.

“But, Comrade Captain”, I begged. “All the guys from our group got several accompanied flights, and Kulushnikov, he got the whole twenty five. Why won’t you at least let me fly once more on dual-control?”

“Double-quick to the plane!” the captain ordered, and at that I ran. The plane mechanic Vasya Rimskiy checked off to me the machine’s readiness. Putting on the parachute I climbed into the cockpit, buckled on the belts, tuned up the two-way for reception, checked everything off as we’d been trained and turned the engine on.

The sensation of take-off, the disappearance of your firm foothold, is amazing. The plane is still running across the rough field gaining speed, one more instant — and it detaches from the ground and the pilot is now carried on two steel wings. During the first circular flight I’d noticed how much faster this traditional route of four turns was completed — the U-2’s engine was no match for the Il-2’s. I had estimated the landing run precisely and landed exactly by the ‘T’-junction: as pilots say, ‘on three points’.

You wouldn’t wish a better one! I taxied out and saw the captain showing me with his arms: ‘do one more flight’. So I rolled for another take-off. Our aerodrome was situated almost on the shore of the Azov Sea, so during flying most of the route was made over the water. I couldn’t swim and was afraid of water. Once in my childhood I nearly drowned: my mum was rinsing the washing, I was with her and fell into the water. I still feared water and swam only close to the shore. And here, after take-off there was a turn over the waves, a second, a third, a fourth one — all over the sea, and then I would land on the aerodrome. And doing a turn over the water I heard a backfire resound, then another — and the engine stalled. The prop stopped, a sinister silence descended…

I automatically pushed the control column away and switched the plane to gliding — so as not to lose speed and not to fall into the sea with the Sturmovik. After that I continued doing everything according to instructions: I throttled back, turned off the ignition, closed the fuel emergency shutoff cock. In a word, I set everything in the cabin on ‘economy’. The aerodrome was already right in front of me, and all would have been alright, but the speed and altitude were falling catastrophically fast. I quickly understood that I wouldn’t make it to the aerodrome and would have to land right in front of my nose. But what was that? The whole terrain was pitted by deep ravines! If I landed on them I would be done for! And at the same time I heard the anxious voice of the regimental commander Kozin in the radio: “What’s happened? What’s happened? Receiving!” But I couldn’t reply for I had no transmitter. And I had no time for replying — all my attention was fixed on the ground. I noticed a narrow strip of flat ground between two ravines and decided to land on it, opened up the cockpit for a better field of vision, then lowered the undercarriage…

Needless to say, the time dragged agonizingly slowly. Then the machine touched down, rolled forward and I did my best to hold her and not to let her fall into a ravine. To achieve that I was energetically ‘pumping’ — pushing the brakes with my feet — and the speed began to fall bit by bit, the wings to lower steadily, and the plane slowed down and stopped. And when I, wet all over, leaped out of the cockpit onto a wing and looked down I saw with horror that my machine’s wheels had stopped right on the edge of a ravine. Numerous skeletons of dead animals lay at the bottom…

I examined the plane — it seemed unscathed. Everything seemed to be in place, and in one piece, except a bail was cracked slightly and a wing was damaged. And there were many patches on the wings and the fuselage as well — the ‘Il’ was riddled all over. The poor Ilyushin had been through a lot during the recent fighting near Ordzhonikidze! It had put its life on the line defending the approaches to Transcaucasia, to the oil-rich districts of Grozny and Baku. The engine must have been through a lot as well — and now it had succumbed. I knew in combat a plane engine was supposed to experience heavy overload, overstrain, and begin to play up by the end of its lifetime. But what had actually happened to it? Why had it stalled? There still was fuel, and oil too. True, some of the devices controlling its work had conked out. But I didn’t want to blame anyone and had nothing against anyone. I understood that during combat a pilot sometimes had to rev up sharply, boost and sharply decelerate, dive at high revs, gain altitude, without sparing the engine. But it had stalled now when I was flying straight, at the assigned altitude, at the defined speed and revolution rate, when I was watching the gauge readings maintaining the most suitable operating conditions for the engine. Basically, I wasn’t overburdening her but she had still stalled… I knew that as soon as we — the young pilots — had mastered our Il-2s completely, they would be written off and we would go to a plant to receive new ones. But that didn’t make me feel any better.

Standing on the spot and pondering it over, I suddenly noticed an ambulance rushing and the pilots running across the field towards me. “Well, — I thought, — I’ll get it now!” And would you believe who was the first to run up to me? The very same trainer from school who had unfairly given me just a ‘good’ mark for a problem I’d been the first to solve! Then, having left the vehicle, out of breath, Doctor Kozlovskiy appeared with his first-aid kit on him. Finding me in one piece and unharmed he began to wail, wiping off sweat and tears from his wrinkled face, “My sweetheart, you’re safe! I’m so glad!”

The regimental commander, who would also fly with us to get a plane (the whole regiment flew) then told me: “Anna Alexandrovna”, now for the first time he called me by my name and patronymic, “you’ve done well, you saved the plane. Whatever is damaged the mechanics will fix up in no time, grease up the percale, put on a lick of paint and it’ll be alright — we’ll fly again!”

By evening the Sturmovik’s engine had been examined, repaired and tested. They turned the plane away from the ravine towards the sea and Captain Karev (being the most experienced pilot of the regiment) took off and safely landed at the aerodrome. And the next day after these events all the personnel of our unit were lined up. No one knew for what reason it had been done but suddenly I heard the following: ‘Junior Lieutenant Egorova, step forward!”

My new comrades moved aside letting me forward from the rear row. I hesitantly stepped out of the line and stood to attention: “What’s going to happen? Will they ascribe the fault for the forced landing to me? I’m going to get it in the neck! They’ll say, ‘she can’t handle the engine’. How will I prove it wasn’t my fault?”

And suddenly the regiment commander said ceremoniously: “For the excellent sortie in the Il-2 plane and salvation of the fighting equipment entrusted to you I express my gratitude!”

“I serve the Soviet Union!” I responded with breaking voice after a long pause.

After this incident attitudes toward me in the regiment changed abruptly…