The Night Witches: The Soviet Women Who Bombed Nazis in Plywood Planes With the Engines Cut Off

German soldiers on the Eastern Front learned to dread a specific sound: a faint whooshing, like wind through canvas, arriving out of total darkness with no engine noise to warn them. By the time they heard it, the bombs were already falling. They called the source of that sound Nachthexen, the Night Witches, and offered the Iron Cross to any pilot who could shoot one down. It should have been an easy medal to earn. The aircraft making that sound were biplanes built for crop dusting, made of plywood and canvas, flown by women who carried no parachutes, no radar, and often no guns at all.

The Night Witches were the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Force, and they were the first women in the 20th century to fly direct combat missions against an enemy.

Why the Soviet Union Let Women Fly Combat

Aviation was genuinely fashionable in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, and thousands of young women belonged to flying clubs, trained in gliders and light aircraft, and treated pilots the way some cultures treated movie stars. Marina Raskova, sometimes called the Soviet Union’s Amelia Earhart, had set long-distance flight records and become a national celebrity.

When Germany invaded in June 1941, Soviet women joined the war effort in enormous numbers, serving as snipers, medics, and partisans directly on the front lines. Female pilots, however, remained barred from combat. Raskova began receiving letters from women across the country asking a fair question: why could they carry rifles and throw grenades but not fly? She took the argument directly to Stalin, using her personal standing to push it through. On October 8, 1941, an order created three all-women air regiments. The 588th Night Bomber Regiment was one of them.

More than 2,000 women applied. Raskova selected around 400, most between 17 and 26 years old, many still students. They trained at a compressed pace at the Engels School of Aviation, expected to learn in months what typically took years, and every recruit had to be capable of serving as pilot, navigator, mechanic, and ground crew.

Flying a Coffin With Wings

The military equipped the 588th with Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes, a 1928 design intended for crop dusting and basic flight training, not war. Pilots described the aircraft, made of plywood with canvas stretched over the frame, as “a coffin with wings.” One veteran put it more bluntly to a historian decades later: “One direct hit and it caught fire and burned up completely in the air, before reaching the ground. Like a match.”

The Po-2 had a top speed of roughly 90 miles per hour and could carry only two bombs, one slung under each wing. Because of the weight limits and the low altitude the planes were forced to fly at, the regiment had no radios, no guns for most of the war, and no parachutes until 1944, since every extra pound cut into bomb capacity. If captured, some pilots carried a single pistol round reserved for themselves rather than face what happened to Soviet prisoners of war.

Winters made it worse. Flying in open cockpits at altitude, pilots endured frostbite regularly. One surviving Night Witch, Nadezhda Popova, later told historian Albert Axell: “When the wind was strong it would toss the plane. In winter, when you’d look out to see your target better, you got frostbite, our feet froze in our boots, but we carried on flying.”

The Tactic That Made the Coffin Work

What the Po-2 lacked in armor or speed, it made up for in stealth, almost by accident. The plane’s maximum speed was actually lower than the stalling speed of the German Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters, meaning those aircraft physically could not slow down enough to fire on a Po-2 without risking their own stall. The wood-and-canvas construction also made it nearly invisible to radar, and its small engine ran cool enough to slip past infrared detection.

The regiment turned these accidental advantages into a deliberate strategy. Planes flew in groups of three toward heavily defended targets ringed with German searchlights and anti-aircraft guns. Two aircraft flew in first as bait, splitting off in different directions once the searchlights locked onto them, deliberately drawing fire away from the real attack. While the Germans tracked the decoys, the third pilot cut her engine entirely and glided in silent darkness toward the target. The only sound was air moving over the wings and struts, the whooshing the Germans came to fear. The navigator dropped the bombs. The pilot restarted the engine, hopefully, and flew clear.

Crews repeated this cycle eight to eighteen times in a single night, landing, reloading, and taking off again, for missions that each lasted only 30 to 50 minutes. Over the course of the war, the regiment flew more than 23,000 sorties and dropped over 3,000 tons of bombs.

What It Cost

Thirty-two members of the regiment died in service, including Marina Raskova herself, killed in a crash near Stalingrad in January 1943 after finally being sent to the front line she had fought to create. She received the first state funeral of the war and was buried in the Kremlin wall.

Twenty-three Night Witches received the Hero of the Soviet Union award, the country’s highest military honor, making the 588th the most highly decorated women’s unit in the Soviet Air Force. Nadezhda Popova was shot down repeatedly and once returned from a mission to find her plane had taken 42 bullet holes. She survived the war, married a fellow pilot, and raised a son who became a general. Decades later she reflected: “I sometimes stare into the blackness and close my eyes. I can still imagine myself as a young girl, up there in my little bomber. And I ask myself, ‘Nadia, how did you do it?'”