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

22. Wingtip to wingtip

At last we arrived at the plant where we were to receive brand-new planes and fly them to the front. In expectation of the machines the pilots lodged in a huge dugout, as big as a Metrostroy tunnel, with two tiers of bunks. Here I received a letter from Raya Volkova, a Metrostroy girl. She wrote that the construction of the Moscow Metro was continuing, that the third-stage line with the stations ‘Sverdlov Square’, ‘Novokuznetskaya’, ‘Paveletskaya’, ‘Avtozavodskaya’, ‘Semyonovskaya’ would start operating soon. “At all stations”, she wrote, “there will be bas-reliefs on the walls with the inscription: ‘Constructed during the Great Patriotic War’. There’s a war on but we are in peaceful construction work. It’s true many Metrostroy men are building defensive installations as well. We’ve helped the men of Leningrad erect fortifications, laid out the Road of Life across Lake Ladoga… The guys from our aeroclub are all at the front. Your instructor Miroevskiy and Serezha Feoktistov are fighting in Sturmoviks. Vanya Vishnyakov, Zhenya Minshoutin and Serezha Korolev, in fighter planes. Louka Mouravistkiy, Vanya Oparin, Sasha Lobanov, Arkadiy Chernyshev, Vasya Kochetkov and Victor Koutov have been killed…”

“Victor who?..” I felt as if I had been struck by lightning — everything grew dark: there was neither sun, nor people, nor this war there… It seemed there was nothing to breathe, my eyes couldn’t see, my ears couldn’t hear. When I had come to my senses I saw Doctor Kozlovskiy above me with a syringe in his hand. He kept saying:

“Have a cry now, sweetheart, have a cry. You’ll feel better straightaway…” But I couldn’t cry. Something unbearably heavy lay on my heart and would not ease even for many long years after…

A kind soul, our doctor! He looked after me and healed my soul back in that hard time of mine. And not only mine… In the regiment there was no man more caring and attentive to us. Kozlovskiy literally looked after each airman: how and what he ate, how he slept, what his mood was. He always organised a Russian bath for us along with a change of underwear. He would pick some shack on a riverbank, skilful mechanics would put together a stove out of rocks, put on it a petrol drum, heat plenty of water — and the bathhouse was ready! Doctor Kozlovskiy always requested that a ‘tub’ be prepared for me — in other words a separate drum of hot water, and demanded insistently that I sit in it for no less than ten minutes. We airmen called our doctor ‘Specially for You’. And here’s why: when giving out to us chocolate or vitamins he would call each of us aside in turn, look around and say secretively: “Specially for you!” Wags among the pilots, catching sight of the Doctor, without pre-arrangement would pull chocolate out of their map-cases and yell all together: “Specially for you!” The doctor would take no offence and would do exactly the same at the next distribution of chocolates or vitamins. Kozlovskiy wouldn’t refuse medical help to anyone where we were based. I remember in Timashevka near Krasnodar I ran up to him with a request to help my billet-hostess and her baby when it was born: and snatching up everything necessary straightaway he rushed to save the mother and her baby. And this kind of thing happened many a time.

Our doctor once sent his wife a parcel along with a sergeant-major going via Moscow to Kuibyshev on service business. The sergeant-major found the hospital in which Kozlovskiy’s spouse worked. Worn out by the heat, he unbuttoned the collar of his blouse, took off his field-cap and sat in a chair in the hospital ward. Then the woman he was waiting for turned up. The sergeant-major stood up, staggered up to the woman and said, “Hello! I bring you your husband’s greetings from the front, and a present.”

“Why are you out of uniform? What sort of way is this to talk to someone senior in rank?” he heard her squeaky voice turning to a screech. The sergeant-major was taken aback. He sharply turned around, put the parcel on a table, put on his field-cap and silently left the building. When he came back to the regiment he wouldn’t upset the doctor, he just passed on greetings from his wife and added: “I handed the parcel over personally, don’t you worry!” The sergeant-major was maligned and mocked in the regiment for quite some time after that but it had nothing to do with our doctor. Him we respected…

There was always a long line in the plant canteen. When your turn came you would give them you ear-flapped hat and get an aluminium spoon. Our lunch would consist of three meals: ‘hasty’ soup, ‘shrapnel’ porridge and ‘blancmange à la raspberry’. The guys would joke: “You can survive on it, but will not chase the girls”.

Day in, day out we flew and pounded the ground — theoretically. We read whatever we could find about aerial and land battles, studied tactics: ours and the enemy’s. We had already been issued with flight maps. We would match them up and stick them together. Whole bedsheets were the result: we had a longish flight route to the front…

At Doctor Kozlovskiy’s insistent request I was shifted from the ninety-person communal house-dugout with three-tier bunks, into a Finnish hut. A room had been vacated there and the commanders offered it to me — after all, I was the only woman. But right in this cosy hut was where I almost perished. Once I came from the aerodrome chilled and saw that the stove had been thoroughly heated and the coals hadn’t gone out yet — they were playing beautifully with now blue, now red, now golden sparks. I feasted my eyes on them, warmed up, then swallowed some pill prescribed by our Doctor as a sedative, lay down on the bed, still dressed, and fell asleep. And here I was, asleep and I saw Victor, as if in reality, in a white shirt and tie. He has an embroidered Central Asian cap on his head. Then in a kind of mist I see myself in a pleated black skirt and a blue football jersey with white collar and laces. I have on a white beret, white plimsolls with blue edging, and white socks. The beret sits literally on the crown of my head and on my right ear — that was stylishness among us. All this magnificence had been acquired by me in the Torgsin104 for an antique gold coin presented to me by my mum. And now, in dream as in waking, I saw in that Torgsin splendour not only myself but Victor too, with a tie he had never worn before. We were in the Sokolniki105 among daisies on some vast meadow. Victor picked me one daisy and said: “Here, tell your fortune: who do you like more — me or ‘Prince’ Tougoushy?”

I felt easy and cheerful in the dream but suddenly I heard someone knocking on the door. I wanted to get up but couldn’t. But they rapped on the door louder and louder repeating my name. I somehow got up and walked, holding onto the wall. I fell over, sat up, fell over again. I decided to crawl — nothing was working. At last I reached the door and turning the key slid to the floor… It turned out I had been poisoned by charcoal fumes: the stoker had closed the stove damper too early. Fortunately our pilots were walking past my hut late in the evening. Noticing the light in the window they decided to drop in and began to knock on the door, but no one opened it. Then the guys understood — something had gone wrong… The guys carried me out to walk it off in the fresh air and walked me around outside all night long. By now crying, I begged them to let me go and have a rest, but the pilots would have none of it: they had their own ‘method of healing’ — the aviation one. In the morning I turned up for studies run personally by the regiment commander. He looked at me for a long time and then said briefly: “To the medical unit, immediately!”

In the medical unit Doctor Kozlovskiy again began to wail over me: “My sweet girl, what’s this bad luck pouring over you as if from a horn of plenty? Where did you manage to hurt your forehead so?”

“I fell on the door key…” I told the doctor about my dream and added: “I wish I hadn’t woken up…”

Kozlovskiy flung up his arms at me and began telling me off: “We’ll all be there but not everyone manages to live his life with dignity. Only infirm, weak-willed people with fragile psyches die of their own free will… Keep that in mind, girl!”

On the second day after the incident I came to classes as if nothing had happened, covering my grazes with powder. Those days everyone’s mood was excellent — at long last, after heavy defeats we were on the advance. We received brand-new silvery-painted planes each with a gunner’s cockpit in which a large-calibre machine-gun half-ring mount was installed. This innovation cheered us up. From now on the Sturmovik would be securely protected from the rear against the enemy’s fighters.

We were in a hurry to fly off to the front as soon as possible but the weather was holding up. It was March but the winter had gone mad and didn’t want to give way to spring. But then a light frost came, the sky became clearer and the sun appeared. We took off and headed towards Saratov.

Nothing boded trouble, rather the reverse, everything was festively cheerful — the clear blue sky, comrades in arms flying wingtip to wingtip… Saratov came in sight — we were supposed to land at the Razboishina aerodrome. Due to the long flying distance we were running out of fuel and it would be dangerous to do a second circuit. Straight after landing one had to taxi out quickly to vacate the airstrip. But someone suddenly hesitated and the pilot next in line went for another circuit. The engine stalled, the plane hung in the air and crashed to the ground at an angle… Junior Lieutenant Pivovarov lost his life. We all were shaken by our comrade’s death and landed our planes at random. I’d seen many deaths at war but here, deep behind the frontline, when the war had been forgotten, if only for a short time, it was hard to see a comrade’s death…

Only this morning we had sat with him in the canteen having breakfast and he, smoothing the fair hair hanging over his high forehead and casting a dark-blue eye towards me, said, addressing the pilot Sokolov: “Volodya, do you know who Egorova will be giving the hundred grams of vodka she gets for a combat sortie?”

“I will be putting my cup at the aerodrome by the landing T so that you and the other Bacchus worshippers will come home drawn by the smell, instead of going astray and landing wherever you feel like”, I had rudely replied then.

“What was I talking to him so rudely for?” I cursed myself now. “What for?” Some kind of alter ego sits inside me. This alter ego doesn’t listen to me. The first ego often keeps silent but the other one often asks for trouble. Once upon a time my brother told me that I had a ‘partisan personality’. He may have been right: although I try to make myself quiet I don’t always manage it. I’d snapped today again and now I was scourging myself…

The second part of our route was Saratov-Borisoglebsk. It was shorter than the first one and we flew it quickly. But what was that? My plane’s left undercarriage didn’t want to come down! The whole regiment had landed but I was still circling over the aerodrome trying to drop the jammed landing gear at different flight settings but couldn’t do it. I cast glances at the fuel gauge: I would run out of fuel soon. For the last time I tried to unfold the undercarriage by energetic aerobatics but all in vain. They were already ordering me from the ground to go for a belly-landing. But I felt sorry for the brand-new plane and took a decision to land on the right wheel only.

Closing in for landing, right before touchdown I carefully tilt the machine towards the unfolded undercarriage. The plane softly touches the ground and runs down the airstrip listing to the right. I do my best to hold the Sturmovik in this position for as long as possible. But the speed drops, the plane doesn’t obey the controls anymore, the list gradually disappears and now, having drawn a half-circle on the ground with the left wing and propeller my Il stops — there’s no more fuel…

People mobbed the plane but I was still sitting in the cockpit with its closed canopy, in a kind of stupor. Sweat poured down my face, my back and hands were wet… Captain Karev jumped up on a wing. “Climb out, why are you still sitting? I wanted to welcome you with flowers but there aren’t even any florist shops in Borisoglebsk. You may count on a bouquet from me!”

I got down on the ground and the first man I saw was the teacher of aerodynamics from the Kherson aviation school. It appeared that my alma mater had been evacuated to Borisoglebsk and merged with the local fighter pilot school where Victor Koutov, Louka Mouravistkiy and other Metrostroy guys had studied before the war… That same day the mechanics replaced the prop, fixed up and painted the wing and my Il-2 took its place in line with all the regiment’s planes, looking no different from the others.

In the morning we were on our way to the front. We topped up the fuel tanks in Tikhoretskaya and headed towards the end point of our route, Timashevskaya, for service in the 230th Ground Attack Aviation Division of the 4th Aerial Army. The stanitsa106 of Timashevskaya was called in Kuban ‘that one’: it was right there, where a woman lived seeing off nine of her sons to the front: Alexander, Nikolay, Vasiliy, Filipp, Fedor, Ivan, Ilya, Pavel and the youngest, Sasha who was born in 1923 and would become a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1943, posthumously. None of her sons came back home…

Our regimental staff had already arrived at the spot and quickly prepared us lodgings in a school. All the rest of us were looked after by the BAO (Aerodrome Services Battalion). Me they billeted in a hut not far away from the school where the flyers lived, hosted by a lovely young woman whose husband was at the front. Doctor Kozlovskiy as usual did his best to organise a Russian bath for us. But this time it was not in some hovel. A large panel truck arrived, parked near the river, pumped up some water, heated it up, and those who wished went there to steam, strictly observing a schedule set up by the regimental Chief-of-Staff and the Doctor.