Sr. Lt. Lydia Vladimirovna aka Lilya Litvyak
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Further Reading:
Wings Women and War by Reina Pennington (1997)
Soviet Women in Combat in WWII by Kazimiera J. Cottam (1983)
Also, online commentary by Ms. Cottam on the likelihood of the cheating death rumors. 
Further Reading:
Wings Women and War by Reina Pennington (1997)
Soviet Women in Combat in WWII by Kazimiera J. Cottam (1983)
Please check my website: I had four more recent books published on Soviet women in combat. You are citing an ancient book of mine. See below:
ReplyDeleteWeb: http://webhome.idirect.com/~kjcottam/welcome.htm
LYDIA VLADIMIROVNA LITVYAK (b. 1921)
ReplyDeleteIn 2000 Russian television featured Swiss TV interview with woman pilot twice wounded during WWII. Nina Raspopova, veteran of the 46th Taman’ Guards Night Bomber Regiment, assumed this was Litvyak. See Yekaterina Polunina, Devchonki, podruzhki, letchitsy. Moscow, 2004. She was former chief mechanic of the 586th Fighter Regiment in which Litvyak initially served and archivist of this unit.
Litvyak graduated from high school with honors in 1938 and trained intensively at Kherson Flying School. As instructor before the war she trained forty-five pilots.
Was transferred from 586th Fighter (Air Defense) Regiment, operational in April 1942, to 437th Fighter Regiment covering close approaches to Stalingrad. Scored her very first two kills on September 13, 1942, the first woman to shoot down an enemy aircraft.
From October 1942 until January 1943, served, still in Stalingrad area, with the famous 9th Guards Fighter Regiment commanded by Lev Shestakov, HSU.
In January 1943 transferred to 73rd Stalingrad-Vienna Guards Fighter Regiment, commanded by Major Nikolay Baranov. Here was commissioned on February 23, 1943. Due to superior fighting skills Litvyak and Ekaterina Budanova became “free hunters” searching for targets of opportunity. On July 19 Litvyak lost her friend. The final ranks of both Litvyak and Budanova were Senior Lieutenants.
The assumption that Litvyak died behind enemy lines on August 1, 1943 is no longer valid. See report by writer Gian Piero Milanetti, dated July 17, 2012 and posted on AbsoluteAstronomy.com. In it he describes his encounter with an elderly peasant in the area of the crash-landing of Litvyak’s aircraft. This man told him an airwoman was seen here successfully parachuting from her disabled aircraft. Since no other airwomen operated in this area, the parachuting airwoman must have been Litvyak.
Polunina calculates that Litvyak had only five independent kills and shot down an enemy observation balloon and Me-109 in group combat (Polunina, p. 143), whereas Budanova shot down six enemy aircraft and four in group combat (Polunina, p. 139). Thus Budanova was the top WWII woman ace.
The Soviet Air Force Command announced that Litvyak’s body must be found to earn the HSU. In the summer of 1979 high school students from Krasnyi Luch learned that she was alleged to have been buried in a common grave near their home town, so Polunina arranged to have a plaque with Litvyak’s name placed on that grave. On March 31, 1986 the Ministry of Defense acknowledged that the uninspected remains were Litvyak’s and on May 6, 1990 she was awarded the HSU.
New evidence suggests Litvyak was taken prisoner and a fighter pilot Vladimir Lavrinenkov saw her in a PoW camp. Aleksandr Gridnev, second commanding officer of the 586th Fighter Regimen, heard Litvyak speaking on German radio after she was captured. His testimony is deposited in WWII archives in Podol'skl.
I checked this submission thoroughly, but nevertheless missed an extra "l" in Podol'sk for which I apologize. Podol'sk is located near Moscow. HSU = Hero of the Soviet Union.
ReplyDeleteWow, sorry on the delayed response, guess this account isn’t great about letting me know when there are comments or I would have sprang on this one. I will certainly see if I can get my hands on them, I was rather limited by even the boundless NY Public Library on this topic. It shocks me that there is so little written about these women and I’m deeply flattered that one of the few who’ve written about the topic has found my little tribute, even, hell, especially if she’s going to point me toward things I’ve left out.Thank you. Mind if I just use the opportunity to ask an expert on the topic - why do you think that it is, in all the mainstream press accounts springing up now about other precedents of gender integrated militaries now that the US is going to allow women in combat, that there’s little or no mention of the large number of women who participated in WWII for the Soviets? And just out of curiosity, what got you interested in it, and how did you first find out about it?
ReplyDeleteHere is some background information about me. I am the author and translator of several books on Soviet women in combat in WWII. Born in Poland, I was forcibly resettled in the north of the Soviet Union in 1940 with my family. Repatriated to Poland in 1946, I emigrated to Canada in 1949. I am PhD graduate in Russian and Soviet history and taught at the Universities of Toronto and Ottawa. However, mainly employed by the Department of National Defense in Ottawa as translator/intelligence analyst, I also worked for the Department of Foreign Affairs, including the Canadian Embassy in Moscow, under the Gorbachev regime. Why was Soviet experience of using women in combat so little known in the West? Probably because soon after the war had ended the Soviet authorities themselves pretended it never happened. Almost all former female combatants went back to civilian life, both willingly and unwillingly.
ReplyDeleteP.S. How did I get interested in the Soviet experience of using women in combat? At the National Defense Headquarters in Ottawa I had access to Soviet periodicals with references to Soviet women's participation in combat during World War II. Soon I was invited to become research associate by the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where I examined data on Soviet women in combat in WWII during my summer holidays.
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