Lyuba Vinogradova has accumulated a huge amount of information about some of the women involved, and tells their story, from the initial idea of forming women’s air units, through the expected resistance to the idea, the training, their deployment, and to the fate of many of the pilots.
As with much Soviet history, she also has to try and separate fact from propaganda and myth. Many of the pilots involved in the beginnings of the story were experienced, having been aviation pioneers before the war, and also, therefore, part of the propaganda machine. This in itself means that not all of them were quite what they appeared.
But many others were women from apparently unpromising backgrounds who happened to be in the right place at the right time. A few were just extremely determined and single-minded.
The book is surprisingly detailed. When you consider the chaos within the huge Soviet warzone for much of the war – a chaos that comes across vividly – it is remarkable to have so much information.
The author tells her story well. We get to know many of these pilots; their background, their motivation, their hopes and fears. She does all this with style, and a lot of credit must go to the translator as well.
What let the book down slightly for me is that it was an incomplete history. It is, in reality, a history of the female pilots who were involved from the beginning, and their story is told in as much detail as is available. However, the story for most of them has no happy ending, and the book ends rather abruptly in mid 1943, when the story of most of those pilots we have been following ends.
We are then left wondering what happened in the last two years of war; were there more female pilots? Where did they come from? Where did they fight? What happened to them? Where there female pilots in the post-war Air Force?
As a book about a group of specific female pilots and their experiences, it is still a very good read. But I would have liked a little more about the wider picture.
This is a review of the Maclehose 2015 paperback edition.
It is an extended version of my review previously published on Amazon and Goodreads.
