So, I just noticed this obituary in The Times from yesterday of Galina Brok-Beltsova. It is about a woman from the Soviet Union who fought in World War Two as a navigator and bomb aimer.
Although, strictly speaking, the Night Witches were the 588th Night Bomber Regiment and she was in the 587th Regiment. This all women regiment flew over 1,100 combat missions during the war and dropped over 980 tons of bombs.
Galina Pavlovna Brok-Beltsova, Soviet wartime airwoman, was born on February 12, 1925. She died on August 15, 2024, aged 99
This is from The Times article with a share token
https://www.thetimes.com/article/b58b24cc-f559-406a-8b65-88942a5b75dc?shareToken=e6bce5e7c25ec20bb17592e857f6c650
Galina Brok-Beltsova obituary: Last survivor of the Soviet ‘night witches’
Navigator who flew combat missions in the Second World War
When Galina Brok-Beltsova flew her first combat mission during the Second World War, the Soviet airwoman was mesmerised by the spangled night sky. It was only after the 18-year-old returned to base that she was told that it was anti-aircraft fire that had eluded her.
Her next challenge as the navigator of the twin-engined Petlyakov Pe-2 dive bomber, was to read the vast monochrome landscape. After invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Nazis razed villages and forests of captured territory, rendering her maps useless. “We were firing and hurling down bombs, but we couldn’t understand where we were,” she said.
On one occasion, as the bomb aimer, she was unable to drop the payload. A mid-air collision with another Soviet aircraft, while weaving to avoid enemy fire, had incapacitated the mechanism for dropping the bombs. Forced into an emergency landing that could blow up the dive bomber, her pilot Antonina Bondareva-Spitsina landed as gently as possible and let the aircraft roll on until it nosed into a trench and the bombs nestled in sand unexploded. On another sortie she and their dive bomber became detached from the formation, including the escort fighter planes, and were attacked by two Focke Wulfs. As they closed in she could see the “terrible smiles” on the faces of the gunners. The arrival of Soviet fighter aircraft saved them.
Sitting back to back with the pilot and ready to spring into the gun turret to fire the Berezin machinegun, Brok-Beltsova flew 36 combat missions in what she called her “beautiful bird of prey”. She took part in Operation Bagration to liberate Belorussia in June 1944, which enabled the Red Army to advance into central Europe. Her final sortie was the bombing of Konisberg (present-day Kalingrad), which the Germans surrendered on April 9, 1945. Surveying the ruined city from the air, she felt no remorse. Brok-Beltsova later received a personal thank you letter from Stalin.
The Soviet airwomen became popularly known as night witches. “We were all so young,” she recalled. “Some of the women were so beautiful. We of course preferred to be called night beauties, but whichever.”
Galina Pavlona Brok was born in 1925 in Moscow, where her father ran a factory. She was 16 in the summer of 1941 when she emerged from a cinema in Moscow to see Nazi bombs rain down on the city. Amid the wail of the air raid siren she ran to a nearby military office and volunteered. “They were attacking my city. There was panic in the streets. What else could I do? It was my duty.”
On entering the 587th (later renamed the 125th regiment), one of three all-female aviation regiments in the Soviet Union, she recalled meeting women in their early twenties whose uniforms were festooned with medals. Recruits looked up to them as hardened veterans. Chief among them was Marina Raskova, the founding and commanding officer of the regiment and the first professional air navigator in the Soviet Union.
Raskova had lobbied Stalin to set up three female aviator regiments in 1941, more than 50 years before women were allowed to fly in combat missions in the US air force (1993) and RAF (1994). She was considered so exemplary that Brok-Beltsova was given a photograph of her to carry in the leg of her flight suit and look at if her nerves began to fail her. “She was brave, so we were brave.” Raskova died in an air crash in 1943.
Brok-Beltsova trained at Samara on the Volga with 300 other women. Her billet was a stable full of frozen horse manure in temperatures of minus 30 degrees. The resourceful Brok-Beltsova found shovels and crowbars and organised a work party to break up the manure. It would be 1944 before her first mission during which love might have come before war.
In 1942 she was noticed by her commanding officer Georgy Beltsov. He was much admired by many of her fellow female aviators in the regiment, but Galina rejected his overtures, refusing his hand when he offered it at dances and telling him that she wanted to focus on “going to the front”. He wrote her three letters a day, which she shared with comrades who were not receiving any letters at all. “They used to say, Galina it’s true love.”
At the end of the war Beltsov tracked her down to Lithuania, where she was stationed, and got down on his knees. She refused him, because she wanted to go to university. He said: “I waited the whole war for you and now, with your soldier’s boots, you are trampling on the soul of a man who is devoted to you.” When she saw his lips begin to tremble she changed her mind. The couple traded underwear to pay for a celebratory goose at their wedding.
With training complete and their first mission approaching, a formation of male Soviet fighter pilots flew low over their dugout and dropped a large teddy bear. On it was a note. “Dear young girls, we have just learnt we are escorting you. Don’t be frightened; we will do everything to defend you, fight for you with the last drop of our blood. Thank you.”
Yet over the next year of combat Brok-Beltsova wondered if it would be better to go down with a burning plane than to eject. Her twin fears were mistreatment, even rape, at the hands of the Nazis if she were captured, and being sent to a Soviet gulag after the war for allowing herself to be captured.
n the event she married her suitor, studied history at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and completed her doctorate in 1960. She taught the subject for 60 years, eventually becoming a professor and rising to become head of the history department at the Moscow Engineering Institute. She specialised on the “Great Patriotic War”; if anyone questioned her accounts of key battles, she only had to remind them that she had fought in them.
Brok-Beltsova was also recruited by the KGB after the war and worked in counter-espionage. She used the money to help her family get enough to eat. “My father had a food card for 800 grams, my mother was sick and my sister was still young. The three of them had to live with that food card.” She did not tell her husband about her extra-curricular activities. He died in 2005. She is survived by their three children.
Believed to be the last survivor of the 1,000 Soviet female aviators who served in the Second World War, Brok-Beltsova lived in a veterans’ village near Moscow on a state pension that was the equivalent of about £30 a month. She continued to wear her “ribbons”, including the Order of Lenin for her bravery, and a chain around her neck on which hung a miniature gold Pe-2. She was proud of serving her country in the Great Patriotic War and in the KGB, but if she still believed western culture to be bourgeois and decadent, she did not show it when invited to speak at a women in aviation international conference in Nashville, Tennessee, where she learnt to line dance at the age of 76 and drank all the other women under the table.
Galina Pavlovna Brok-Beltsova, Soviet wartime airwoman, was born on February 12, 1925. She died on August 15, 2024, aged 99