The Soviet Army’s “Night Witches”
On the Eastern Front of the Second World War, there was a Soviet unit so fearsome that any German soldier who downed one of their planes would automatically be awarded the Iron Cross. Under the cover of darkness, its soldiers carried out continuous bombing missions—anywhere up to 18 in a single night amounting to 30,000 between 1942 and 1945. And all of their recruits were women volunteers in their late teens and early twenties who decorated their aircraft with flowers and used their navigation pencils as lip color.
For this all-female unit, silent but deadly was the order of the day. The aviators would idle the engines of their plywood and canvas Polikarpov Po-2 aircraft so they could operate under complete stealth as they dropped their bombs on the unsuspecting Germans. But try as they might, they couldn’t be completely silent. As the Germans noted, the swooshing sound of their plywood planes dipping down made the noise of a witch’s broomstick. Hence the name of the unit: the Nachthexen or “Night Witches.”
It may look like forward-thinking today, and to some extent Stalin’s decision to allow a total of three military units to be composed entirely of women was. But although the generalissimo’s decision was heavily influenced by Soviet aviation heroine Marina Raskova, putting it down to a drive for gender equality on Stalin’s part is a little too generous. The creation of these units is better understood as part of his policy to mobilize as many able-bodied Russians as possible in desperate defense of the Motherland.
Being made of plywood, their aircraft were particularly susceptible to tracer bullets and would go up in flames if hit by one. During missions bullets flew all around; as Nadezhda Popova, one of the regiment’s most famous members recalled, every mission was like “sailing through a wall of enemy fire.” And to compound things further, none of the women carried parachutes—owing to the weight of their bombs the altitude they were flying at was too low. Yet by Soviet standards, the Night Witches lost relatively few of its members. Thirty women were shot down from the skies: a remarkably small number given what they were up against.