The Night Witches, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, and the Soviet Women Who Flew Plywood Biplanes Against the Luftwaffe Every Night for Four Years

The Soviet 588th Night Bomber Regiment - later honored as the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment - flew more than 23,000 combat sorties against German forces between 1941 and 1945. They flew in open-cockpit plywood biplanes, at night, in temperatures as low as 40 degrees below zero. The Germans called them Nachthexen: Night Witches.

How the Night Witches Came to Exist

Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, launched in June 1941 and immediately devastated the Red Air Force. The Soviets were losing aircraft on the ground, in the air, and in nearly every engagement. The military situation was critical on every front.

Marina Raskova, one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated pilots, saw an opening. She had set long-distance aviation records throughout the 1930s and was the first woman in the Soviet Union to qualify as a military navigator. She had direct access to Stalin at a time when that access carried more weight than rank.

Raskova had been pushing for something no air force had attempted at scale: all-female combat aviation regiments. Not support roles or ferry duty - combat. Stalin approved the plan in October 1941. Three regiments, all women.

The Aircraft They Were Given

The aircraft assigned to the 588th was not what any of those volunteers had imagined. The Polikarpov Po-2 was a biplane with open cockpits and fabric stretched over a plywood frame. It had been designed in the late 1920s as a primary trainer.

Its maximum airspeed was approximately 94 miles per hour. Fully loaded with bombs, it flew considerably slower. German fighters pursuing them were doing over 300 miles per hour.

When the women of the 588th first saw their aircraft, some wept. Survivor accounts record the reaction directly.

Why the Po-2’s Weakness Became Its Greatest Tactical Advantage

What those pilots eventually understood is one of the more remarkable pieces of tactical reasoning from any theater of the war.

The Po-2 was so slow that German fighters had serious difficulty shooting it down.

The Messerschmitt Bf 109 had a stall speed of approximately 90 miles per hour, depending on variant and configuration. The Po-2 cruised at around 60 miles per hour. A German night fighter would line up a gun pass, throttle back to stay on target, and overshoot. The biplane would bank, the fighter would be past and gone. Establishing a reliable firing solution on a target moving that slowly - from an aircraft that required triple the airspeed to maintain controlled flight - proved genuinely difficult.

There were other advantages. Wood and fabric return almost no radar signature. The regiment flew at 50 to 150 feet above the ground, below the threshold where ground radar could track reliably. The missions were always at night.

The Engine-Cut Tactic That Gave Them Their Name

The 588th developed an approach that was tactically precise and, to the soldiers below, deeply unsettling.

A crew would load their bombs, take off from whatever dirt strip served as their field that night, and navigate by moonlight and terrain features - a river bend, a forest edge, a road junction. On approach to the target, the pilot cut the engine.

In the silence, the aircraft glided the final stretch in. The only sound was wind moving through the rigging wires of the biplane - a sound German soldiers described as a broomstick sweeping through the night air. That comparison, and the bombs that followed the silence, gave them the name Nachthexen.

The bombardier, who also served as navigator and handled the bombs manually, released over the target. The pilot restarted the engine, banked hard, and ran for home.

The Pace of Operations on an Active Night

The regiment flew in relays. While one crew was over the target, the next pair was ten minutes behind them, and the crew that had just returned was already being rearmed and refueled.

On an active night, a single crew might fly eight to twelve sorties. The shortest missions ran as little as thirty minutes from takeoff to landing. Then the pilots climbed out, helped rearm the aircraft, and climbed back in.

The Conditions They Flew In

The Eastern Front in winter operates at a severity that standard descriptions understate. Temperatures regularly dropped to 30 and 40 degrees below zero. The open cockpits offered no protection. The women flew in uniforms and boots issued for men, and stuffed newspaper in the toes to maintain feeling in their feet.

There was no heating. No armor plating. Early in the war, parachutes were so scarce that many crews flew without them. Command noted that a crew bailing out at 50 feet altitude had limited use for a chute. The logic held. It was not easier to live with for being logical.

The most immediate danger was fire. The Po-2 was wood, fabric, bombs, and fuel. A tracer round into the fuel tank ended the crew instantly. Several crews died that way.

Who These Women Were

The average pilot was 22 years old when she joined the regiment. Most had been university students, instructors, athletes, or engineers before enlisting. Some of the mechanics keeping the aircraft flying through the night - performing engine changes by flashlight because no light could be shown at the field - were 17 years old.

Nadezhda Popova is among the most documented figures in the regiment’s history. She flew 852 combat missions. She enlisted after German forces occupied her hometown and her brother was killed. She was 19 years old on her first combat mission and flew until the final weeks of the war in Europe.

In later interviews, she described what it felt like to be on the fifth or sixth sortie of a single night. The exhaustion, she said, was beyond any words she could find. You landed. You helped with the aircraft. You got back in the cockpit. It was not a decision. It was simply what you did.

Popova received the Hero of the Soviet Union decoration. Twenty-three members of the regiment received that honor by the end of the war - the highest distinction the country could award.

What the Regiment Accomplished Over Four Years

The 588th flew more than 23,000 combat sorties and dropped approximately 3,000 tons of bombs. The average crew flew around 800 missions before the war ended. Some flew more than 1,000.

They flew in support of the defense of Stalingrad. They crossed the Kerch Strait under fire, repeatedly. They operated from the Caucasus mountains to Poland. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, the Night Witches were still flying.

The Luftwaffe had to take them seriously regardless of what its institutional culture preferred. Officers issued standing orders to shoot down Po-2s on sight. The Iron Cross was offered to any pilot who brought one down. German veterans described the particular helplessness of hearing that sound in the dark and knowing a bomb was already falling - with no way to stop it.

Why Their Story Disappeared - and Why It Endured

The postwar years were not generous to the Night Witches. The Soviet Union, like many victorious nations, had little appetite for sustaining the narrative of female combat veterans. Many women were quietly encouraged to return to civilian life. Medals went back into drawers. During the Cold War, their story was essentially invisible in the West.

But among pilots, the reputation endured - because what those women accomplished is undeniable on its merits. They solved tactical problems with ingenuity and nerve. They flew more combat sorties than most fighter pilots on either side of the war. They did it in a biplane, in winter, over the Eastern Front, and they kept doing it.

The performance came not from the aircraft. It came from what they figured out inside it.

Sources: Night Witches by Bruce Myles; Wings, Women and War by Reina Pennington; oral histories preserved through the Russian Veterans Committee.

Key Takeaways

The 588th Night Bomber Regiment, one of three all-female Soviet combat aviation units authorized by Stalin in October 1941, became the most feared and most decorated of the three.
Flying the Polikarpov Po-2 - a fabric-and-plywood biplane with a top speed of ~94 mph - the regiment turned the aircraft’s extreme slowness into a tactical advantage: German night fighters with stall speeds near 90 mph could not maintain a firing solution.
Their signature tactic was cutting the engine on approach, gliding silently over the target, and releasing bombs by hand - giving rise to the Nachthexen nickname from German troops who heard only wind through the rigging wires before impact.
The regiment flew more than 23,000 sorties and dropped approximately 3,000 tons of bombs, with the average crew completing around 800 missions over four years.
Twenty-three members received the Hero of the Soviet Union, the country’s highest decoration - including Nadezhda Popova, who flew 852 missions beginning at age 19.