Talk:Lydia Litvyak/@comment-28179027-20160410205938

I am retired military intelligence analyst who was deputy chief of a military intelligence section in Ottawa, Canada, at the National Defence HQ. I am also a PhD in Russian and East European history. The nonsense written about Litvyak boggles the mind. She might still be alive. How do I know? I have a copy of a document that shows that she was/is not Jewish and a book by Ekaterina Polunina, chief mechanic of the regiment in which Litvyak initially served. Polunina presented this book to me at a reunion of Soviet airwomen with North American WASPs, held in San Diego in 2005. I was appointed the keynote speaker at this remarkable event. This book successfully argues that Litvyak came down with a parachute and was captured by the enemy while her empty aircraft crashed to the ground. All that cult of her supposedly dead body is utter nonsense. Captured by the enemy, Litvyak was incarcerated in a PoW camp where she was seen by a male comrade from her fighter regiment who subsequenty managed to escape. In the year 2000 a Russian woman former combat pilot was interviewed on Swiss television. The program was seen and heard by one of Litvyak's former comrade-in-arms from another Soviet women's regiment. (The three regiments trained together before being posted at the front so all the airwomen knew each other.) The Russian airwoman interviewed on Swiss television did not provide her maiden name; she was married to a Swede and had been wounded twice in combat as Litvyak had been. The main thing to note from all this is that Litvyak bailed out safely from her crash landing aircraft and was immediately captured by the enemy..