Marina Raskova, the Night Witches of the Soviet Five-Eighty-Eighth Regiment, and the Glide Attack That Made German Soldiers Fear the Sound of Silence

Between 1942 and 1945, a regiment of Soviet women flew over 23,000 combat sorties against German forces on the Eastern Front, in open-cockpit biplanes designed in 1927. They attacked at night, cut their engines on final approach, and dropped their bombs in near-total silence. The Germans called them Nachtexen - Night Witches. The name stuck.

Who Was Marina Raskova?

Marina Raskova was already one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated aviators before the war began. In 1938, she served as navigator aboard the ANT-37 “Rodina” (Motherland) on a record-breaking 1,800-mile flight across Siberia. When fuel ran critically low and the commander ordered the crew to shed weight, Raskova bailed out over the taiga - alone, with a survival kit and a pistol - and walked through Siberian wilderness for ten days before search teams found her.

The flight set a world record for women’s long-distance aviation. The Soviet government awarded each crew member the Hero of the Soviet Union, the country’s highest honor. Raskova became a national figure: her face appeared on posters, she lectured at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, and she answered letters from thousands of young women who wanted to fly.

That fame became a strategic asset.

How the Night Witches Came to Exist

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In the months that followed, thousands of Soviet women with flight training wrote to the government demanding to fight. They were trained pilots and navigators, many of them products of the OSOAVIAKHIM civil aviation clubs. The Red Army was in existential crisis, having lost entire armies to German encirclement, and didn’t know what to do with them.

Raskova went directly to Stalin.

In October 1941, with German forces having advanced hundreds of miles into Soviet territory, she requested three all-female aviation regiments. Stalin agreed. Order Number 341, signed October 8, 1941, created a fighter regiment, a dive-bomber regiment, and a night bomber regiment. Raskova commanded the entire training program at Engels, on the Volga River.

The women who arrived were young - most in their late teens and early twenties. Some had real flying experience; many had almost none. Two-year training courses were compressed into months. They trained through winter. They wore uniforms built for men, slept in shifts for lack of beds, and stuffed newspaper inside oversized boots for insulation.

The Po-2: Why Flying It Took Extraordinary Courage

The three regiments did not receive equal aircraft. The fighter regiment got the Yak-1. The dive-bomber regiment received the Petlyakov Pe-2. Both were modern combat aircraft.

The night bomber regiment received the Polikarpov Po-2.

The Po-2 was a biplane designed in 1927 as a primary trainer. Wood frame. Fabric covered. Open cockpit. A five-cylinder air-cooled radial engine producing roughly 100 horsepower. Top speed: approximately 94 miles per hour.

For comparison, a German Messerschmitt Bf 109 cruised at around 300 miles per hour. The Po-2 was slower at top speed than a modern Cessna 172 at cruise. By 1942 it was a museum piece that had been used for pilot training for fifteen years. It had no armor, no self-sealing fuel tanks, no cockpit heating, and no radios in the early period. Navigation tools amounted to a compass, a map, and the stars. The aircraft could carry two small bombs on wing racks, later modified to carry six.

The Soviet Air Force sent these women into combat in it.

How the Glide Attack Worked

The regiment’s commander, Major Yevdokia Bershanskaya, developed tactics that converted the Po-2’s weaknesses into operational advantages.

The aircraft was too slow to outrun German fighters and too low-flying for German radar to track effectively. Its wood-and-fabric construction produced almost no radar return. Flying at night, at low altitude, it was effectively invisible.

The decisive innovation was the glide attack.

As a crew approached its target, the pilot cut the engine entirely. The aircraft descended in silence - no engine noise, only the soft sound of wind moving through fabric and bracing wires. German defenders below heard nothing that identified an aircraft. The crew held the glide, released the bombs by judgment and timing, then the pilot restarted the engine and climbed away.

German soldiers who heard that sound - that whisper in the dark followed by explosions - began calling the attackers Nachtexen: Night Witches.

The regiment also flew in pairs. A decoy aircraft came in first and drew the searchlights, maneuvering to hold attention while the lead aircraft approached from a different angle, engine cut, in silence. The decoy broke free. They regrouped and flew home together.

Then they refueled, rearmed, and went back.

What the Night Witches Actually Accomplished

On a typical night, each crew flew eight to twelve sorties. During summer, when darkness was brief, crews pushed to eighteen sorties in a single night. Winter temperatures on the Eastern Front dropped to 30 and 40 degrees below zero Celsius. The cockpits were open. Eyelashes froze to goggles. Hands went numb on the controls.

By the end of the war, the regiment’s record was as follows:

Over 23,000 sorties flown
Approximately 3,000 tons of bombs delivered
More than 20,000 individual medals awarded to members
23 women received the Hero of the Soviet Union
30 members killed

Thirty killed. In twenty-three thousand sorties. In an unarmored, unheated, fabric-covered biplane, against one of the best-equipped military forces in history. The tactics worked. The discipline held.

The unit was eventually redesignated the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment. In the Soviet military, the “Guards” designation was not ceremonial - it meant a unit had distinguished itself in combat beyond any reasonable expectation given its resources.

Nadezhda Popova: 852 Missions

Nadezhda Popova was 21 years old when the regiment formed. Her home village had been occupied by German forces. Her brother had been killed early in the war. She had been a trained pilot before the conflict and volunteered the day Raskova opened registration.

Popova flew 852 combat missions during the war. She was shot down multiple times, wounded, and continued flying. On more than one occasion she landed an aircraft already on fire. In 1945 she was named a Hero of the Soviet Union.

She lived to 91 years old, spending decades in interviews and lectures about the regiment. Asked late in life whether she had been afraid, she said yes - every one of them was afraid, every night. The aircraft had no armor. One incendiary round would turn it into a torch at low altitude. They knew that. They flew anyway.

“Fear is not the thing that determines what you do,” she said. “What determines what you do is what you believe you are responsible for.”

Marina Raskova’s Death

Raskova never saw the regiment complete what she had started.

On January 4, 1943, she was killed in a crash while leading her dive-bomber regiment to a new forward base in deteriorating weather. Flying low to stay beneath the cloud ceiling, her aircraft came down in a ravine. She was 30 years old.

The Soviet government held a state funeral in Moscow. Her ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall.

The regiments she had created kept flying.

Why This Story Took Decades to Surface

After the war, the Soviet military demobilized its female combat pilots and directed them back toward civilian life. The records were classified. For decades, the Night Witches were largely unknown outside the Soviet Union - partly through deliberate suppression, partly because no one in the West was looking.

The primary English-language sources that recovered this history are Reina Pennington’s Wings, Women, and War and Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War, which collects direct testimony from Soviet women veterans. Both remain authoritative accounts.

What these women were doing, in purely aeronautical terms, was among the most demanding flying the war produced: night formation flying without radios or formation lights, navigating by stars and landmarks; low-level approaches into contested airspace below weather ceilings; manual bomb release timed by judgment alone; multiple sorties per night while maintaining their own aircraft. These were not support roles. The 46th Guards flew combat at the edge of what any pilot, in any aircraft, could manage - and they did it in the worst equipment the Soviet Air Force had.

Key Takeaways

Marina Raskova leveraged her fame as a record-setting aviator to personally convince Stalin to authorize three all-female combat aviation regiments in October 1941, early in the most desperate phase of the Eastern Front war.
The 588th Night Bomber Regiment was equipped with the Po-2, a 1927-era fabric biplane with a top speed of 94 mph - slower than a modern light trainer - and flew it into combat against a fully modern military.
The regiment’s signature glide attack involved cutting the engine on final approach to achieve near-total silence, making the aircraft nearly undetectable to German defenses until bombs were already falling.
By the war’s end the unit had flown over 23,000 sorties and lost 30 members - a casualty rate that reflects both the effectiveness of the tactics and the discipline of the crews.
Nadezhda Popova flew 852 combat missions, was shot down multiple times, and survived to 91 - her accounts remaining among the most direct records of what the regiment actually experienced.