The Short, Daring Life of Lilya Litvyak
Lilya Litvyak.
On June 22, 1941, the Third Reich launched its ill-fated invasion of Russia. It was pestilential in scale; more than three million Axis soldiers swarmed Russia’s borders in a matter of hours, overwhelming Soviet defenses. Hitler regarded the peoples of the Soviet Union to be a subhuman rabble against whom victory was inevitable. But the supposed Untermensch turned out to be ferocious opponents, hardened by decades of deprivation and fueled by an unbending love of country.
Among those supercharged patriots were eight hundred thousand women who volunteered for frontline action, in roles such as snipers, machine gunners, and tank drivers. Nearly two hundred thousand women served in air defense, including those who flew bombers and fighter planes in Air Group 122, at the time the world’s only all-female air-combat unit. It was established in the fall of 1941 by the twenty-nine-year-old navigator Marina Raskova. Thanks to a series of daring long-distance flights undertaken in the late 1930s, she was one of the most famous people in the Soviet Union, and a role model to millions of young women. Yet, Raskova’s reputation was to be surpassed by one of her students: the petite, baby-faced Lilya Litvyak, who became the world’s first female fighter ace, and is better known as the White Rose of Stalingrad.
“Warrior! Answer to the motherland’s victory!”
Born in Moscow in August 1921, Litvyak knew nothing of the Russia before Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and their revolution. Her parents, Anna and Vladimir, had grown up in the countryside. They moved to the city as newlyweds in 1918, peasants in pursuit
