Ekaterina Budanova: How a Village Girl Became an Ace and Shot Down 6 Planes

The sky over Donbass in July of forty-three smelled of hot metal, burnt oil, and gunpowder. The cockpit of the Yak-1 fighter was cramped. And unbearably hot. The cockpit canopy was closed, the parachute pressed into the back, and the canvas straps dug into the shoulders. A girl was at the controls. She was twenty-six years old. And she was flying to kill.

We are used to bronze monuments. To glossy posters where smiling, fair-haired Valkyries in clean tunics look into a bright future. But the reality of fighter aviation is not a poster. It's hard, dirty, physically exhausting work. Overloads that make your eyes go dark. Bloody calluses on your hands from the hard steering wheel. And constant, sticky, animal fear that needs to be stuffed somewhere deep under the ribs before each flight. Katya Budanova knew this better than many. She had six personally shot down German planes to her credit. Six crosses drawn in someone else's blood in the cold sky.

From the machine to the clouds

She was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth. An ordinary girl from the Smolensk village of Konoplyanka. She was orphaned early. In search of some kind of life, she went to Moscow and went to work at an aircraft factory in Fili. The noise of the workshops, the smell of shavings, machine oil on her hands. And then - the flying club.

You know, everyone was sick with the sky back then. It was the era of Chkalov and Gromov. But it's one thing to dream, looking up, and quite another to get up at four in the morning, take a tram across half the city to fly your hours on a plywood U-2 before your shift at the factory. Katya succeeded. She had that very peasant stubbornness. A hard core. She didn't just learn to fly - she became an instructor.

When the war began, Budanova was eager to go to the front. She ended up in Marina Raskova's women's aviation regiment. But bombers didn't suit her. She needed speed. Maneuver. Hunting. She managed to transfer to fighters. And that's when the most difficult thing began.

A stranger in a man's sky

September 1942. Stalingrad. Meat grinder. The sky is black with smoke from the burning city. Budanova and her friend Lidia Litvyak (the very "White Lily") are transferred to the 437th Fighter Aviation Regiment. A men's regiment.

Imagine the faces of harsh, battle-worn men who are sent two girls. The commanders looked at them with undisguised irritation. A fighter is a strict machine. No hydraulics. To make a sharp turn at a speed of five hundred kilometers per hour, you need brute male strength. And here is Katya. Tall, of course, combative, with a short haircut, but still a girl.

"At first they took care of us. They didn't let us into the heat. And we were offended to tears. We didn't rush here to sit on the ground," the pilots of that call-up later recalled.

But the skepticism quickly evaporated. Budanova flew aggressively. Daringly. Unlike Litvyak, who was an artist in the air, weaving elegant lace of maneuvers, Katya was a fighter. She fought. She dug into the enemy's formation. Her Yak-1 with tail number was thrown across the sky with such ferocity that the wingmen sometimes struggled to keep up with her.

Sixteen seconds for life

An air battle is not a knightly tournament. It's chaos. The roar of the engine drowns out everything. The crackle of the radio and the commander's swearing in the headphones. The head rotates 360 degrees, the neck is rubbed to blood by the stiff collar of the tunic. A second's loss of concentration and you're dead.

Katya shot down her first single plane in the fall of forty-second. German spotter Fw-189, the famous "frame". It was damn hard to shoot it down - maneuverable, firing back with machine guns from behind. Budanova approached closely. She pulled the trigger. And saw the enemy machine peck its nose and fall into the abyss.

Then there were the Messerschmitts. Then the Focke-Wulfs. She became an ace. Six personally shot down planes. This is not statistics from a computer game. This is six times when she was faster, smarter and angrier than professional German pilots. The very ones who had gone through Europe. She looked into their sights, and they - into hers. And she pulled the trigger first.

The last dive

July 1943. Donbass. The heat melts the earth. On July 18, Katya flew to cover our Il-2 attack aircraft. Ordinary, routine work. But there is no routine in the sky of war.

A trio of German Messerschmitts fell from somewhere above, from behind the blinding sun. Budanova could have left. She could have abandoned the clumsy attack aircraft. But she made a turn and went into a head-on attack. One against three.

It was a terrible dance. She managed to stitch one "Messer" with a burst. It burst into flames and went to the ground. But in the same second, a lead whip lashed at her "Yak". A blow. The crackle of a broken canopy. Pain that took her breath away. The plane caught fire.

She didn't jump. Perhaps there was no strength to open the canopy. Perhaps the linkages were broken. Bleeding, choking on acrid smoke, twenty-six-year-old Katya Budanova dragged the burning machine to the ground. She managed to land the fighter in a field near the village of Novokrasnovka. Local peasants ran to the smoking plane and pulled the pilot out of the cockpit. She was unconscious. She was gone in a few minutes.

She was buried there, on the outskirts of the village. For many years her name remained in the shadow of more famous heroes. Only in 1993, half a century after that hot July day, Ekaterina Budanova was awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation. Posthumously.

She didn't become a wife. She didn't become a mother. She remained there forever, in the sky of forty-three. A Smolensk girl with calloused hands who proved to everyone that courage, fury and love for her land have no gender. Only a clear, piercing sky. And the sound of a fading engine.