Introduction: “I Love My Soldiers”: Comradely Bonding and Alternative Cultures of Combat Violence

By March 1943, eighteen-year-old Junior Lieutenant Valentina Chudakova had been the woman commander of a male machine-gun platoon – this most basic technical unit of the trenches, twenty-four men and four machine guns – for more than two months. The Central front, where her platoon was entrenched, was relatively quiet in early 1943. She and her soldiers spent most of their time digging in and participating in local skirmishes. By early March, the front began to move in its first large-scale offensive of the year. After the first days of combat, Chudakova's platoon took a short rest by the remains of Novolisino, the village that it had just helped liberate. Depicting the scene in her first book of recollections, A Bird of Strong Character, she drew a picture of the changes that had taken place in her relationship to her soldiers since the end of 1942. The machine gunners, mostly young men, had greeted Chudakova with shocked looks, challenges to her technical expertise, and outright insubordination. By the following spring, they had coalesced into a platoon of “her lads.” Sitting nearby, Chudakova stared at them affectionately and with a latent awareness of their male physical beauty: