In the desperate early days of the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union took the unprecedented step of forming all-female combat aviation units. The most legendary was the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, commanded by Major Yevdokia Bershanskaya.
These women flew the Polikarpov Po-2, a 1920s-era open-cockpit biplane made of plywood and canvas. It was so slow that modern fighters would stall trying to match its speed. The pilots used this limitation as a tactical advantage: they would cut their engines near the target, gliding silently through the darkness, release their bombs, then restart their engines and escape before the Germans could react.
The Germans called them Nachthexen—Night Witches—because the whooshing sound of the silent gliding biplanes reminded them of broomsticks. Any German pilot who shot down a Night Witch was automatically awarded an Iron Cross.
Operating conditions were brutal. The open cockpits exposed the women to temperatures of -40 degrees at altitude. They had no parachutes (to save weight for extra bombs), no radar, no radios, and no guns. Navigation was done by moonlight with a map on the knee. Each pilot flew 8-18 missions per night, landing, rearming, and taking off again within minutes.
The regiment flew more than 30,000 sorties over the course of the war. Twenty-three of its members were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union. Thirty pilots died in combat. Despite their extraordinary service, the regiment was disbanded immediately after the war, and the women received little recognition for decades.
Marina Raskova, the famous Soviet aviatrix who lobbied Stalin to create the female units, died in a crash in 1943 and was given a state funeral. But the individual pilots she championed—women like Nadezhda Popova, who flew 852 missions, and Irina Sebrova, who flew over 1,000—returned to civilian life with their incredible stories largely untold until glasnost in the late 1980s.