The Night Witches: Soviet Women Who Bombed the Wehrmacht in Open-Cockpit Biplanes

The 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment - originally designated the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment - flew more than 23,000 combat sorties against the Wehrmacht between 1942 and 1945. They did it in open-cockpit biplanes designed in 1927. The Germans called them Nachthexen: the Night Witches.

The Airplane That Started It All

To understand the Night Witches, you have to understand the Polikarpov Po-2. Designed in 1927 by Nikolai Polikarpov, the Po-2 was built for one purpose: to teach Soviet student pilots to fly. It was a two-seat biplane, tandem cockpits, fabric over a welded steel tube fuselage, plywood wings, and a radial engine producing roughly 100 horsepower. Top speed was approximately 90 miles per hour. Stall speed was around 45 to 50 knots.

That narrow speed envelope - the gap between stalling and maximum speed - is smaller than the cruising speed of most light aircraft today. Soviet student pilots learned to fly in the Po-2 the same way American students learned in the Stearman: grass strips, Sunday afternoons, instructors dozing in the back seat.

Nobody designed the Po-2 to go to war.

How an All-Female Regiment Came to Exist

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the scale of the military collapse was staggering. The Red Army was losing hundreds of aircraft per day. Into that crisis stepped Marina Raskova.

Before the war, Raskova was one of the most recognizable people in the Soviet Union. In 1938, she served as navigator on a long-range record-attempt flight aboard the Rodina from Moscow to the Soviet Far East. When the aircraft ran low on fuel over Siberia, Raskova was ordered to bail out of the nose position to lighten the load. She landed in dense forest and survived alone for ten days before rescue teams found her. All three crew members were awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal - the country’s highest military honor. Raskova became a national celebrity.

When the war started, letters flooded her mailbox. Women pilots, navigators, and mechanics who had trained through the Soviet aeroclub system wrote by the hundreds asking to fight. Raskova took those letters to Stalin personally. In October 1941, Stalin signed the order creating three all-female aviation regiments: one for fighters, one for day bombers, and one for night bombers.

The night bomber regiment would fly the Po-2.

Training in the Russian Winter

The women who reported to the training base at Engels, on the Volga River, in the fall of 1941 came from across the country. Some had years of flying experience. Some had barely finished school. They had roughly six months to train before deployment to the front.

They trained on the Po-2, at night, in one of the coldest Russian winters on record. Navigation meant stars, terrain features, dead reckoning, and a compass. There was no instrument approach system, no radio navigation, no autopilot. In temperatures well below zero, in open cockpits, they learned to find targets they couldn’t see and return to airfields they couldn’t see either.

The aircraft were modified to carry bombs - something the Po-2 was never designed for. Armament crews fabricated wing racks that could carry a maximum load of approximately 300 to 350 pounds. Small ordnance by any standard. But dropped accurately, from a few hundred feet, it was enough.

The Tactics That Made the Wehrmacht Afraid of Broomsticks

What the regiment developed was tactically sophisticated for the resources available.

They flew in pairs. The first aircraft - the decoy - would approach the target at altitude. German searchlights would find it, lock on, and the antiaircraft guns would orient toward it. Every eye on the ground tracked the decoy. Meanwhile, the second aircraft, offset and behind, would throttle back and cut the engine entirely, then glide toward the target in silence.

With the engine off, a Po-2 made almost no sound. German soldiers in forward positions described hearing only a soft whoosh of air through the wing bracing - like cloth tearing, like a broomstick sweeping through the dark. By the time they heard it, the bombs were already gone. The second aircraft dropped, banked away, restarted the engine in the darkness, and cleared the area. Then the two switched roles and came around again.

A crew did not fly one sortie per night. On a productive night with aircraft in serviceable condition, a single crew would fly eight to twelve sorties before dawn. Some crews logged eighteen sorties in a single night - eighteen takeoffs, eighteen approaches, eighteen bomb runs in an open-cockpit biplane.

Why German Fighters Couldn’t Stop Them

The German night fighter pilots sent to intercept the Po-2 ran into a problem with no good solution. The Messerschmitt Bf 109’s stall speed was faster than the Po-2’s top speed. A German fighter pilot who slowed down enough to get a gun solution would fall out of the sky before he could pull the trigger.

The Po-2 was also small, low, and constructed of fabric - it returned almost nothing useful to whatever detection equipment the Germans were running. Fighter pilots eventually adapted, approaching from angles that preserved more relative speed, but even then the aircraft was difficult to kill at night at low altitude.

When the Germans did manage to set a Po-2 alight, the fabric burned fast. There were losses. As German searchlight coverage expanded and antiaircraft defenses thickened deeper into the war, the regiment began taking heavier casualties. They kept flying.

The Germans, unable to explain the accuracy of nighttime bombing from aircraft that seemed to materialize from nowhere, reportedly circulated the story that Soviet women received special injections that gave them the ability to see in the dark like cats. The simpler explanation - that these crews were very good at their jobs - apparently seemed less credible.

The People Behind the Numbers

Nadezhda Popova flew 852 combat sorties over the course of the war. She was shot down multiple times and returned to flying each time. She was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal in 1945 and lived to be 91 years old, precise to the end about altitudes, headings, and what the Po-2 sounded like in the dark.

Yekaterina Ryabova flew 840 missions. On one night - the same night Popova logged her eighteen sorties - Ryabova matched her exactly. Both women completed eighteen sorties in a single night, taking off and landing eighteen times before sunrise.

Yevdokiya Bershanskaya commanded the regiment from early 1942 through the end of the war, leading it across the Caucasus, through Ukraine, into Poland, and through the final offensive operations of 1945. She was the only woman in the Soviet military to command a regiment for the duration of the entire war.

Marina Raskova, who had made the regiment possible, did not survive to see any of it. She was killed in January 1943 when her Pe-2 bomber went down attempting to land in poor visibility during a ferry flight from the factory. She was 30 years old. The Soviet government gave her a state funeral with full military honors - among the first such ceremonies conducted for a woman in Soviet history. Her ashes are in the Kremlin Wall.

The Record

The 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment was redesignated the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment - the Guards distinction being the highest unit honor in the Soviet military, awarded selectively for demonstrated combat performance. The regiment earned it.

By the end of the war:

23,000+ total combat sorties flown
23 pilots and navigators awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal
30 crew members killed in action

The regiment was formally disbanded in October 1945, a few months after the German surrender.

The postwar years were complicated for many of the women. Some were openly celebrated. Others found that Soviet society in the late 1940s and 1950s had no clear category for women who had spent three years in combat. The Cold War limited how much of the story reached the West. It was not until the 1980s, and more completely after the fall of the Soviet Union, that the full record became widely known outside Russia.

The Po-2’s Afterlife

The Polikarpov Po-2 remained in production until 1953, with a total build of approximately 40,000 aircraft. Some are still airworthy, appearing at airshows and in museum collections.

When you see one - that small, slow, honest biplane with the fabric wings and the hundred-horsepower engine - it is worth pausing on what it carried, and who was at the controls.

Key Takeaways

The 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment (later the 46th Guards) was an all-female Soviet unit that flew 23,000+ combat sorties in Po-2 biplanes from 1942 to 1945.
The Po-2 was a 1927 trainer with a 90 mph top speed - slower than the stall speed of the Bf 109, making conventional fighter interception nearly impossible.
Crews flew 8 to 18 sorties per night using a two-aircraft tactic: one decoy to draw searchlights, one gliding in silent with the engine off.
23 crew members were awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union; 30 were killed in action.
Marina Raskova, who convinced Stalin to create the regiment in October 1941, was killed in a landing accident in January 1943 at age 30 - two years before the regiment she founded reached Berlin.

Sources: Bruce Myles, Night Witches (1981); Anne Noggle, A Dance with Death; Russian State Military Museum archives; Air & Space magazine.