 She was aged just fifteen at the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War in June 1941 but promptly volunteered for military service in Smolensk after a train she was travelling on was bombed "en route" to Brest.Adding two years to her age, she was rejected by the recruitment office but was accepted by a military hospital.The patients of the hospital soon had to be evacuated after the building was bombed but Mikhailova-Demina stayed behind, as Germans advanced towards Moscow through the summer of 1941, to work as a field medic for the Red Army (which was desperately short of medical personnel).