and again but kept pulling, still pulling, holding on! Clenching my teeth, I held on too and keep steering my unruly machine. Losing altitude I flew at the lowest speed possible. The earth was coming closer and closer but I still needed to cross the Kerch Straits!
Suddenly I saw some objects fly up from the trenches. Hand grenades? No, not that — it was helmets, thrown up by our soldiers who were rapturously greeting my red-starred plane. They were happy for me, for the infantry’s beloved
When I was above the Straits our fighter planes came in time to drive my pursuers away. At last I saw my aerodrome and landed the machine on the run without closing in by the rules. I didn’t care about the rules now: I just wanted to land my plane that was barely staying in the air!
…Silence. How wonderful silence on the ground can be! But what was that? My hands were bloody for some reason, and my blouse was bloody as well… It appears that I hadn’t noticed being wounded by the shell splinter during the battle… And what about Makosov? He was alive, wounded but alive! My heart soared…
Airmen ran across the aerodrome field to my plane, an ambulance car with a red cross rolled at full speed, a tractor followed it to tow the crippled plane away from the airstrip as soon as possible. Swallowing tears I held onto its wing and whispered: “Thank you, my friend
They put Makosov on a stretcher. He tried to get up and repeated over and over:
“Comrade Lieutenant! Don’t send me to hospital — let our doctor treat me. I’ll recover soon and fly again. Don’t get yourself a new gunner!”
“Alright, alright, Makosov”, I calmed the gunner. “I’ll ask them to treat you in our [Aerodrome Services] Battalion medical unit. Try to get well quickly. I’ll wait for you!”
The next day I went to see my gunner and suddenly heard someone sobbing. I came closer and saw the gunsmith Dousya Nazarkina sitting on a shell crate and crying bitterly, her face buried in her knees. “Someone’s insulted her!” I thought, but then immediately rejected my assumption. Dousya was loved very much by everyone in the regiment. The frolicsome, cheerful and very hard-working armourer had become highly-regarded by everyone. It was sheer pleasure to look at her when she was hanging bombs and rockets, loading cannons and machine-guns. Dousya would flash around a
And now the ‘weightlifter’ was in tears… I shook Dousya by the shoulder but she did not respond. Then I sat next to her on the crate, took Dousya’s head in both hands, lifted it a bit and lay it on my knees. The field cap Dousya was squeezing in her hand was wet and crumpled. I silently stroked the armourer’s head. About ten minutes elapsed, and then she, not wiping away her tears, began to tell me about her love for Serezha Bondarev. Being a plane mechanic, he had flown today with the pilot Khmara as an aerial gunner. They hadn’t come back from the mission…
“I don’t want to live without him! Just yesterday we told each other about our love, kissed for the first time, and decided to get married when the war is over. And now he’s no more. Serezha’s killed!”
She fell on the ground moaning, covered her face with her hands and sobbed noiselessly. I ran to the headquarters dugout, brought her water and liquid ammonia from the medicine kit. Dousya began to calm down little-by-little, and then suddenly shouted: “Comrade Lieutenant! Anna Alexandrovna! I request, I beg you, take me on as your aerial gunner. I know all the aspect angles and estimations, I know the enemy planes’ silhouettes, I’m a good shot. Take me on! I want to avenge Serezha!”
“But I have a gunner — Makosov”, I said, perplexed by Dousya’s unexpected request.
“But he’s wounded. Will he be able to shoot after such a wound? His right hand’s broken.”
I began to talk Nazarkina out of it, told her how scary it was to fly in a
“We pilots are protected by armour”, I tried to convince her, “but the gunner sits in front of a Fascist fighter- plane in an open cockpit. And your Serezha may still be alive. After all, you know many cases of our pilots and gunners “coming back from the dead.”
But Dosya seemed not to want to hear me: “Take me on! Support my application before the regiment command, I’ll write the application now.”
I failed to dissuade Nazarkina. And in about two weeks the head of the Corps Political Department Colonel Toupanov arrived, and the issue was decided: Dousya Nazarkina was appointed as aerial gunner in my crew. Thus the only all-female crew in ground-attack aviation was formed. Later I was to find out about another female crew for the
Back then I was sorry to part with my seasoned gunner, and he didn’t want to go to another pilot. But an order is an order, and I obeyed it. I was to discover Makosov’s fate only after the war. During the reunion of the veterans of the 230th Kuban Ground-Attack Aviation Division, Twice Hero of the Soviet Union Air Force Major- General G. F. Sivkov, who had fought in the 210th Aviation Regiment of our division approached me and said: “You had a great gunner in Kuban. He was assigned to our regiment after Nazarkina was appointed to join you.”
“Makosov?” — I exclaimed gladly.
“Yes, Makosov. After the war your former aerial gunner quit the forces, got married and raised five sons with his spouse. But then what misfortune befell their grey heads. One of their boys was killed in action during the frontier conflict at the Ussury river in 1969139…”
And back then, in 1943, I began to fly with Dousya Nazarkina and was greatly surprised — from the very first combat sortie she handled her gunner’s duties not the least bit worse than Makosov. I heard her voice in the intercom time and again. Dousya became my second pair of eyes. Occasionally through the reinforced glass separating our cockpits in which we sat back to back, I saw her operating her machine-gun. Its barrel would now lift up, now dip at an angle, spitting fire. I was lucky with gunners!
30. Off the front
The fighting near Taman had ceased: now we were attached to the 1st Byelorussian Front. The relocation of the regiment to Karlovka near Poltava went without incident. As usual, the HQ and the technical personnel met us with a prepared airfield, parking lots, and billets for the airmen.
Somewhere in those parts Peter the Great defeated the Swedes.140 And just recently our troops had smashed a large Hitlerite force here. For our training, the HQ found us a natural bombing range near the ancient Russian redoubts, where the rubble of abandoned enemy materiel remained. They built an observation tower there, marked the trenches with wooden dummy ‘soldiers’, installed wooden ‘cannons’. On this dummy enemy defence line there were also tanks marked with crosses, and vehicles.
Over the period of our action over Taman, our regiment had been reinforced by planes and flying personnel three times. And now a new reinforcement arrived — many new pilots, whom we would have to get into shape: to teach them how to bomb, to shoot, to seek out targets — in other words, all we’d been taught once upon a time by the veterans of the ground-attack regiment at the Ogni aerodrome. Experienced, though not battle-hardened pilots had arrived in our 3rd Squadron. All of them had come from the Far East: Stepanov, Sherstobitov, Khomyakov, Ladygin, Ivnitskiy, Khoukhlin, Moustafaev, Kirillov, Evteev, Ivanov, Tsvetkov, Konyakhin… We — the ‘oldies’ — did not enjoy working with the youngsters. Leaving the frontline we had hoped to have a short rest in the rear. Attacks on the bombing range dummies with cement bombs did not make the seasoned front-liners enthusiastic, and for the younger guys these exercises were only a continuation of their boring school lessons. They were striving to go to the front too. Only once did I come across a pilot who didn’t want to fly. I asked him: “Tell me honestly, what’s your problem?” And he said: “I’m afraid”. That pilot was released from the regiment… But in general the mood was: “Let’s go to the front!” We would fly with the young pilots in two-seaters two or three times — they were mostly well-trained, but it was required that they study the plane in detail! Moreover, many of them were used to open cockpits, but the Il’s cockpit was closed, and at first one felt sort of boxed in. We also got clumsy ones and we had to ‘polish’ them up. You would fly with them time and again, they would do their best but there would still be big
