Now it was quiet on the air. The Il’s engine was running smoothly. Here was our aerodrome. The one whose machine was most damaged was the first to close in for landing — this was our rule. Then all the others, including me, landed. Having taxied to the parking bay I turned the engine off and only then felt the deadly fatigue. The technician, the mechanic, the engine specialist, the armoury girl, the flyers who didn’t take part in the sortie, swarmed all over the cockpit like bees.
“Are you wounded, Comrade Lieutenant?” The armourer Dousya Nazarkina shouted.
“You’ve got blood on your face!”
“No”, I said, “My lips are cracked and bleeding.”
The mechanic shows me a huge hole in the left wing: “Lucky that the shell didn’t burst — otherwise you would have been blown to pieces. Look, the elevator trimmer is broken as well.”
And during the flight I hadn’t noticed my Il was damaged!
The regiment is lined up. The battle flag is brought out. We, who carried out the Front Command’s special mission, stand separately as though it were our name day. The 4th Aerial Army Commander General Vershinin expresses his gratitude to us for our excellent work and pins the Orders of the Red Banner on our chests. And in the evening there is another reward: the accursed Blue Line has been broken through by our troops! We are told that several minutes after we released the ‘smoke gas’ a white wall of smoke grew up in front of the enemy lines. It fully served its purpose. Moving towards the enemy the smoke screen covered the knots of resistance and made their infantry blind. Not knowing what was happening in front, the Hitlerites abandoned the frontline in a panic. Our troops broke through the lines and advanced a kilometer and a half to two kilometres straight away.
26. My comrades-in-arms
The life of the regiment went on its normal course. Fierce fighting on the Taman Peninsula continued. We had to fly combat missions several times a day, and most of the time we flew towards targets over the waters of the Black and Azov Seas.
I’d feared water since childhood and had always been a bad swimmer. And it seemed to me sometimes when flying over the sea that the engine was playing up. In case of emergency we had been issued with lifebelts but the airmen didn’t believe they would save us if we ditched on water. But I, like a drowning man clutching at a straw, would put the belt on without fail, to the jokes and laughter of my comrades, meticulously adjusting it to my figure. Of course by modern standards our lifebelts were far from perfect. Judge for yourself: when a shot-down plane falls into the sea, a pilot has to manage to open the cockpit, to bail out, then open the parachute and the valve on the life belt and wait until it filled up with gas produced by the contact of some chemical substance in it with water. And if the belt didn’t fill with gas, what then? That was why the airmen didn’t believe in the lifebelts. But when put on, it had a positive psychological effect on me, and therefore I paid no attention to the guys’ good-natured joking.
The regimental favourite Borya Strakhov didn’t come back after a sortie onto the Choushka Spit. A day later some seamen brought his body to our place and said it had been washed ashore near Anapa. We buried him with a Division lined-up, with all military honours in the Stanitsa of Dzhigitskaya. Airmen were rarely buried during the war because they usually died where the action was. I stood next to the coffin of Boris, wept bitterly and could not believe he was dead. It seemed he would get up any minute, look around with his grey-green eyes, twist his non-existent moustache and ask: “What are they taking girls to war for?” and would hand me a field flower. He used to do that often.
During his last combat sortie Boris led a sixer of Il-2s on a ground attack and bombing mission against a ferry carrying a troop train near the Choushka Spit. The Sturmoviks flew below the lower edge of clouds at a height of 700 metres. On approach to the target the pilots were surprised: the enemy didn’t open fire on the planes for some reason. Strakhov and his wingmen were aware that the enemy flak was zeroed in on the clouds’ lower edge beforehand and began to conduct wide anti-flak manoeuvres in course and altitude plane. The flak guns remained silent. The pilots wanted to see them sooner than later, to see the first shell bursts so as to know where to turn the planes but the sky was still clear right up to the clouds. But then Boris Strakhov noticed the ferry near the Choushka Spit — a steam-engine dragging the carriages was creeping off it. Judging by their silhouettes on the open trucks, there were tanks, artillery and vehicles under the tarpaulins, and probably ammunition in the covered carriages. As soon as the leader switched his plane to diving several flak batteries tore the skies with a powerful salvo. The pilots didn’t falter and maintained their rapid approach to the target, firing their cannons and machine-guns and launching rockets. The pilots dropped 100-kilogram bombs with delayed fuses from low altitude. In 22 seconds the fuses did their work and a dazzling blaze covered the whole Choushka Spit.
But when the group was on its way home and already flying over the Black Sea the pilots saw that the leader’s plane was badly damaged and losing height. Apparently Strakhov was wounded, for his radio was silent. And suddenly four Fokkers125 leaped out of the clouds. They pounced upon the leader’s plane like jackals. Strakhov sharply threw his plane up — possibly he wanted to let the Hitlerites pass forward and attack them himself but his plane was no longer controllable. Hitting the waves with a list, he went to the bottom…
So Boris Strakhov was no more — a fair-haired bloke from Gorky — the 1st Squadron Commander. Everyone in our regiment took his death hard but his friend Vanya Soukhoroukov suffered harder than anyone. Ivan lost weight, looked drawn and spent all his spare time at his friend’s grave. Just recently as an incentive Ivan had got permission to have a vacation at home. Before leaving he told me confidentially that he was leaving to marry his childhood girlfriend and asked me to ‘lend’ him my trench-coat, for his own was very old, soldier-issue. My trench-coat had been made up from English cloth in a Voentorg126 workshop. “Since you’re going to get married…” I agreed, “take it!”
Ivan had been absent from the regiment for ten days and when he came back for some reason he did his best to stay out of my sight. “What’s the matter?” I wondered and decided to ‘interrogate’ Boris Strakhov. Borya was somewhat hesitant and then said:
“You know, it’s a very delicate matter. Please don’t tell anyone…”
It appeared Ivan had made it home but his girlfriend had just left for the front. Their wedding didn’t happen. When his vacation was over his town-folk presented him with a three-litre bottle of samogon127, a gift for his comrades, the frontline airmen: “Don’t be precious, everything we own is yours…” Ivan saved the huge bottle all the way back, having wrapped it in my ‘special’ trench-coat. He had to hitch-hike from Krasnodar to the aerodrome, and when he was doing the last leg of his trip the driver shook his passengers so much that all of them flew out of the back of the truck and hit the ground hard. Everyone was alright, and only Ivan suffered: his cherished three-litre bottle was smashed. Of course, the strong home-made drink soaked the trench-coat. Ivan washed it after he came back to get rid of the smell of spirits and hung it out to dry somewhere outside the stanitsa, among the vegetable gardens. “As soon as it gets dry, he’ll iron it and bring it back to you”, Boris finished earnestly, and it suddenly made me laugh: I had imagined Ivan flying out of the back of the truck with arms around the bottle wrapped in my trench-coat. When I finished laughing I suggested: “Not a drama. I’ll have to ask for a new trench-coat from the battalion commander, and I’ll present Ivan with that one — let it remind him of his town-folk’s gift.”
125
Editor’s note — the classic nickname for German Focke Wulf Fw 190 fighters in Russian military slang. Indeed, it has nothing to do with the planes of the ‘Fokker’ design.
126
Translator’s note — a network of special shops organised to supply military servicemen.