Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for the "Night Witches" discussed below.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
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Soviet Women Combat Pilots Fought Nazi Germany
The Story of the Night Witches
The three all-women air combat regiments of the Soviet Union were an integral part of the mass mobilization of the entire population against the Nazi invasion of their country in World War II. Our purpose in recalling the exemplary courage and personal sacrifices of these women is not to show that women are equal to men in even that most terrible of human struggles, war. We honor these women for their brave defense of the USSR, homeland of the first workers revolution in history.
As the capitalist powers plunged the world into a nightmare of slaughter to determine whose imperialism would prevail, the Soviet Union fought to defend the gains of the October Revolution and its socialized property forms. In this vital and desperate battle, women once again came forward, as they had in the Russian Revolution of February 1917, when a strike of women workers sparked the insurrection that overthrew the tsar. During the bitter civil war that followed the Bolsheviks' October Revolution, the Red Army included riflewomen and women armored train commanders and gunners (though most women served as medical personnel). Some women were also partisan fighters and leaders, including the colorful Bolshevik Larissa Reissner. It is these fighters against capitalism that we hail. When bourgeois feminists like NOW took up the plight of U.S. military career women, we took our stand "with the Red Army soldier who has marched to liberate the masses of Afghanistan, rather than with the U.S. female officer who may one day direct bombing raids over Soviet Central Asia" ("No to the Draft!" W&R No. 20, Spring 1980).
The story of the Soviet airwomen, the first women in history to fly planes in combat, is told in Bruce Myles' Night Witches (paperback published by Panther Books, 1983; unless otherwise noted, quotes are from his book). Myles, a Scottish journalist, interviewed veterans of the women's units: the 586th Fighter Regiment, the 587th Bomber Regiment, and the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, known as the "Night Witches" by Nazi troops who feared their nightly sorties.
These women were not unique. Almost one million Soviet women served at the front in all capacities— including as partisans—constituting about 8 percent of total Soviet military personnel at the end of 1943.1 n daring missions behind German lines, women pilots helped supply partisans fighting in Russia's forests— they even carried passengers, who slid themselves out of plywood tubes rigged under the wings into deep snowdrifts as the planes flew only feet above the ground! Women pilots also helped relieve the 900-day German siege of Leningrad, flying food to the starving city.
Stalinism and Women's Struggle to Volunteer
When Hitler launched his "Operation Barbarossa" invasion of the Soviet Union in the early morning hours of 22 June 1941, the USSR was criminally unprepared. Stalin had beheaded the army in his bloody purges, while refusing to believe the Nazis would attack, despite desperate warnings. Sixty percent of the Russian combat air force was destroyed on the ground; by November, the Germans were only 20 miles from Moscow, Leningrad was besieged, and three million Soviets had been taken prisoner, as Hitler sought another "lightning victory." But the Nazis fatally underestimated the will and capacity of the peoples of the USSR to defend the gains of their revolution, and got bogged down in the Russian winter. As the Soviets scrambled to recreate huge military factories back of the Urals out of German reach, hundreds of thousands of volunteers, many in the Komsomol youth groups, overwhelmed the military recruiting centers—including teenage girls with flying experience gained at paramilitary flying clubs across the USSR.
The first response of harassed officials to the young fliers was summed up by the initial rejection of one young woman who later became a Hero of the Soviet Union. She was told: "Things may be bad but we're not so desperate that we're going to put little girls like you up in the skies. Go home and help your mother." The October Revolution which overthrew capitalism opened up tremendous liberating potential for women, promising them freedom at last from subjugation to the family hearth. The Bolsheviks abolished all the old legal impediments to women's equality and sought to provide alternatives to the family, through socialization of housework and childcare. However, the bloody civil war which decimated the proletariat and the failure of revolutionary uprisings internationally, especially in Germany, led to Stalin's political counterrevolution. Without the necessary international economic basis for socialism, the real liberation of women is impossible in an isolated workers state. But this defeat was glorified ideologically by the Stalin regime as part of its defeatist and socially retrograde policy of "socialism in one country," while the Bolsheviks' commitment to replacing the oppressive nuclear family was reversed.
The deeply contradictory nature of the USSR—where the Stalinist regime had politically expropriated the working class, yet was forced to defend the planned economy—made it possible, when the very survival of the workers state was posed, for the official policy of rejecting women as fighters to be reversed. In contrast, in the imperialist West, to the extent women were officially mobilized it was in noncombat roles. In Britain, for example, some 450,000 women were in uniform, but limited to tasks like road building, ferrying planes, or spotting on antiaircraft sites, where they were forbidden to actually fire the guns.
A call went out over Radio Moscow in the fall of 1941 from the country's most famous woman aviator, Marina Raskova, for volunteers for all-women air regiments. Three 400-strong air regiments were formed, each comprising three squadrons of ten aircraft. Mechanics and armament fitters were all female as well. Before leaving for their training base at Engels on the River Volga in October 1941, the women had their first struggle trying to get into the military clothing—to hysterical laughter they stuffed sheets of Pravda and Izvestia into their boot toes, and trimmed trailing pants legs and coattails. More serious adjustments were needed as they learned to handle their aircraft. The 587th Women's Bomber Regiment flew the Petylakov twin-engined PE-2 light bomber, which had a crew of three. One pilot, Katerina Fedotova, recalled:
"Fully loaded with fuel and bombs, the PE-2 needed someone with a lot of strength to pull back on the stick at the appropriate moment to get the nose off the ground. Most of us had to get our navigator to stand beside us on take-off to help yank the stick back on a given command.... And some of the girls with particularly short legs had to have special blocks put on the rubber pedals so that they could reach them with their feet."
The pilots of the 586th Fighter Regiment learned to fly the Yak-1, a single-seat machine, while the "Night Witches" bomber regiment flew Nikolai Polikarpov's PO-2. The PO-2 was a veteran biplane trainer pressed into service as a bomber. Beneath its fabric-and-wood wings were loaded racks of small bombs (maximum load only 800 pounds), released by a wire inside the cockpit. It was incredibly slow—top speed only 100 miles per hour!
By May 1942 the women were ready for their first combat assignments. The 588th bomber regiment had its first test from male Soviet pilots: sent to escort the women to their first airbase, the men dived down at the inexperienced formation, many of whom panicked and broke away. But the women quickly recovered from this embarrassment, and soon proved their worth to their male comrades.
Stalingrad, 1942-43: "Achtung, Litvak!"
In the summer of 1942, Hitler launched a new offensive, against the Caucasus oil fields and against Stalingrad, splitting his forces on the southern front. By winter, Hitler's obsession with taking Stalingrad led the German 6th Army under General Paulus into a trap, dooming the German army to eventual encirclement inside Stalingrad as Soviet reinforcements arrived on the scene late in the year. Among them were the women's day bomber regiment, which had already faced combat in Kirshatz, the "Night Witches" and several of the best women fighter pilots, who joined the men of the 73rd Fighter Regiment in furious air battles over the city.
One of these was Lily Litvak, the daughter of a railway worker, who as a teenager had joined a flying club. Lily Litvak joined up with pilot Alexei Salomaten in the Soviet fighters' standard two-plane formation. By Christmas she had personally shot down six German aircraft over Stalingrad—three fighters and three transport aircraft running the gauntlet of the Russian air defenses in a vain attempt to supply the trapped German 6th Army from the air.
Lily became famous as the "White Rose of Stalingrad," as she had the fuselage of her Yak painted with white roses, one for each plane she shot down. Soviet monitors of air radio could hear German pilots warning each other, "Achtung, Litvak!" Her beloved partner Salomaten had crashed and died, but Lily kept on as a "free fighter"—her tenth "kill" brought down a German ace. As K.J. Cottam recounts in "Soviet Airwomen in Combat in World War II" (MA/AH Publishing, Kansas State University, 1983), the arrogant pilot could not believe what had happened:
"The middle-aged German ace from the Richthofen's 4th Air Fleet whom Lilya [Litvak] forced to bail out from his burning plane was taken to her regimental HQ. Here he sat, a haughty officer decorated with a number of iron crosses and medals, feigning indifference. He had yet to collect himself, to come to terms with what had happened; he was shot down so quickly, so unexpectedly, and in such an audacious manner! The German saw a small girl, looking about 16, enter the dugout. She wore a headset with goggles and a flying suit. His curiosity soon changed to disbelief and then indignation. 'What a humiliation!' exploded the Nazi pilot. 'This is nonsense and I demand a proof.’ Then the Major requested that the girl tell the Germans some-of the details of their dogfight, known only to the antagonists. Soon the prisoner was completely convinced; he glanced at her with new respect and reportedly silently hung his head."
While "free hunters" like the glamorous Lily Litvak received the most publicity in the Soviet press, the women ground crews were vital—the pilots' lives depended on them. Ina Pasportnikova, a mechanic at Stalingrad, recalled the excruciating 40° below winter temperatures, which combined with handling burning-hot metal parts left mechanics' hands permanently scarred as they raced to repair aircraft at top speed during half-hour breaks between sorties: "Sometimes the only way to get, say, a little nut into part of the engine with numbed fingers was to spit on the finger and, as it froze, attach the nut to the finger. Then you'd fumble around the screw, using your finger like a screwdriver to attach it."
The "Night Witches" in the Caucasus and Kerch Peninsula
The 588th women's night bomber regiment fought over the Soviet southern front. In the summer of 1942 as the Nazis pushed toward the oil-rich Caucasus, the women shifted bases quickly, seeking to slow the enemy advance, sleeping anywhere from in haystacks to under the wings of their planes. The Germans quickly learned to recognize the approach of the women night bombers: the little PO-2s made a distinctive "pop-popping" sound as they approached (later the women learned to turn off their engines and glide over the target). The PO-2s' slow speed and low flying altitude enabled the crews to drop bombs with an accuracy unmatched by other Soviet aircraft. The Germans called the planes "night devil”, "sewing machine" or "Russian plywood/' and the pilots "night witches." The Russians themselves referred to the little trainers as "coffee grinders/' "kitchen-gardeners" or "flying bookcases." Incredibly, until the summer of 1944, the women bombers flew without parachutes in order to take on an extra 42 pounds of bombs!
The German advance in the Caucasus was finally halted; on 31 January 1943 the Nazis surrendered at Stalingrad. By then the "Night Witches" had flown in combat for over eight months. At their headquarters in the North Caucasus, they were awarded the title of "46th Guards Regiment," the first women's unit to receive this high honor, placing them among the elite of the Red Army's fighting units. They flew more than 24,000 sorties during the war; of the 30 "Hero of the Soviet Union" awards won by airwomen, the "Night Witches" received 23.
They remained in the Kuban area for another eight months, where they took heavy casualties. Navigator Ira Kasherina was awarded the order of the Red Flag for her heroic efforts in bringing her plane home, the pilot dead, after a bombing run on enemy troops at Novorossisk on 22 April 1943. Ducie Nosal, the pilot who was killed, had lost her first-born son at the war's beginning in the ruins of a maternity hospital. She had flown over 354combat missions, and was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, the first Soviet airwoman to receive this honor. On 9 April 1944, the regiment lost one of its favorites, Zhenya Rudneva, chief navigator and a former astronomy student, over Bulgansk in the Crimea. She has an enduring memorial in the skies; the Soviets named an asteroid after her some years later. Lily Litvak, too, fell in battle in 1943 over the Donbass region as eight German fighters zeroed in on her Yak fighter with its white roses.
By October 1943 the Germans had been pushed out of the Caucasus, and the "Night Witches" went on to drop supplies to army and navy troops in one of the Soviets' largest amphibious operations that fall, the seizing of a beachhead on the Kerch Peninsula in order to liberate the Crimea. The landing party at El'tigen near Novorossisk was surrounded by enemy troops on three sides, with the sea at their back, their radio smashed, their supplies running out. In these difficult night flights, the pilots glided in from the sea with their engines cut off, guided by flashlights or bonfires in the rain and wind. Men from the landing party later met the "Night Witches," embracing them enthusiastically and telling them over and over that they had saved them.
The Battle of Kursk
Meanwhile, in central Russia, the key battle of Kursk raged in July 1943. Hitler's "Operation Citadel" sought to inflict a decisive defeat on the USSR by smashing the "Kursk salient"—a bulge driven by the Russians into the German lines, centering on the town of Kursk. On July 5 nearly a million German troops, 2,000 tanks and over 1,800 aircraft attacked, driving to surround Kursk, in the biggest tank battle of the war. The women of the 586th Fighter Regiment were drawn heavily into the mass battles in the air, as over 4,000 aircraft operated in an area only 12 by 30 miles—battles involving up to 150 aircraft at a time were common. Galia Boordina recalled:
"German and Soviet fighters were whirling and diving everywhere— The risks of collision were enormous—even with your own side. It was a complete melee, and most of the aircraft were flying at very high speed. I broke out of the fight briefly to gain height and look for a target. I dived down and pulled up underneath a Messerschmitt 109 and raked it with machine-gun and cannon fire. It fell away immediately, burning. I had shot down two other Germans before that—a bomber and a transport—but that was my first fighter."
Two women of the 586th took on an entire attack group of Germans during the buildup to Kursk. The women were alone in the sky in their two Yak fighters when they spotted a cluster of black dots, materializing in seconds into a group of 42 Junkers 88 and Dornier bombers. Despite the fantastic odds, they dived on the leading formation from out of the sun, seeking to break up the Germans before they reached their target. Two bombers fell away in flames on the first pass; the Yaks pulled up and got one more bomber each on their second pass, while the enemy jettisoned their bombs and broke formation.
When the smoke of the massive tank battle finally cleared, the two German spearheads were still forced 100 miles apart. Hitler had lost his huge gamble, and from that point the offensive passed to the Red Army. Essentially alone, the Soviet Union had broken the back of the mammoth Nazi military machine. Then began the long and hard-fought Soviet advance, retaking its own territory and then liberating the Eastern European nations from fascist occupation. In May 1945 the Red Army triumphantly entered Berlin. Many of the troops wrote their names on Hitler's bombed-out buildings, including a Soviet front-line nurse and fighter, who told an interviewer many years later: "I wrote that I, Sophia Kuntsevitch, Russian daughter of a welder, came here and defeated fascism" (Shelley Saywell, Women in War, Penguin Books, 1986).
The USSR had defeated Hitler—at a terrible cost. Twenty million people—one-tenth of the population—were dead. As the men and women of the Red Army advanced westward, they uncovered the horror of the Nazi Holocaust: smoldering ruins of villages, whole towns massacred, then finally the fascist death camps where millions had perished in the barbaric Nazi "technology" of mass murder.
The Fight for Women's Liberation Today
The women of the Soviet Union, arms in hand, were vital to the defeat of fascism. They proved in blood that they were equal to men in even that supposedly most "masculine" preserve, air combat. Yet even as women like Lily Litvak were shooting down German aces, the Stalinist regime continued its reactionary and shameful glorification of "women's true role" as domestic slave to the family. The Stalinist bureaucracy even introduced "Motherhood Medals": "Motherhood Glory, First, Second and Third Class" (nine, eight or seven children) and "Heroine Mother" for ten children. As Leon Trotsky noted in 1936 in The Revolution Betrayed, "The most compelling motive of the present cult of the family is undoubtedly the need of the bureaucracy for a stable hierarchy of relations."
In 1944, as women fought alongside men at the front, coeducation was abolished in the USSR. A director of the Moscow Municipal Department of National Education wrote, "It is essential to introduce in girls' schools such additional subjects as pedagogics, needlework, courses in domestic science, personal hygiene and the care of children," while another Stalinist ideologue added, "what we must have now is a system by which the school develops boys who will be good fathers and manly fighters for the socialist homeland, and girls who will be intelligent mothers" (quoted in Tony Cliff, Class Struggle and Women's Liberation, Bookmarks, England, 1984). In 1944 a law was passed with heavy financial sanctions against divorce, including the right of the court to reject divorce petitions. Women's right to abortion, which the Bolsheviks had granted in 1920, had been abolished in 1936 (it was reinstated in 1955). At the end of the war, women were taken out of combat positions.
Today, the Bolsheviks' great liberating goals for women remain unfulfilled. Gorbachev, like the other Stalinist bureaucrats before him, believes he can "appease" imperialism's unrelenting hostility to the Soviet Union, which still retains its socialized property forms. So now he's pulled the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, abandoning women and leftists there to a threatened bloodbath by feudal fanatics. While the women of the Soviet Union today are a world—and a social revolution—away from the barbaric enslavement Afghan women have suffered under the veil, they still must bear the burden of working and simultaneously being saddled with childcare, housework and endless standing in shopping lines, still in the grip of the bureaucracy's policies.
Working-class women have proven in every revolutionary struggle that they are among the best fighters for the liberation of their class. Certainly the women of Afghanistan, some of whom received military training, have shown they would be a real component of an army under revolutionary leadership. Our fight for women's liberation means a struggle for socialist revolution against capitalism. In the USSR and other bureaucratically deformed workers states we fight for political revolution to oust the conservative bureaucracies and to restore the revolutionary internationalist goals of Lenin and Trotsky. Among the best cadres in this struggle will be new generations of women, drawing inspiration from the heroic work of their predecessors—including the "Night Witches" of World War II.
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