The White Lily of Stalingrad
Hello, kickass people of all genders! Today I’m going to talk about one of the women who most inspired me as I wrote my novel, OUR REALM IS THE NIGHT. This lady was intelligent, driven, positive, kind, beautiful, and utterly devoted to a country that refused to acknowledge her heroism until decades after her death.
Her name is Lidia Litvyak, but some call her the White Lily (or Rose) of Stalingrad.
Lidia was born in 1921 in Moscow. Early in her life, her father was accused of treason by the Soviet Union, and sent to a work camp in Siberia. Lidia became dedicated to restoring the family name. And when the Russian air force was destroyed by Hitler in 1941, breaking the truce between the Soviet Union and Germany, Lidia got her chance.
Lidia had enrolled in a flying club at 14, and was making solo flights from the age of 15. When she heard that another great flyer and a Hero of the Union, Marina Raskova, was founding female aviation regiments for the new war, she was determined to join the fight. There was just one problem: she’d already been rejected from another aviation unit. She didn’t have enough experience, they said, even though she’d trained nearly 50 men to fly planes.
So what was a girl to do? Lidia decided to sidestep the problem by inflating her own hype. She lied about her experience and was assigned to the all-female 586th Fighter regiment. Later she was moved, from regiment to regiment, joining mostly-male regiments and showing up her colleagues. She liked to bleach her hair and collect bouquets, which she’d stick in the cockpit of her plane. She also ended each mission with unsanctioned aerial antics, right above the base - a move that irritated her male commander no end.
Lidia flew a plane called a Yak-1. People called her a natural-born fighter pilot, and she was the first female pilot to shoot down enemy aircraft. Not only that, but to this day Lidia holds the record for most kills made by a female fighter pilot - most people agree that she made 11 solo kills and 3 team kills.
But in 1943, at the age of 21, Lidia disappeared.
She was on her fourth mission of the day, escorting other Soviet aircraft to their base. As they neared it, Lidia saw a group of German bombers and moved to attack. But she didn’t realize that a pair of Messerschmidts were flying cover. The Messerschmidts moved in, and the three planes disappeared behind a cloud. Another pilot in the dogfight said that the last he saw of her plane, it was pouring smoke and pursued by up to eight enemy aircraft.
Her colleagues found neither Lidia nor the wreckage of her plane. Without proof that she’d died, Soviet policy dictated that Lidia should be considered compromised - captured and forced to reveal information, essentially making her a traitor to the Soviet Union according to the rules at the time. For all that she’d wanted to redeem her father, she hadn’t managed to escape his fate.
Lidia’s downed airplane was found 36 years later, near a village called Dmitrievka. Only then was her name cleared of potential treason, and she was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union award in 1990.
Lidia and her story always struck me as one of contrasts - not just the contrast between male and female, which usually gets overhyped, but the contrast between love for one’s country, and a country’s love for its citizen. The stories of the USSR’s female aviators, and how they fought the state in order to fight for the state, always stuck with me.
And when I think of this contrast, it’s often the image of Lidia I see in my mind - fighting to get home in a smoking plane, giving everything that she is, all for a country that called her traitor for 36 long years.
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