When he was taken to Lidya, he thought they were trying to make fun of him. After Maier bailed out from his stricken plane and was captured, he asked to meet the Russian pilot who had shot him down. The aircraft was piloted by Staff Sergeant Erwin Maier, an 11-victory ace. An interesting story is told about the time when she shot down a Luftwaffe Bf 109 G-2 Gustav. It took her less than a month to account for five aircraft and gain the coveted title of fighter ace. Within days Lidya achieved her first couple of kills, thus becoming the first female fighter pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft. The crucial Battle of Stalingrad had begun a few weeks earlier. In September 1942, Lidya Litvyak and a small group of women pilots who had a special reputation for skill and daring, finally achieved their dream of being part of an elite men’s unit, the 437th Fighter Regiment. There, from January 1942 onwards, she learned to fly and fight on the Yakovlev Yak-1, thought to be one of the best Soviet fighter aircraft of the time. Lidya was initially rejected as being inexperienced but eventually joined the all-female 586th Fighter Regiment of the Air Defence Force. Lidya immediately volunteered to join a women’s aviation regiment that was being formed by Marina Raskova, the famous Soviet woman pilot, as part of frantic efforts to try and halt the relentless German advance. Within three years she became a flight instructor at the Kalinin Airclub and had trained 45 pilots by the time the German attack on the Soviet Union commenced on June 22, 1941.
Her first solo was at the age of 15 and she graduated from the Kherson Flight School on the River Dnieper, now part of Ukraine. She grew up as an ordinary girl who yearned to fly. By mere coincidence the date was later chosen as Soviet Aviation Day. Lidya Vladimirovna Litvyak, affectionately known as Lilya, was born in Moscow on August 18, 1921. She died before her 22nd birthday and is rightly remembered as one of the Soviet Union’s greatest military aviators, man or woman. A regimental commander in the division she was assigned to described her as “a very aggressive person” and “a born fighter pilot”. The Western press covered her aerial exploits in glowing terms calling her the “White Rose of Stalingrad”.
In her own country, the Soviet Union, the only nation to regularly field women in combat during the War, she was known as the “White Lily of Stalingrad”. During World War II, this young woman with a passion for flowers, shot down over a dozen of Germany’s best fighter pilots to become the greatest female ace ever. Does a woman have what it takes to be a good combat pilot? The question would have seemed strange to Lidya Litvyak.
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