9. The Fighting Couple
When Aleksandra and Ivan Boiko first sought to join the Red Army, the draft officials refused, because both had essential jobs: Ivan was a superb heavy truck driver, while Aleksandra performed essential clerical work for her department. The couple did not give up, though, and eventually figured out a way to get into the fight. During the war, Soviet citizens could directly pay for specific new tanks and planes for the military. So, in 1943, the badass couple donated 50,000 rubles from their savings to pay for a new IS-2 heavy tank, and wrote a letter to Stalin, asking for the right to drive that tank into battle.
Stalin agreed, and the Boikos were trained as tankers in Chelyabinsk Tank School. Ivan became a tank driver, while Aleksandra became a tank commander – the only woman to have ever commanded a heavy tank during WWII. Their technically “private” tank was officially named “Kolyma”, after the Kolyma River near the couple’s Siberian town of Magadan.