Obituary
IRINA RAKOBOLSKAYA
Irina Rabobolskaya, member of Soviet World War II flying corps known as the Night Witches.
Pilot, professor
22-12-1919 – 22-9-2016
Irina Rakobolskaya, who has died aged 96, was a member of an elite corps of Soviet women – known as the "Night Witches" – who fought in the air war against Germany from 1941 to 1945.
Unlike Soviet men, women were not formally conscripted into the armed forces. They were volunteers. But the haemorrhaging of the Red Army after the routs of 1941 saw mass campaigns to induct women into the military. They were to play an essential role. More than 8000 women fought in the charnel house of Stalingrad.
In late 1941 Stalin signed an order to establish three all-women air force units to be grouped into separate fighter, dive bomber and night bomber regiments. The order was kept secret in case it boosted the Germans' morale. Over the next four years these regiments flew a combined total of more than 30,000 combat sorties and dropped 23,000 tonnes of bombs.
Born in Darkov, a small settlement 300 kilometres from Moscow, Irina Rakobolskaya was the daughter of a schoolteacher mother and physicist father. The family moved to Moscow after her father's death and Irina was a 20-year-old physics student at Moscow State University when she volunteered for the new women's air regiments.
Although she was trained as a navigator, she took part in only 23 sorties as, much to her initial disappointment, she had been appointed to a desk job as chief of staff of her regiment – the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, whose achievements she would chronicle after the war. It was the only one of the three regiments to remain exclusively female throughout the war.
The 588th was not well equipped. Wearing hand-me-down uniforms from male pilots, the women flew 1920s-vintage Polikarpov PO-2 two-seater biplanes, which consisted of fabric strung over a plywood frame, and lacked all but the most rudimentary instruments.
There was no radio; navigation was done with a stopwatch and a map. The planes carried no guns, no parachutes and could only carry two bombs, forcing the pilots to make multiple sorties.
Irina recalled that the bombs sometimes got stuck and would not drop: "The navigator would get out of the cockpit, stand on the wing and reach down with her hand to try and push it loose."
The women sometimes put in up to 12 missions a night, mainly harassment bombing of German military encampments, rear bases and supply depots. The Germans dubbed the women the "Nachthexen" (Night Witches) due to the whooshing sound they made – "like a witch's broomstick in the night" - as they flew past.
In April 1944 she had to watch helplessly as a plane containing her fellow navigator and great friend Yevgeniya Rudneva was shot down in flames to the north of Kerch. "I was standing at the aerodrome watching it," she recalled. "She was burning away above my head, and I could do nothing to save her. Grief paralysed me."
As if the physical dangers were not enough, the women also had to deal with the initial contempt of their male colleagues, some of whom dismissed them as "petticoat pilots".
Although members of Irina Rakobolskaya's regiment won 23 Hero of the Soviet Union medals, little effort was made to publicise their achievements in official party journals.
After the war most of the women had little option but to return to traditional civilian roles as wives, mothers and homemakers.
Irina Rakobolskaya, however, returned to Moscow State University, where she became a professor of physics and head of the cosmic rays and space physics department.
But she always worked to keep the memory of the "Night Witches" alive, publishing Yevgeniya Rudneva's diary and her own memoirs and participating in regimental reunions.
In 1946 she married Dimitri Linde, who died in 2005. She is survived by their two sons
Telegraph, London