Over Fields of Fire

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…

21. Dropping bombs through a ‘bast-shoe’

Now the training flights began: each time more and more complex and crucial — flying in the zone, bombing, shooting. We had our own firing range in the mountains in a desolate area. There were dummy tanks, guns, railway cars, planes with white-cross markings — they served us as targets for drill attacks. How many times, having gained altitude, I threw the Sturmovik

into a steep dive, pressed all the triggers and fiercely attacked the targets! Then our group set about flying in a pair, a flight, a squadron. As I said before, Valentin Vakhramov and I had been assigned to the 3rd Squadron. Its commander, Lieutenant Andrianov, having listened to us report for duty, stood silent for quite a while, puffing on a pipe with a long stem. From the first encounter I remembered him like that: tall, dark-eyed, with weather-beaten face, in a black leather raglan, a red-topped black kubanka102 tilted onto his eyebrows. Andrianov’s raglan was girdled by a wide officer’s belt with a holster on it holding a pistol, and on another, narrow, belt slung across his shoulder, hung a map in a mapcase. And it didn’t just hang — it hung with style, nearly touching the ground. All his looks and bearing said: “I’m not a boy any more, I’m a seasoned comesk even if no older than you in years”.

“So”, at last the comesk delivered without pulling the pipe out of his mouth, “whichever of you masters the Sturmovik faster and better, learns to bomb and shoot accurately and keep in good formation will be taken on by me as wingman for the very first combat sortie…”

To become wingman to an experienced leader — what else could we dream of? A good leader knows how to assemble the planes that took off after him into a group, how to lead it precisely along the established route and close in on a target which is not that easy to locate on ground pitted by bombs and shells. He knows how to cunningly avoid the ack-ack guns and screens of enemy fighters, and to strike as the situation dictates. It was no accident that the Hitlerites tried hard to shoot down the leader first of all — both from the ground and from the air. If they shot him down the formation would scatter and there would be neither accurate bombing nor well-aimed shooting — and in fact the combat mission would not be carried out.

In order to learn the craft of a flight leader one had to have been a wingman and to have survived. A wingman repeated his leader’s movements during the first combat sorties. He had to keep in formation, and he had no time at all to glance at the dashboard, to notice Messers, to see flak shell bursts. He had no time even to orient himself and often he didn’t even know where he was flying to. Most of the Sturmovik pilots who died, died in their first ten sorties.

Valentin Vakhramov was mastering the Sturmovik quickly and easily and we stubbornly competed with him: who of us after all would be the comesk’s wingman? But once… Vakhramov had flown back from the firing range, landed the plane confidently and already on his run-in, accidentally confusing the levers, he retracted the undercarriage… The Il’s undercarriage immediately folded back and the plane began to crawl on its belly… When we ran up Valentine was already climbing out of the cockpit, gloomily looking at the prop blades bent into ‘ram’s horns’. There were tears in his eyes. No one was scolding him then, nobody was reprimanding him, but he was suffering so badly that it was sad to look at him.

By nature Valentin was a reserved, outwardly rather a coarse man. But this put-on roughness originated from