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The White Rose
OF STALINGRAD
The Real-Life Adventure of
Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak,
the Highest Scoring Female
Air Ace of All Time
BILL YENNE
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Contents
Introduction 7
Prologue 21
Chapter 1:Born Into a Season of Darkness 27
and Promises
Chapter 2: Growing Up With the Man in Red 39
Chapter 3: Mother and Father 55
Chapter 4: Bright, Happy Years 69
Chapter 5: Bonfires of Paranoia 85
Chapter 6: Heroes in the Sky 103
Chapter 7: Heroines in the Sky 113
Chapter 8: From Behind Dark Clouds 123
Chapter 9: Enemies at the Gates 133
Chapter 10: Women at War 141
Chapter 11: Marina’s Falcons 155
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Chapter 12: Operational Assignments 169
Chapter 13: Lilya at War 185
Chapter 14: Stalingrad, the Very Hell of the War 201
Chapter 15: A Time of Heroines 215
Chapter 16: Springtime in Moscow 233
Chapter 17: Romance and Tragedy 245
Chapter 18: The White Lily of the Donbass 253
Chapter 19: Twilight of the Falcons 261
Chapter 20: Lost Lily 273
Epilogue 287
Appendix: Aerial Victories Credited to Lilya Litvyak 292
About the Author 294
Selected Recurring Acronyms 295
Bibliography 298
Index 310
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Introduction
This is the story of a woman who dared to aspire to be a warrior,
in part to defend the reputation of her family name, dishonored
by lies which had shamed her father, and in part to save her
beloved Motherland from a dark beast who came out of the west on
leathery wings to consume and subjugate a land whose soil runs in the
veins of its people.
The fact that popular culture has portrayed her as the “White Rose of
Stalingrad,” when it was actually a white lily that she painted on the side
of her Yak-1 fighter aircraft is illustrative of how, in death, the story of her
short life has become more myth than legend.
In the making of myths, factual details can be an intrusive nuisance.
In the making of history, the myths, in the literary sense, are the elements
of the story that elevate certain events and certain people to prominence
above others. Throughout history, great warriors, heroines as well as
heroes, are remembered as such as much for the light reflected from their
armor as for the deeds they did and their true accomplishments. This is
the story of a woman about whom little is known, a story that is seen
through the window of her times, as well as through the window into the
dimly lit room that was her life.
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THE WHITE ROSE OF STALINGRAD
The documented facts about her life are few, the recollected information
fleeting. In the mythology that surrounds her, she is at once a victim of
circumstance and a feminist hero. She is both a shy girl and a skilled
warrior. She is seen as representing many, and symbolic of much.
Yet she is both far simpler than all of this and far more complex. She
would probably never imagined herself as allegorical, but rather as an
unpretentious girl who simply wanted to fly airplanes, and who, when
given the chance, was exceptionally good at it.
Lidiya Vladimirovna Litvyak was universally known as “Lilya,” or “Lilia,”
meaning “Lily,” and known intimately to her closest friends by the
diminutive “Lil’ka.” Her father’s given name, Vladimir, is memorialized, as
is Russian custom, in her middle name. For Lilya, this is especially poignant
because, as a teenaged girl, she suffered the humiliation and the torment of
watching her father be arrested, executed, and erased by the state for which
he had served as a civil servant and she would later serve as a warrior.
She was born in Moscow in 1921, specifically on August 18, the day
that, on her twelfth birthday, became “Soviet Air Fleet Day,” also called
“Soviet Aviation Day.” This coincidence is especially auspicious, given
Lilya’s eventual prominence as one of the Soviet Union’s most outstanding
military aviators. They still hold the Moscow International Aviation and
Space Salon (MAKS) air show at Ramenskoye (Zhukovsky) Airport near
Moscow during the week of Lilya’s birthday.
It is important to underscore the fact that Lilya grew up with the Soviet
Union, an immense empire of a new kind, born of a violent revolution,
rising out of the ashes of an empire of the old kind. As Vasily Vitalyevich
Shulgin, a member of the prerevolutionary government, wrote in
retrospect, this vast place, which had cut itself off from the rest of the
world, “was no longer a monarchy, but nor was she a republic. She was a
form of state with no name.”
The story of the birth throes and tumultuous adolescence of this empire
is thickly intertwined with Lilya’s own story. This state, and its leader, the
cruel and enigmatic Josef Stalin, became the governing presence
throughout her entire life.
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INTRODUCTION
Lilya grew up in a Janus-headed state which, in many ways celebrated
and molded its youth into idealized components of the society which it
was inventing, while at the same time, compelled an older generation—
ironically, the generation who fought to make the state possible—to live
with fear and suspicion. As young people like Lilya grew up with campfires
and patriotic songs, dark and sinister shadows lurked beyond the warm
glow of their fire circle.
Beyond that warm glow, the days and nights of her youth in the Soviet
Union were a dark and tempestuous time, the history of which is
composed of half-truths and is cheated of facts that were deliberately
omitted, intentionally erased, or never recorded out of fear, or for more
sinister purposes.
Lilya Litvyak grew to prominence in a time of war, the time of the “Great
Patriotic War.” Like the original “Patriotic War” fought against Napoleon in
1812, the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 was a war of national survival, and
one in which the very essence of national identity was at stake. The rest of
the world was embroiled in World War II, but to the Soviet people, this
global conflict was merely a sideshow to their mighty, and very personal,
struggle against the “Hitlerite fascists.” Even today, Russians still refer to
the war they fought against the Germans between 1941 and 1945 as the
Great Patriotic War, and not as World War II.
In the beginning of those years, a groundswell of popular support for
this great and patriotic war emerged from the youth of Lilya’s generation
who had grown up with the idealism and the patriotic songs. They came
by the millions to form the great body of the armed forces that ultimately
saved their Motherland. Among them were not just the young men
of Lilya’s generation, but also the young women—and a great many of
them, too.
Among the tens of thousands of young women of that generation who
fought and died in the Great Patriotic War were those special ones who did
so as aviators.
The story of Soviet women in military aviation during the Great
Patriotic War began with the vision and tenacity of a single exceptional
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THE WHITE ROSE OF STALINGRAD
officer. She was nearly a decade older than Lilya, but she was still a young
woman, just twenty-nine years old, when the Great Patriotic War began.
Marina Mikhailovna Malinina Raskova was an aspiring opera singer
turned pilot who had achieved international prominence in the world of
aviation in the 1930s, the same era when women such as Amelia Earhart
were capturing headlines and world records—and becoming household
words. Marina Raskova was one of the household names in the Soviet
Union. She was the woman whose picture was carried—like that of a pop
star—in the school bags of young schoolgirls like Lilya Litvyak.
A woman of great beauty and charisma, Marina Raskova was also a
great visionary. She inspired the women of Lilya’s generation to fly and
fight, but beyond that, she also succeeded in realizing the impossible
dream of creating all-women combat regiments in which that
generation of flying fighters would have the opportunity to shine—and
how they shone!
Among the Allies in World War II, only in the Soviet Union were
women deliberately sent into combat—and only in the Soviet aviation
regiments formed by Marina Raskova did they serve in all-women units.
While thousands of other young Soviet women would serve in uniform in
ground combat roles from snipers to tank drivers, they served as small
minorities within mostly male units.
Woman warriors have always been a part, albeit small and often
overlooked, of military history. From ancient times through the Middle
Ages, there have been numerous instances of individual armed women
going into battle alongside male warriors. These have ranged from warrior
queens, such as Tomyris of Persia and Boudica of Wales, leading troops in
battle; to women warriors, from the fifteenth-century French heroine
Jeanne Hachette to the American Revolution’s Molly Pitcher, both of
whom rose from the nonnobility to take up arms. Among these, France’s
Joan of Arc, the “Maid of Orleans,” is an outstanding example.
From the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are many
well-documented instances of specific women who either took up arms in
time of war to defend their homes or homeland or who disguised
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INTRODUCTION
themselves as men in order to join the armed forces of their country.
Indeed, there are numerous cases of women who enlisted in the Union
Army or the Confederate Army during the American Civil War and who
served for a year or more without it being known that they were women.
Well-known in Russian military history is the famous “cavalry maiden,”
Nadezhda Andreyevna Durova. The daughter of an army officer, she grew
up on military posts and later enlisted under an assumed male identity.
Beginning in 1806, she fought bravely in various battles, was
commissioned as an officer, and played a role in the climactic defeat of
Napoleon in Russia in 1812.
Marina Raskova, though, was about as far in her mindset from
Nadezhda Durova as is possible among women warriors. She saw no
reason why a woman should have to hide her identity and blend into a
company of men. Nor, indeed, did she see why women warriors could not
be organized and go into battle in the company of other women. Marina
Raskova’s idea of creating formal combat units comprised of women was
unique to its time, although it was not entirely without precedent.
Throughout military history, mainly in premodern times, one can find
examples of armies organizing specific units in which large numbers of
women served routinely in combat. Ancient history—liberally seasoned
with ancient folklore, of course—tells of tribes of warrior women. Notable
are the Amazons, who lived in Scythia, roughly the area north and east of
the Black Sea. Amazons are mentioned in the fifth century B.C. by the
historian Herodotus and later by the biographers of Alexander the Great,
among many others. Though the Amazons are often considered to have
been mythical, David Anthony writes in his 2007 book The Horse, the
Wheel, and Languagethat one in five of the graves of warriors found in the
swath of Russia and Ukraine north of the Black Sea contains the remains
of an armed woman.
In 1542, the Spanish explorer and conquistador Francisco de Orellana
encountered a tribe of warrior women in South America, and the river
where this happened became known as the “Amazon” because of them.
Ancient Norse sagas, such as the Völsunga and Hervarar, speak of
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THE WHITE ROSE OF STALINGRAD
contingents of women warriors known as “shieldmaidens,” and there are
some written accounts by outsiders, circa the tenth century, which
describe such women being seen in battle.
In the late Middle Ages and thereafter, there were even a few orders of
women knights in Europe, although in most cases they seem to have been
given their titles as honorary ranks, rather than for serving as warriors in
battle. However, in about 1149, Ramon Berenguer, Count of Barcelona,
established the Orden de la Hacha (Order of the Hatchet), which was
specifically comprised of cavalleras (female knights) who had fought to
save the city of Tortosa from attack by the Moors.
The seventeenth-century English historian Elias Ashmole, who created
the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford through the donation
of his manuscript collection, specifically mentions the women who
became knights. “The example is of the Noble Women of Tortosa in
Aragon, and recorded by Josef Micheli Marquez,” Ashmole writes in his
1672 The Institution, Laws, and Ceremony of the Most Noble Order of the
Garter. “[Marquez] plainly calls them Cavallerosor Knights, or may I not
rather say Cavalleras, seeing I observe the words Equitissaeand Militissae
(formed from the Latin Equites [the Roman equestrian warrior] and
Milites) heretofore applied to Women.”
By the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, though, women
in the uniformed military service of most nations were formally relegated
to serving only in medical units. Notable among the exceptions were the
Russian all-women “Battalions of Death” of 1917. While such an
appellation conjures images from a “B-Movie” sexploitation film, the
reality was more mundane. These units, some of which were simply called
“Woman’s Battalions,” were created by the short-lived Russian Provisional
Government, which was briefly in place between the fall of Tsar Nicholas
II and the Bolshevik Revolution, at which time they were disbanded.
It was at a time when the Provisional Government hoped to rally support
for a continuation of the fight against the Germans in World War I.
The 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death saw limited action against
the enemy in July 1917, but was badly defeated.
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