The Five Eighty-Eighth Night Bomber Regiment, the Nachthexen, and the Soviet Women Who Flew Wood and Canvas Against the Wehrmacht

The 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment flew over 23,000 sorties against Nazi Germany between 1942 and 1945, operating obsolete biplanes at night against one of the most advanced air forces in the world. German soldiers called them Nachthexen - Night Witches. The Wehrmacht took them seriously enough that any pilot who shot one down received the Iron Cross.

Who Built the 588th - and Why

To understand the regiment, you have to understand Marina Raskova, the most famous aviator in the Soviet Union by the late 1930s. In 1938, she and two crewmates flew the aircraft Rodina (Motherland) from Moscow eastward across the Soviet Union in a bid for the women’s long-distance record. The flight covered over 6,000 kilometers.

Over Siberia, with fuel critically low on the final leg, Raskova bailed out from the nose navigator’s position to reduce weight and give the other two women a fighting chance to reach the airstrip. She landed alone in the taiga with a pistol, a compass, and a few days of rations. A search party found her ten days later. The other two made the airfield.

Stalin met all three women personally when they returned to Moscow. All received the Hero of the Soviet Union award. Raskova was not yet 27 years old.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Wehrmacht drove east at a pace that stunned the world, Raskova petitioned Stalin to authorize women in combat aviation. She had spent years training female pilots and knew what they were capable of.

Stalin’s Authorization and the Three Regiments

In October 1941, with German forces within striking distance of Moscow, Stalin authorized three all-female air regiments: a fighter regiment flying Yak-1s, a dive bomber regiment flying Pe-2s, and the 588th, a night bomber regiment assigned to the Polikarpov Po-2 biplane. Raskova organized and initially commanded all three.

The women who filled these regiments came from universities, flying clubs, and aviation academies across the country. Many were teenagers. Soviet aviation culture in the 1930s had deliberately trained women alongside men, so most had some flying background - but combat flying was something else entirely.

Raskova herself commanded the dive bomber regiment. She was killed on January 4, 1943, when her Pe-2 went into the ground in bad weather on approach to a snow-covered airfield near Saratov. She was 30 years old. She is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

The 588th was commanded by Major Yevdokia Bershanskaya, who led the regiment from its first mission through the German surrender.

The Aircraft: A 1927 Biplane Against the Wehrmacht

The Polikarpov Po-2 was designed in 1927 - not 1937, not 1932. 1927. It was built as a primary trainer: wood frame, fabric and plywood skin, open tandem cockpits with no canopy, a radial engine producing around 100 horsepower, and a top speed of roughly 90 miles per hour on a good day.

The aircraft the 588th flew into combat in 1942 was a 15-year-old biplane trainer. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Focke-Wulf Fw 190 they flew against were capable of over 300 miles per hour, with armament that could shred a Po-2 in seconds. The performance gap wasn’t a disadvantage. It was a different universe.

But the Po-2 had two things that mattered. It could carry a bomb load strapped under the lower wing - not heavy, but enough. And it flew so slowly that a German fighter attempting to intercept one risked stalling if he matched its airspeed. The minimum flying speed of a German fighter was faster than the cruise speed of a Po-2.

The Tactic That Worked

The regiment built a technique around exactly this asymmetry, and it worked well enough that the Germans never found a clean counter to it.

Three aircraft would approach a target together. Two came in with engines running, absorbing the searchlights and antiaircraft fire - making noise, presenting themselves as targets. The third cut her engine.

A Po-2 with no engine running is nearly silent. The only sound is wind through the bracing wires between the wings. German soldiers described it as something like a broomstick sweeping across the sky - something moving overhead that you could feel more than hear. That third aircraft would glide silently down toward the target, sometimes below 300 feet, release her bombs, restart the engine in the noise and confusion of the explosion, and climb away before the searchlights could reacquire her. Then the three aircraft rotated and the procedure repeated.

This was not doctrine handed down from headquarters. It was operational innovation developed entirely in the field, built from an honest understanding of what their aircraft could do and what the Germans couldn’t stop.

The Operational Scale

In summer at those latitudes, darkness lasts roughly six hours. The regiment flew 15 to 18 sorties per night. Mechanics swarmed the aircraft between missions with fuel cans and bomb trolleys while pilots sometimes stayed in the cockpit to save time. Refuel, rearm, check instruments, back into the dark.

Eastern Front winters tested everything else. The Po-2 had no heating system. Open cockpits. Ground temperatures that could fall to 40 or 50 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, with wind blast at 90 mph driving the effective temperature well below the thermometer reading. The women wore padded flight suits and wrapped everything they could. They flew anyway, night after night, for three years.

Nadia Popova flew 852 combat missions with the 588th. She said in later interviews that she stopped counting the times she was shot at - the number became meaningless after a certain point.

Irina Sebrova flew over 1,000 sorties before the war ended. By nearly any measure, she flew more individual combat missions than any other pilot in any branch of any air force during the entire Second World War - more than any male fighter ace, more than any bomber crew flying from England or the Pacific.

The regiment flew without instrument lighting - it would ruin night vision. No radio navigation, no electronic aids beyond a basic compass. The navigator worked from a map on her knee and whatever the moon and stars provided.

They flew low, using terrain as reference: rivers, railroad lines, the dark shapes of forests, scattered village lights when they were visible. The navigator read the ground passing beneath them at 300 feet and called course corrections to the pilot. No backup system. No divert option if the fuel ran short or the weather closed unexpectedly. You either made it to the target and back, or you didn’t.

Several aircraft were lost to weather and navigation error in addition to combat losses. The regiment flew on.

Recognition and Redesignation

In 1943, the regiment was redesignated the 46th “Taman” Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment. The Guards designation was the highest recognition available in the Soviet military structure. The Taman name came from their operations on the Taman Peninsula during the Battle of the Caucasus.

By the end of the war, 23 members of the regiment had been awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union, the country’s highest military honor.

The total sortie count across the war stands at approximately 23,000, with some historians working from different archival sets producing figures closer to 30,000. Documentary records from those conditions were not always complete, and the range persists in the literature. Every source agrees the scale was extraordinary.

How This Story Reached English Readers

After the war, the Soviet state celebrated the Night Witches - for a while. As Soviet history was revised through the decades that followed, the story faded from prominence. Many of the surviving pilots lived long lives without significant recognition in their final years.

Western audiences encountered the 588th seriously only in the 1980s and 1990s, as historians gained better access to Soviet military records. Anne Noggle, an American who had herself served as a Women Airforce Service Pilot during the war, tracked down surviving Night Witches in the 1980s and conducted extended interviews. Her book A Dance with Death, published in 1994, was the first substantial account of this story for English-language readers. Noggle was speaking with these women pilot-to-pilot - not just interviewer to subject - and the conversations carry a weight that shows.

Historian Reina Pennington has produced the most thorough scholarly treatment of Soviet women in combat aviation in English, drawing directly from archival research.

Nadia Popova lived until 2015, dying at age 91. In late interviews, she was asked whether she had been afraid during the war. She said of course she had been. She said fear was appropriate. What mattered, she said, was what you did with it.

Key Takeaways

The 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment flew approximately 23,000 combat sorties on the Eastern Front between 1942 and 1945, operating Po-2 biplanes designed in 1927 against modern German air defenses
Marina Raskova, the Soviet Union’s most celebrated aviator, organized all three all-female air regiments authorized by Stalin in October 1941; she was killed in January 1943 at age 30
The regiment’s signature tactic - two aircraft drawing fire while a third glided silently to the target with engine cut - was self-developed in the field, not issued from doctrine
Irina Sebrova flew over 1,000 sorties, more than any other pilot of any nationality in the war; Nadia Popova flew 852
The German military awarded the Iron Cross to any pilot who shot down a Night Witch - recognition, from the enemy, that a 90 mph canvas biplane and its crew were a genuine threat worth taking seriously
A Dance with Death by Anne Noggle (1994) and the scholarly work of Reina Pennington remain the primary English-language sources on this subject