Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [104]
The front end of the plane had been rammed with great force several metres into the hard ground, by the sheer momentum of the heavy engine block. The recovery team had to try and dig the cockpit out of the hard-frozen earth. They found that it was utterly smashed, and the two men’s bodies inside were severely mangled. To their great distress, the rescuers spent many hours retrieving fingers, toes, pieces of ribcage and skull from the crater, the surrounding woodlands and even the trees – some of these had to be cut down once they knew what to look for. It became clear that the plane’s impact with the trees had caused terrible damage to the cockpit, even before the final impact on the ground had crushed it once and for all.
Meanwhile Gagarin’s personal driver Fyodor Dyemchuk, who had driven him to Chkalovsky that morning, was quietly waiting for the MiG to return so that he could get his passenger back to central Moscow, to see Valya in the Kuntsevo hospital in the evening. ‘At approximately eleven o’clock [that morning] all of us learned that his radio link was lost. Everyone assumed his transmitter was out of order or something like that.’ But the mood darkened once the search party was ordered later that day. ‘We were told that a crash site had been found and we were under orders to be ready at eight o’clock in the evening. We formed a team, picked up some equipment and went to that place. There was a lot of snow, and the ground was difficult, so it took us most of the night to drive through and reach the crash site. Of course everyone was upset. Everyone felt it. The most horrible thing was the uncertainty.’
At first light next morning, the extent of the crash became clear. Dyemchuk was closely involved in the search to recover every scrap of wreckage, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. ‘The only large pieces left were the engine, some landing gear, and one wing. The rest was scattered over the entire forest by the force of impact and the explosion. We were walking through the snow. You walk and see a hole in the snow, and you dip your hand in and pull out a piece of flesh or a piece of bone. Sometimes a finger. Those were very dark days.’
Dyemchuk’s worst moment actually came two days after the crash, when he was driving a distraught Valentina Gagarina away from the hospital after her operation. Thoughtlessly he let slip some comment or other about recovering Gagarin’s body. ‘She was hysterical. She didn’t know. She thought he was found intact, or at least that the majority of body parts were found. Of course men understand very well what happens in an explosion, but how could women know about these things? She didn’t realize they were blown to pieces. Because of my naïvety, I told her. Perhaps a bitter truth is better than a sweet lie.’
Under conditions of the greatest security, Leonov, Kamanin and other colleagues were asked to attempt an identification of the two dead pilots’ body fragments. Leonov says, ‘When they showed me part of a neck, I said, “That is Gagarin.” Why? Because of a birthmark. On Saturday we were at the barber’s shop at the Yusnost Hotel. There was a barber, Igor Khoklov, who liked Yura very much, and he always cut his hair. I saw the birthmark, about three millimetres across, and I said, “Igor, be careful. Don’t cut it off.” So I knew when I saw it that we could stop searching. We wouldn’t find Gagarin out there somewhere. He was here.’
Meanwhile, one of the most intensive air-accident investigations in Soviet history was initiated. Despite the very wide scattering of wreckage, 95 per cent of the MiG-15 was recovered for analysis over the next fortnight. Even while this painstaking recovery was being carried out, fragments of heart and muscle tissue from the pilots’ shattered bodies were sent off for chemical analysis.
A standard sequence of biochemical tests was performed on the remains of all Soviet military pilots killed