Topic: Security
Blog Brand: The Buzz
Region: Europe
Tags: Aerial Ace, Security, Soviet Air Force, and Soviet Union

History’s Only Two Female Fighter Pilot Aces Were Both Soviets

March 14, 2025
By: Christian D. Orr

The Nazi invasion galvanized these women into action, and they served with distinction.

For Women’s History Month, The National Interest is commencing a multi-part series honoring some of history’s most badass female warriors. We started off with the deadliest female sniper in history, the Red Army’s Leytenánt (lieutenant) Lyudmila Pavlichenko of World War II (or as even the post-Soviet era Russians still prefer to call, “the Great Patriotic War.” This time we move from a ground-pounding Red Army woman soldier to some of her aerial warrior counterparts in the WWII Soviet Air Force, two groundbreaking female airmen (bad pun intended) who made history as the only women in history to become fighter pilot aces.

Ace #1: 1st Lieutenant Lydia Litvyak, “The White Rose/White Lily of Stalingrad”

Lydia Vladimirovna Litvyak was born on August 18, 1921, to Vladimir Leontievich Litvyak (a railwayman, train driver, and clerk) and Anna Vasilievna Litvyak (a shop assistant). Young Lydia would show her ambition and intelligence at an early age: she enrolled in a flying club at age fourteen, performed her first solo flight at age fifteen, and later graduated from the Kherson military flying school. Not content to rest on her laurels, she became a flight instructor at Kalinin Airclub, and by the time Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, she had already trained forty-five pilots!

That Nazi invasion galvanized her into action; she initially joined the all-female 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment and then transferred to the male-dominated 437th Fighter Aviation Regiment. On just her second sortie in April 1942, she proved her worth, downing a Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 88 bomber and a Messerschmitt Bf109 fighter, thus becoming the first female pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft. Her latter victim was eleven-victory ace, Erwin Maier, who, after capture, asked to meet his vanquisher and was astounded to be introduced to a female pilot.

 

As noted by former Sunday Times of London journalist Russell Miller in his 1984 book The Soviet Air Force at War (part of Time-Life Books’s excellent book series titled The Epic of Flight):

“Partly out of need, partly out of a sense of Communist egalitarianism, the Soviet Air Force in World War II was the only major arm to allow women to fly in combat units … the Soviets applauded Lilya Litvyak as the White Rose of Stalingrad, not so much for her blond, blue-eyed beauty as for the 12 victories as a member of a crack fighter unit.”

If one wishes to linguistically nitpick, some sources translate Litvyak’s affectionate nickname as “The White Lily [Belaya Liliya] of Stalingrad.” But regardless of the exact translation, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, “A rose by any other name is just as deadly,” as those twelve solo air-to-air kills, along with four shared aerial victories, make her not only the highest-scoring female fighter pilot of all time but a highly-respectable ace pilot by any standard. Case in point, her twelve confirmed solo kills put her score a half-kill ahead of the 11.5 shootdown tally attained by a certain male flying legend, Chuck Yeager (who, of course, became most famous for being the first human to break the sound barrier).

Sadly, she didn’t live to see the end of the war; she presumably was killed in action on August 1, 1943—a couple of weeks shy of her would-be twenty-second birthday—during the Battle of Kursk (though some believe she might have actually survived the crash and ended up briefly as a prisoner of war) after being shot down by Messerschmitt Bf 109s. On May 6, 1990, then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev belatedly awarded her the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

 

Ace #2: Captain Yekaterina Vasilyevna Budanova

Yekaterina “Kayta” Budanova was born on December 6, 1916, in Konoplanka, Smolensk Governorate, Russia, into a peasant family. At the tender age of thirteen, she was sent to work as a carpenter in an aircraft factory in Moscow. This seeming curse of child labor actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise for young Katya, as this is how she developed her interest in aviation; she soon joined a local aeroclub’s parachutist section and got her flying license in 1934, becoming a flight instructor in 1937.

As was the case with “The White Lily,” the German invasion spurred Budanova into joining the 586th Fighter Aviation Regiment. There are conflicting accounts as to when she obtained her first kill as well as her final victory tally, but the general consensus is that she scored six solo shootdowns and four shared victories.

Sadly, Capt. Budanova’s military career also paralleled Sr. Lt. Litvak’s in terms of not surviving the war: she was shot down and killed in action on July 19, 1943. Katya was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Russian Federation on October 1, 1993.

In her own prescient words conveyed in a letter to her sister:

“My dear winged ‘Yak’ is a good machine and our lives are inseparably bound up together; if the need arises, we both shall die like heroes.”

The Plane They Both Flew

That “dear winged ‘Yak’” was the Yakovlev Yak-1 single-engine prop-driven monoplane, a warbird that made its maiden flight on January 13, 1940, and officially entered into Soviet Air Force service later that same year. An anonymous author writing for The Military Factory assesses the plane thusly:

“Often overshadowed by its contemporaries in the West (to include the Supermarine Spitfire, North American P-51 Mustang, Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke Wulf Fw 190) the early production Yakovlev fighter aircraft were some of the best piston-engined fighters during World War 2.”

The Yak-1’s tech specs and vital stats included:

About the Author: Christian D. Orr

Christian D. Orr was previously a Senior Defense Editor for National Security Journal (NSJ) and 19FortyFive. He is a former Air Force Security Forces officer, Federal law enforcement officer, and private military contractor (with assignments worked in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, Japan, Germany, and the Pentagon). Chris holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Southern California (USC) and an M.A. in Intelligence Studies (concentration in Terrorism Studies) from American Military University (AMU). He has also been published in The Daily Torch, The Journal of Intelligence and Cyber Security, and Simple Flying. Last but not least, he is a Companion of the Order of the Naval Order of the United States (NOUS). If you’d like to pick his brain further, you can ofttimes find him at the Old Virginia Tobacco Company (OVTC) lounge in Manassas, Virginia, partaking of fine stogies and good quality human camaraderie.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.