Litvyak, Lidiya (1921–1943)

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Litvyak, Lidiya (1921–1943)

Soviet fighter pilot during World War II, first woman to shoot down an enemy aircraft, and top woman ace in history. Name variations: Liliya or Lilya Litvyak; Liliia Litviak. Pronunciation: Lit-VYAHK. Born Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak on August 18, 1921, in Moscow, USSR; died on August 1, 1943, in Dmitreivka, Ukraine, as a result of air combat; daughter of Vladimir Leontovich Litvyak (a railway employee) and Anna Vasilevna Khmeleva Litvyak (a saleswoman); never married; no children.

Became a pilot (1937) and instructor pilot (1939–41); joined Soviet military (1941); was a fighter pilot with 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment (1942); transferred to 437th Fighter Aviation Regiment and achieved first kill (1942); transferred to 9th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment (1942); transferred to 73rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment and achieved all subsequent kills (1943); disappeared in combat (August 1943).

Awards:

Order of the Red Star; Order of the Red Banner; medal "For the Defense of Stalingrad"; Order of the Patriotic War, 1st degree; Hero of the Soviet Union (awarded posthumously in 1990).

Lidiya Litvyak was a rebel and something of a contradiction. She was the first woman in the world to shoot down an enemy aircraft—a fact that has gone completely unheralded—and she went on to become a double fighter ace before her untimely death a few weeks short of her 22nd birthday. Yet Litvyak would have seemed an unlikely choice for the demanding job of flying high-speed fighter aircraft. She was so short that she had to use extra seat cushions to see out of the cockpit; her feet could not reach the rudder pedals without the aid of wooden blocks to extend the pedal platforms. She was always doing the unexpected and the forbidden—and getting away with it.

Litvyak considered it more than coincidence that she was born on August 18—Air Force Day—in 1921. She lived with her parents and her younger brother Yuri in Moscow on Novoslobodskaia Street (Building 14, Apt. 88). A lively, cheerful girl, organizer of all the games, she had a happy childhood, and she and her friends loved to stage impromptu performances of plays and music.

By the time she was 14, Litvyak knew that she wanted to fly. In the Soviet Union of the 1930s, flying instruction was free but only available for those 16 and older. Undeterred, Litvyak snuck into airclub training sessions without her parents' knowledge. Though she did not fool the instructor (her tiny stature made her look even younger than her actual age), she was permitted to remain unofficially after she proved that she had studied as well as the older students. When ground classes were over and flight training began, Litvyak hung around the airfield, assisting mechanics and cleaning airplanes. Eventually, a sympathetic instructor allowed her to begin flying.

It was not unusual for a Soviet girl to learn to fly in the late 1930s; about one out of every three or four student pilots was female. However, relatively few women were able to advance to higher levels of training to become instructor pilots. Fewer still became military pilots; although there were no legal barriers in the Soviet Union against women joining the service, there was strong social prejudice. Many women encountered opposition even in basic flight training.

In 1937, about the time Litvyak realized her dream of becoming a pilot, disaster struck. It was the height of the Stalinist purges, and her father was arrested as an "enemy of the people"; the family never heard from him again. Though specific charges against him are still unknown, the family was notified in 1956 that he had died of heart trouble in prison in 1943; a few months later, he was officially "rehabilitated."

It was difficult for Litvyak to carry on with her new career in flying after her father was arrested. Not only did she have to cope with the worry and stress of the event, she also had to endure the stigma of being the daughter of a "repressed" person. (After the war, her brother Yuri was fired from a succession of jobs whenever it was discovered that his father was an "enemy"; he eventually changed his last name when he married in 1951.)

At age 18, Litvyak set out to make aviation her career. She attended the Kherson Aviation School from January through May 1940, where she received training to be an instructor pilot. She then worked as an instructor pilot at the Kirov airclub in Moscow, where from 1940 to 1941 she trained 45 students to be pilots. After setting a record for 8 hours and 40 minutes of instruction in a single day, she was singled out as

one of the top instructor pilots in Moscow by Samolyot (Airplane) magazine on May 5, 1941.

After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, thousands of Soviet women rushed to volunteer. Most were turned down, although, as the war progressed, the Soviet military opened its ranks. Eventually, 800,000 women served. Litvyak made repeated requests for an assignment to military aviation, but was told she had to continue working as an instructor pilot and would be evacuated to the rear area with her airclub. But in early October 1941, the famous Soviet pilot Marina Raskova (a sort of Russian Amelia Earhart ) was authorized to form three aviation regiments to be staffed entirely by women. Litvyak was selected to join Raskova's training squad, Aviation Group No. 122.

The 122nd was sent to Engels, 500 miles southeast of Moscow, for intensive training. The students worked 12-to-14 hours a day, cramming what was normally three years of military flight training into six months. Inna Pasportnikova , a mechanic, remembers Litvyak from the first morning roll call. Raskova suddenly commanded Litvyak to step forward. As she did, the other girls began to laugh; instead of the usual brown fur collar that was part of the winter uniform, Litvyak was wearing a smart, fluffy white collar. She had cut the goatskin lining from her boots and sewn it on her jacket. "What's that on your shoulders?" Raskova demanded. "A goatskin collar. Why, doesn't it suit me?" Litvyak replied. She was ordered to replace the collar with the standard military issue. Pasportnikova was appalled; how could such a vain, frivolous girl become a combat pilot? Who could worry about their appearance at such a time, when soldiers were dying on the battlefield? She did not dream she would later become a member of Litvyak's crew and a witness to the fierce ability of that "vain, frivolous" combat pilot.

How rarely do we recall the names of the women fighter pilots! There weren't many of them, but their combat actions deserve the very highest appraisal. After all, they disproved the erroneous opinion that the profession of air combat is unacceptable for women. Katya Budanova and Lidiya Litvyak were, for us, dependable comrades-in-arms in the skies of the front.
—Vladimir Lavrinenkov

Litvyak quickly demonstrated her skill as a pilot and was selected for the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment, the first of the three "women's" regiments to become operational. The 586th was assigned to the air defense forces, and rebased near Engels with the task of defending the city of Saratov against enemy attack. The missions of the 586th included performing combat air patrols to defend against enemy reconnaissance aircraft and bombers, and providing fighter escort to protect transport aircraft against enemy fighters. While stationed at Saratov, Litvyak completed 55 combat flights. The flying was fairly tame, however. Saratov was still a long way from the front lines.

On September 10, 1942, Litvyak finally got her wish to see "real" combat when she and seven other pilots from the 586th were transferred to Stalingrad. Soviet aviation regiments had endured heavy casualties in the Stalingrad region, and the eight women were divided between two regiments as replacement pilots. Litvyak, along with Katya Budanova, Raisa Belyaeva , and Mariya Kuznetsova , was sent to the 437th Fighter Aviation Regiment of the 8th Air Army; their female mechanics and armorers went with them. (At the time, Inna Pasportnikova was Belyaeva's mechanic.) The women were received with hostility. "This is combat, not a flying club!," they were told. "There are air battles every day. We're waiting for real pilots, and they sent us a bunch of girls." But the male commanders had to take what they could get.

The women acquitted themselves well. Within three days, Litvyak scored her first two kills, both during a single combat flight. She was flying as wingman in a standard combat formation, with her plane positioned behind and to the side of a male pilot's leading aircraft. Each succeeded in shooting down a Ju-88 bomber. Then she saw that Belyaeva, who had run out of ammunition, was being attacked by an Me-109 fighter. Litvyak attacked the German plane and shot it down; the pilot bailed out safely and was captured by Soviet forces. Eyewitnesses do not recall the German pilot's name, but they remember that he was a colonel who bore three Iron Crosses upon his chest. "He was a famous fascist ace, and considered himself unbeatable," says Pasportnikova. When his captors presented Litvyak to him as the pilot who had shot him down, he thought it was a joke to humiliate him. Then Litvyak recounted the details of their air battle, which no other pilot could have known.

For a pilot to achieve two kills in one flight on her third day of combat was a remarkable achievement. For that pilot also to be the first woman in history to shoot down an enemy deserves acknowledgement and credit, but Litvyak has gone unheralded. One of the women who remained with the 586th, Valeriia Khomiakova , shot down a German bomber ten days later and is often cited as the first woman with a kill, but records in the Soviet military archives make it quite clear that Litvyak was first. Her accomplishment probably went unnoticed in the heat of combat because she was a newly arrived woman in a male regiment which she and the other women soon left. Once Khomiakova was given credit, perhaps it became too troublesome for the Soviets to set the record straight.

Despite their dramatic success, Litvyak and the three other women pilots in her group were for some reason abruptly transferred three weeks later, on October 1, 1942, from the 437th to the 9th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment. The 9th Guards was stationed at the time near the city of Zhitkur, where it was being reequipped with new aircraft. Some of the most famous Soviet fighter aces of the war were members of this renowned regiment. Though not in the hottest part of the fighting during this period, Litvyak and Budanova received excellent training from the seasoned pilots. One of the 9th's fighter pilots (later a Hero of the Soviet Union and a general), Vladimir Lavrinenkov, wrote about the women pilots in his memoirs. Litvyak and Budanova "served on an equal footing with the men," he notes, and he describes several air engagements in which the women acquitted themselves well. Their life was not easy; flying fighters required exceptional strength and endurance.

Budanova and Litvyak made an interesting pair. Both were excellent pilots, but they could hardly have been more different in character or physical appearance. Budanova was tall and mannish-looking with her short haircut. "The small, fair-haired Lidiya seemed like a little girl beside her," Lavrinenkov recalls. Many of the men were smitten with Litvyak, but Lavrinenkov writes that she "showed no preference for anyone" and acted with reserve. Somehow she managed to avoid emotional entanglements without alienating her fellow pilots; for Litvyak, personal relationships were strictly secondary to the job at hand. She was deadly determined to prove herself as a fighter pilot—not only from personal ambition and patriotism, but also in order to redeem her family name. She never stopped believing in her father's innocence, and believed that she could reclaim the family's honor by gaining fame in combat.

But if her father's status as an "enemy of the people" heightened her desire to fight, it was also the source of her deepest dread. More than anything else, Litvyak feared that she would end up missing in action. Any Soviet soldier whose body could not be found, who went "missing without a trace," was automatically suspected of desertion. Pilots often flew deep into enemy territory; they could be taken prisoner, or they might crash with their aircraft, leaving their bodies impossible to identify. Litvyak was determined not to die that way, but to land in friendly territory, even if it was with her dying breath.

On January 8, 1943, Litvyak found her true combat home when she and Budanova were transferred to the 296th Fighter Aviation Regiment. The 296th, part of the 8th Air Army, was a front-line regiment. Regimental commander Nikolai Ivanovich Baranov, who had been in the war since the first day, was known as "Batya" ("Father") to his pilots. It was Baranov who finally gave Litvyak and Budanova the opportunity to prove their skill. There were many well-known fighter pilots in the regiment, such as squadron commander Alexei Solomatin, who had participated in a famous air engagement a few months earlier, when seven Soviet fighters fought 29 enemy aircraft. Solomatin took Litvyak as his wingman, and Budanova was selected to fly with Baranov. In this way, the women were able to benefit from flying with highly experienced leaders.

On February 11, 1943, Litvyak was one of 4 fighters from the 73rd involved in an air battle with 29 enemy aircraft. Flying with Baranov, Solomatin, and a fourth pilot, Litvyak personally shot down a Ju-87 and shared a kill with Baranov against a Focke-Wulf 190 fighter. Later that month, she was selected to join the ranks of the elite, the "free hunters"—fighter pilots who, because of their skill, were sent out in pairs to find and destroy the enemy. She became a flight commander and was promoted from sergeant to junior lieutenant. On March 8, 1943, the 296th was renamed the 73rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment in recognition of its combat performance.

Khomiakova, Valeriia (d. 1942)

Soviet fighter pilot during World War II. Name variations: Valeria Ivanovna Khomyakova. Died in 1942.

Wrongly credited as the first woman fighter pilot to shoot down an enemy bomber, Valeriia Khomiakova's kill occurred on September 24, 1942, ten days after Lidiya Litvyak 's first kill. Since Litvyak had been sent off to fill in at another regiment, nobody appeared to think her accomplishment was worth publicity. Most likely, no one back at Litvyak's assigned regiment even knew about it until later. On the other hand, Khomiakova's commissar was quick to publicize her achievements; she was sent to Moscow to receive an award and was written up in the newspapers. Khomiakova was killed two weeks later, due to the poor judgment of her commander.

Early in her career, Litvyak adopted the showy, and strictly forbidden, habit of buzzing the airfield when she returned from a kill. Approaching the airfield after a successful mission, Litvyak would break from formation and perform high-speed, low-altitude passes and victory rolls. "After her 'circus number' in the air," said Pasportnikova, Litvyak always asked her, "'Did Batya swear terribly?' And if I said, 'terribly!' she would hang her head and walk over to him with her post-mission report." In other words, Litvyak was careful to give the appearance of being appropriately contrite after breaking the rules.

Litvyak was badly wounded in air combat on March 22, 1943, while part of a group of six Yak fighters attacking a dozen Ju-88 bombers. After shooting down one of the bombers, she felt a sharp pain in her leg, and realized she was being attacked, from out of nowhere, by a pair of Messerschmitts. As she evaded the attack, four more enemy fighters joined in, and Litvyak found herself in a singlehanded dogfight against six Me-109 fighters. In an aerial game of "chicken," Litvyak employed a tactic often used by Soviet pilots possessed of especially steely nerves: she pushed the throttle forward and raced directly into a group of enemy fighters. At the last minute, they veered, and she was able to get into good firing position, shooting down a Messerschmitt before the fight ended. In severe pain and losing blood, Litvyak managed to return to her airfield and land her plane. She stopped on the runway, but lost consciousness before she could taxi to a parking spot.

After receiving field treatment, Litvyak was sent to a hospital in Moscow for surgery. Since hospital beds were in short supply, she received permission to recuperate at home, but she was restless and anxious to get back to the front. After a few days, Litvyak talked her way onto a transport and returned to her regiment.

Less than six weeks after her injury, Litvyak was back on the scoreboard. She shot down two aircraft in March; she would make three kills in May, and another four in July—all personal kills. Litvyak shot down Me-109 fighters on May 5th and 7th. Reportedly, she had not entirely regained her strength when she first returned to flying; she was so weak after her May 5th flight that Baranov refused to let her fly again that day. But the month of May brought tragedy as well as victory for Litvyak. On May 6, Nikolai Baranov died when he attempted to bail out of his burning aircraft; although his parachute opened, it was already on fire. His pilots saw him plummet to his death, with the burning parachute trailing in the air. On May 21st, Litvyak suffered an even deeper loss. Before the eyes of the entire regiment, while conducting training with a new pilot above the airfield, Alexei Solomatin crashed and was killed. Only two weeks earlier, he had received the highest military decoration, the Hero of the Soviet Union medal.

A great deal has been written about the supposed romance between Litvyak and Alexei Solomatin, who flew together in the 73rd. But according to Litvyak's letters, she did not realize she loved Solomatin until after his death. She wrote a wrenching letter to her mother at the end of May, a few days after Solomatin's funeral:

Fate has snatched away my best friend Lyosha Solomatin. … He was everyone's fa vorite and he loved me very much, but at that time he was not my ideal. Because of this there was a lot of unpleasantness. I transferred to another squadron and maybe that's why I was shot down over Rostov.

In the same letter, Litvyak described a dream she'd had:

The river was seething, to swim across was impossible; [Solomatin] stood on the other bank and called me, he called so, simply to tears, and he said, "After all, Batya managed to get me for himself, he couldn't manage without me." And again Alyosha called me and asked: "Lilka, aren't you coming?" And I told him, "If they let me. …" But I know that I can't swim across this river anyway. And I woke up. And now it's terrible for me to endure, and I confide, mamochka, that I valued this friendship only in the moment of his death. If he had remained alive, then it seems this friendship would have become exceptionally beautiful and strong. You see, he was a fellow not to my taste, but his persistence and his love for me compelled me to love him, and now … it seems to me that I will never again meet such a person.

Litvyak seems to have become increasingly daring—some might say reckless—after the death of her friends. Her third May kill was the one for which she is most remembered by her comrades; and it was not an aircraft but a German artillery observation balloon near the village of Troitskoye, about ten miles behind the front lines. The balloon was tethered to the ground, and could be raised to permit artillery spotters to observe Soviet positions; they could then accurately direct German artillery fire. The balloon was protected by a heavy screen of anti-aircraft fire and could be quickly lowered. Several attempts had already been made by Soviet pilots to destroy the balloon, but all had been turned back by German defensive fire. Litvyak decided on a new tactic. First, she flew into friendly territory, far away from the front, before circling back and crossing the front lines. She then penetrated deep into enemy territory before turning to approach the balloon from the rear, behind its defenses. She destroyed it on the first pass.

On June 13, 1943, Litvyak was appointed flight commander in the 3rd Aviation Squadron of the 73rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment. A few days later, she was flying as wingman to the new regimental commander, I.V. Golyshev, when they set out to intercept an enemy reconnaissance aircraft and encountered four Me-109 fighters. Golyshev was wounded; Litvyak managed to cover his exit from the fight, but her aircraft was badly shot up in the process. Despite ten holes in her Yak-1, she was able to land the plane successfully.

Litvyak was wounded once more on July 16, 1943, when 6 Yak-1s battled against 30 Ju-88s escorted by 6 Me-109s. Though injured early in the battle, she stayed in the fight and shot down one bomber and one fighter. Forced to leave the area after receiving serious damage to her aircraft, she was attacked again during her return to base and wounded a second time. Litvyak received local medical attention for her shoulder and leg, but refused to be sent to a field hospital, claiming that the wounds were not serious.

On July 19, while escorting Il-2s, Litvyak shot down one Me-109. On the same day, Katya Budanova died. After shooting down two Me-109s (her fifth and sixth personal kills), Budanova was badly wounded and her aircraft severely damaged. She managed to land in a nearby field, but was already dying when local villagers pulled her from the plane. Pasportnikova recalls that Litvyak was stunned by Budanova's death; it must have seemed that she had lost all the fellow warriors who mattered most to her.

The next day, Litvyak barely survived a fierce air battle when she and Golyshev encountered ten enemy fighters. Litvyak bailed out of her burning aircraft; Golyshev was killed. Near the end of July, Litvyak wrote to her mother, "I am completely absorbed in combat life. I can't seem to think of anything but the fighting." Now, to add to her list of motivations, she had a very personal desire to avenge her fallen friends.

Litvyak's final flights took place on August 1, 1943. On her third flight of the day, she shared a kill against an Me-109. On her ill-fated fourth flight, she participated in a mass air battle involving 6 Yak-1s against 12 Me-109s and 30 Ju-88 bombers. Litvyak shot down an Me-109, then flew into the clouds, trailing smoke, as she attempted to evade two more attacking German fighters. She disappeared over enemy territory.

When Soviet forces recaptured the area a few days later, her regiment conducted extensive searches but could find no trace of Litvyak's aircraft. Her worst fear had been realized; her records were marked "missing without a trace." One of Litvyak's colleagues, pilot Ivan Borisenko, later wrote: "It is difficult to imagine our grief. Everyone without exception loved her. As a person and as a pilot she was wonderful."

During her brief life, Litvyak made her mark. She was the first woman in history to shoot down an enemy aircraft. She also holds the top rank for total number of kills among women fighter pilots; her tally of 12 personal kills is a respectable score for any fighter ace. Litvyak chose a thoroughly unfeminine profession, yet maintained an almost blatant femininity even in wartime. When the other pilots were having shark's teeth painted on their aircraft, Litvyak asked for flowers. She had her mechanic obtain peroxide so she could continue to bleach her hair the shade of blonde she preferred. Yet her skill as a fighter pilot is indisputable. She is remembered by her male colleagues as "a remarkable girl, smart, with the true character of a fighter pilot and a daredevil."

Litvyak was recommended for the Hero of the Soviet Union medal, but it was a military regulation that the medal could not be awarded to anyone who disappeared in combat. Inna Pasportnikova vowed that she would not rest until Litvyak's body had been found and her name cleared. She worked for many years with various groups that searched for and identified victims of the war. As it turned out, Litvyak had not gone down where she was thought to have landed. Apparently, she flew some distance before landing, in an attempt to return to friendly territory. In 1979, the searchers discovered that an unidentified woman pilot had been buried in the village of Dmitrievka. No personal identification was found, but the woman had been very short, had received a mortal head wound, and had been found dead in her aircraft. A search of military records revealed that Litvyak had been the only surviving woman pilot in the region at that time, and it was concluded that the body was hers. Finally, in 1988, Litvyak's records were amended; rather than being listed as missing, she was now officially "killed in action." The Hero of the Soviet Union nomination went forward at last. In May 1990, Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev signed the award, which was presented to Litvyak's brother Yuri Kunavin. Kunavin died soon after, but he had lived to see the names of both his father and his sister restored to honor.

Lidiya Litvyak completed 268 combat flights; her personal kills included 1 Ju-87 and 3 Ju-88 bombers, 7 Me-109 fighters, and 1 artillery observation balloon. Her shared kills included 1 FW-190 and 2 Me-109 fighters. All her kills were accomplished in less than one year of combat flying, between September 13, 1942, and August 1, 1943.

archival records, unpublished documents and personal interviews:

Kanevskii, A. "Ia samaia schastlivaia …" ["I'm the Luckiest …"] Aviatsiia i Kosmonavtika. March 1990, pp. 36–38.

Lavrinenkov, Vladimir Dmitrievich. Vozvrashchenie v nebo (Return to the Sky). 2nd ed. Moscow: Voenizdat, 1983.

Pennington, Reina. "Wings, Women and War: Soviet Women's Military Aviation Regiments in the Great Patriotic War," Master's thesis, University of South Carolina, 1993.

Yeryomin, Boris Nikolaevich. Vozdushnye boitsy (Air Warriors). Moscow: Voenizdat, 1987.