The engine dies. The plywood biplane goes silent, gliding through the black Ukrainian sky at 1,200 metres. Below, German searchlights sweep the darkness. Flak crews wait, listening. They hear nothing — just a faint whisper of wind through wire struts. Then the bombs fall. By the time the explosions tear open the fuel depot, the women are already banking away into the night. No engines. No parachutes. Just two Soviet pilots in their twenties, doing it all over again in 45 minutes.

The Germans called them Nachthexen — Night Witches. They meant it as an insult. The women of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment wore it like a medal.

Born from Necessity — and One Woman’s Stubbornness

In the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany tore through the Soviet Union with terrifying speed. Stalin needed every body he could find. Marina Raskova — already a Soviet celebrity, the first woman to earn a Navigator’s Licence, holder of multiple long-distance aviation records — saw her moment. She petitioned Stalin personally and received Order No. 0099 on 8 October 1941: authorisation to form three all-female combat aviation regiments.

Young women from across the USSR flooded in. University students. Factory workers. Gliding club members. Most had never flown in combat. None cared. Within months, Major Yevdokiya Bershanskaya — ten years a pilot, described by her colleagues as “austere, modest, self-possessed” — had forged them into the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Their first combat mission flew on 12 June 1942. They would not stop for three years.

The Po-2: History’s Most Unlikely Weapon

The Polikarpov Po-2 was not a warplane. Built in 1928 as a crop duster and trainer, it was made of plywood, canvas, and wire. Its top speed — around 120 km/h — was slower than many German fighters’ stalling speed, meaning the Luftwaffe couldn’t slow down enough to shoot it without falling out of the sky. It carried a maximum of 200 kg of bombs. It had no radar, no radio, no armour, and no ejection seat.

The Night Witches carried no parachutes either. Not because they were forbidden — because a parachute weighed the same as two extra bombs, and the women made their own calculation. Two more bombs per sortie, multiplied across 18 sorties a night, multiplied across three years of war. The mathematics of total commitment.

What looked like weakness became tactical genius. The Po-2 flew too low and too slow for German radar to track reliably. Its wood-and-fabric construction made it nearly invisible to early infrared detection. And when the pilots cut the engine on final approach, it was completely silent. A wooden ghost in the dark.

The Silent Kill: How the Tactic Worked

The Night Witches developed a three-aircraft attack pattern that became one of the war’s most effective low-tech solutions to a high-tech problem. Two planes would approach the target with engines running, drawing German searchlights and flak. As gunners fixed on them, the third — carrying the bombs — would cut her engine and glide silently from a different angle. The decoy pair scattered as the third dropped her payload and restarted her engine in the dive away.

The glide approach lasted two to four minutes of absolute silence. Navigator and pilot communicated by tapping each other’s shoulders. The navigator would feel the altitude, watch the target shape below, and tap once — now. The pilot would release. Then: fire, noise, chaos below, and the quiet biplane already climbing away into the black.

German soldiers who survived the raids described the sound as identical to a witch’s broomstick — a rhythmic whooshing as wind passed through the bracing wires. The name stuck instantly. Any Luftwaffe pilot who shot one down received an automatic Iron Cross. Few did. The Po-2 was simply too slow, too small, too dark to catch reliably at night.

The Women Behind the Legend

Nadezhda Popova flew 852 combat missions. On one sortie she returned with 42 bullet holes in her aircraft — and her helmet. On another, she bombed a fuel depot, took fire, and belly-landed her burning plane behind Soviet lines before walking back to base. In a single night over Poland she flew 18 sorties, each round-trip no longer than 45 minutes, taking off in darkness, landing, reloading, and going back into the sky. She died in 2013 at age 91, still sharp, still furious that people were surprised women could do this.

Irina Sebrova flew 1,008 sorties — more than any other pilot in the regiment. On a mission over Grudziądz, her plane was hit and she crash-landed deep in forest. She and her navigator spent days trekking through German-held territory, navigating by stars. They arrived back at base to find the regiment had already mourned them.

Thirty-two members of the regiment died in combat. Twenty-three were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union — more than any other women’s unit in the war. Commander Bershanskaya received the Order of Suvorov, the only woman ever to do so. The regiment was redesignated the 46th “Taman” Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment — one of the Soviet military’s highest honours.

What They Left Behind

After the war, the Soviet military quietly disbanded its female combat units. Women were thanked and demobilised. Many returned to universities. Evdokia Pasko, who flew 800 sorties, earned a PhD in mathematics and taught at Bauman University for four decades. Others flew commercial routes or took posts in aviation administration. The regime that had needed them in crisis found them inconvenient in peacetime.

But the Night Witches were never truly gone. Their story survived in fragments — interviews, memoirs, a 1981 Soviet film, and eventually the internet. Today they are taught in military history courses worldwide as examples of adaptive tactics, unconventional warfare, and the gap between what resources you have and what you can achieve with them.

Over 23,000 sorties. Three thousand tons of bombs. Thirty-two killed in action. Twenty-three heroes. All of it done in the dark, in silence, in a plywood trainer from 1928 — by women who left their parachutes on the ground so they could carry two more bombs.

Sources: National WWII Museum; History.com; Virginia Tech Undergraduate Historical Review; Wikipedia — 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment