Captain Larisa Litvinova-Rozanova described the way pilot and navigator would trade naps to and from the target, as well as the horror of watching three planes before her and one plane behind her shot down by a night fighter (the regiment’s worst night of losses). Major Mariya Smirnova was pushed out over the Sea of Azov by low cloud cover, and nearly drowned. Several Night Witches described such experiences as climbing out on a wing to knock off a bomb stuck on the rack, being chased down by pursuing German planes, singing and dancing and embroidering during airfield waits, hazing from the male pilots, and—worst of all!—the indignity of wearing mass-issued men’s underwear.
Yelena is also a fictional character; it isn’t known if there were any romantic relationships between women of the Forty-Sixth. In the oppressive atmosphere of the Soviet Union, no one would have spoken a word of any such liaison had it existed. Pilot memoirs and interviews are similarly close-lipped about criticism of the ruling regime—even after the fall of the Soviet Union, only one Night Witch openly admitted hating Stalin and his rule. Undoubtedly there were others who were less than ardent Communists even as they fought to defend their homeland, but like Nina, they would have remembered the listening ears of the secret police and kept quiet. There is no record that any woman of the Forty-Sixth defected on a bombing run, but the Red Air Force was evidently afraid such things could happen, since they made a point of refusing posthumous honors to any deceased pilot whose body was not recovered. Soviet superiors were clearly aware of the danger that some resourceful pilot might take his or her plane in the opposite direction to find a new life in the West.
Poland, where Nina crashes in August 1944, would have been a hellish place to survive. The doomed Warsaw rebellion was in full roar, the Soviet army pushing from the east as Nazis began to flee west. Poznań, renamed Posen by the Germans, was a place steeped in tragedy: many Polish citizens were displaced, arrested, and executed as German settlers moved in to make a new Aryan province. Lake Rusalka was created using Polish slave labor, and though there was no Huntress living in an ocher-walled mansion on its shores, the lake was the site of several massacres. Memorials to the dead stand today in silent witness among the trees around an otherwise beautiful nature spot. Poznań was also the site of a prisoner of war camp, Stalag XXI-D, home to many Allied prisoners sitting out the war in idle frustration. Many had been captured during the retreat to Dunkirk, including members of the Sixth Battalion Royal West Kents in whose ranks I placed the fictional Sebastian Graham. Escape attempts from behind stalag walls were common; most escapees were recaptured or killed, but at least one man—Allan Wolfe, referenced by Sebastian—walked to Czechoslovakia and managed to survive living rough in the countryside until the war’s end, so survival in the wild was possible, if difficult.
The pretty spa town of Altaussee was a bolt-hole for any number of high-ranking Nazi officials in the war’s immediate aftermath, including Adolf Eichmann. His wife continued to live at 8 Fischerndorf with their sons—in 1952, a few years after her fictional interview with Ian and his team in this book, the real Vera Eichmann quietly packed up her children and joined her husband in exile. Had anyone been keeping watch on her, Eichmann would likely have been caught years before his eventual capture in 1960.
As always, I have taken some liberties with the historical record to serve the story. I wasn’t able to confirm if there was an air club at Irkutsk, though there were hundreds across the USSR by the time Nina learned to fly. It isn’t known if representatives from the female aviation regiments were present at Marina Raskova’s funeral in Red Square, or if Stalin himself was there—but given the deep affection in which both the “Boss” and the women pilots held Raskova, it seems likely. (Besides, I couldn’t resist the opportunity of showing Stalin, along with his very real habit of doodling wolves on documents!) The occasion where the Night Witches had to scramble their planes into the sky when they had just sat down to breakfast happened in the Crimea rather than in Poland and is combined with a separate occasion recounted by Lieutenant Polina Gelman, who recalls getting extremely tipsy after an unaccustomed drink at a