Jack Kruse, Author

Creating memorable characters is not easy. They seldom appear full blown. Just like meeting someone new, it takes a while to get to know them. I’m sure my experience is not unlike that of many other writers. You may think you know a character when you first start to write about it, but, as scene follows scene and the writer puts the character in a number of different situations and makes it jump a number of hurtles, the individual begins to come through.

The main character in my work in progress is Katrina Safronova. As I introduced her I knew she flew Yakovlev fighters and had fought in the air war over Stalingrad in the fall and winter of 1942/43, that she had been wounded in combat, (splinter through the left bicep), and that she had two personal victories and one shared victory. That told me she was one tough cookie, especially since she wanted to go back into combat to drive the Fascist invaders from her homeland.

Success in the air in a fighter at any time in the history of air combat requires the mental agility of a cat, the physical strength of an athlete, the ability to think in three dimensions making mathematical calculations under unthinkable emotional and physical pressure and all in fractions of a second. Katrina has a core of steel and an indomitable spirit. As the saying goes, there are two types of fighter pilots: the hunter, and the one who knows in his heart he is the hunted.

After three months in hospitals, Katrina is ready and eager to go back into combat. At the beginning of my work in progress she is flying a replacement aircraft for a squadron based at Belgorod south of the Kursk salient in the Ukraine. Three other women, also flying replacement aircraft, accompany her as replacements of casualties the squadron suffered during the Battle of the Kursk Salient.

The squadron they join has been all male. The squadron is happy to get the replacement aircraft but not so happy to get women pilots. They consider these women to be sub-standard replacements. As a male, telling this story from a woman’s perspective, I may seem under qualified. It takes a considerable amount of chutzpa to think I can take on this project and make it a success. As a writer, I took it on because I felt it was a story that needed to be told. Women now fly fighters in the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, and fly a number of aircraft for the Army of the United States.

I am not a fighter pilot, but I am a life long student of war in the air. As a Naval Flight Officer in the United States Navy I was a navigator and an airborne anti-submarine warfare tactical coordinator. In training I was indoctrinated into formation flying and air combat maneuvers, so I have a platform with some credibility. And I felt a duty to tell this story, before the accomplishments of these women were totally forgotten.

Katrina has, for me, after writing some 95,000 words, become a complex, multi-faceted, 22 year old women tempered in the heat of combat, and unwilling to allow any man, anywhere in the world, to look down on her, in spite of the fact that she is short.