THE WHITE ROSE OF STALINGRAD

______When Hitler beat Stalin in the "Who's Going To Attack Who First 1941" Competition Lilya Litvyak was serving as a civilian flight instructor, having learned to fly herself at the age of 14. By now she had six years of flying experience and managed to join an all-female 586th Fighter Regiment, upstaging the male instructors sent to train them.
______Litvyak turned out to be one of those rare people who is a natural pilot. Flying the La-5, one of the USSR's latest model fighters, she was soon in combat on the Stalingrad Front and on September 13th 1942 shot down her first two planes, the first woman in history to score an aerial combat kill. That she shot down two planes in her first engagement was almost unheard of for ANY pilot, male or female.
______Litvyak soon graduated to the more capable Yak-1 fighter and painted a white lily on either side of her aircraft. The Germans mistook the lily for a rose (understandable, as floral arrangement is usually the last thing on your mind when someone is trying to shoot you down) and she became known to the Luftwaffe as the White Rose of Stalingrad.
______Litvyak's love of flowers made her decide on the emblem. She would often pick wild flowers near the airfield before the mission and take them with her into the cockpit.
______An extremely aggressive pilot, Litvyak's confidence in her flying ability was often the deciding factor in her victories over the Germans, surprising them with her seemingly reckless manuevers and aerobatics. She was awarded the Order of the Red Banner and promoted, first to Junior Lieutenant and later to Senior Lieutenant. For a time she was transferred to one of the male fighter regiments to provide her expertise to the unit, but resentment of her "intrusion" by her fellow pilots and the inability of some of them to ogle her when she wasn't in her cockpit (she was blond with gray eyes and supposedly built like a brick kremlin) frustrated her and eventually she returned to duty with a female unit.
______During her short career Lilya Litvyak shot down 12 enemy aircraft, some of them Bf109s, the standard German fighter at the time, and at least one was piloted by an ace. However, the victories came with a price: the Rose was herself shot down three times and she saw many of her friends killed in combat. The Soviet practice of leaving pilots on the front until they were either killed or the Red Army reached Berlin did not help her mental and physical state either.
______On August 1st, 1943 Litvyak was "jumped" by several Bf109s while on a mission and failed to return to base. It was assumed that she was shot down (although the paranoic Communists thought there was a possibility that she might have been captured or, worse, defected) but her body could not be located. In 1969 the body of a woman pilot was found, buried under the wing of a Yak-1. It would still be several more years before the fate of the White Rose of Stalingrad was known for sure.

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