Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½
“They seem like nice enough boys, but they haven’t the hunger my ladies do. That can’t be taught or disciplined into anyone. It comes from decades of being told we can’t do a thing while knowing we can. They’ll never have that.”
No army in recent military history has made more use of women than the Soviets during World War 2. As we’ve already covered, they operated on the front lines in positions ranging from sniper to tank commander. But few of their stories have ever been covered in any depth. This book aims to redress that balance, at least somewhat. While the characters in this are fictional, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, comprised entirely of woman, did exist. It flew bombing and harassment missions of German forces, using extremely light aircraft, so slow the German fighter planes were unable to follow them without stalling. Their tactic of cutting their engines before beginning their bombing run, allowing them to arrive in silence, helped earn the regiment the nickname from the Nazi soldiers of “nachthexen” – Night Witches.
The heroine here is Ekaterina Ivanova, known as Katya. She has always had an interest in flying, dreaming of it as an escape from her rural home. But the opportunity arrives in 1941, with Hitler’s army massing on the border, and she is one of the few female recruits allowed to train at the Chelyabinsk Military Aviation School. It’s not easy: she has to overcome the doubts, not just of the trainers, but her fellow cadets. As Katya puts it, “We have to be the best. Not just good… We need to fly more missions than the men. We have to be more efficient than they are. We can’t be excellent. We need to be exemplary.” There, she meets and falls in love with fellow trainee, Vanya Soloneva: the two quickly marry, but are just as soon separated, as the Nazis roll into Russia. Katya joins other women pilots, navigators, armorers and engineers in the 588th, under the command of record-breaking aviatrix Sofia Orlova. But will she and Vanya survive the battles to come?
Even if wholly fictional, it still offers what feels like a credible insight into the time, as well as the hell which was World War II. The mortality rate here is fearsome, almost approaching Game of Thrones level: I’d recommend not getting too attached to any of the characters, because… you never know. The story is told in first-person perspective, which allows you to get right inside Katya’s head and see the world through her concerns, doubts and hopes. But her colleague, Oksana, is perhaps the most poignant character: she suffered a devastating personal loss, yet found a way to carry on and serve her country. I was initially somewhat concerned the Katya/Vanya romance would overwhelm the main narrative. However, Runyan reins it back in, after some early scenes are noticeably overcooked, with her heroine simply not having time to start out the window and sigh plaintively. However, I do have to dock some points for an ending apparently lifted wholesale from A League of Their Own, right down to the women bursting into song: fortunately, it is missing any Madonna warbling.
Otherwise, however, there are very few mis-steps here. It’s an engrossing story, populated by very human characters, who behave in ways that generally seem convincing. Even Katya, at one point, tries to escape the horrors of the front-line with Vanya, after being shot down and injured. It’s a largely unexplored and unknown area of military history (though the documentary below sheds some good light on its inspiration), and Runyan does it more than adequate justice.
Author: Aimie K. Runyan
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing, available through Amazon as an e-book or in paperback.
“Only madmen and sadists want war. We wanted to fly, and when the war came, we wanted to do our duty. Its not foolish. It’s brave.”