The Night Witches, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, and the Women Who Glided Wood-and-Canvas Biplanes Over the German Lines With the Engine Cut

The Night Witches were the women of the Soviet 588th Night Bomber Regiment, who flew tens of thousands of nighttime bombing raids against German forces on the Eastern Front between 1942 and 1945. They flew the Polikarpov Po-2, an obsolete 1920s wood-and-fabric training biplane, gliding silently over enemy lines with their engines throttled back to idle. German soldiers named them Nachthexen - “Night Witches” - for the broomstick-like whisper of wind over their wings.

Who Were the Night Witches?

In the autumn of 1941, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, and the Red Army was collapsing backward across a thousand miles of front. The country needed anyone who could fly.

Thousands of young women wrote letters volunteering to fight, and most were turned away at the recruiting office. One woman changed that: Marina Raskova, a record-setting long-distance pilot and navigator who was as famous in the 1930s Soviet Union as Amelia Earhart was in America.

Raskova took the letters directly to Stalin and won permission to form three regiments of women aviators - pilots, navigators, mechanics, and armorers, all of them women. One of those became the 588th Night Bomber Regiment.

What Aircraft Did They Fly?

They flew the Polikarpov Po-2, a 1920s primary trainer built of fabric stretched over a wooden frame. Flat out, with the wind behind it, the Po-2 might reach 60 to 70 miles per hour. A modern fighter of the era could do 350. This little biplane was slower than some cars.

On paper it looked like a death sentence - sending young women to war in a crop duster. But the Po-2 hid two enormous advantages.

First, it was too slow to shoot down easily. A Messerschmitt’s stall speed was higher than the Po-2’s top speed, meaning a German fighter had to fly dangerously slow just to line up a shot - risking a stall of its own. The Po-2 could out-turn anything the Luftwaffe had, drop into valleys, and weave between trees where fast aircraft couldn’t follow.

Second, it could glide almost silently. The light airframe and large wing area let the pilot throttle the engine back to idle and coast in near-silence, with only the sound of wind singing through the flying wires.

Why Were They Called the Night Witches?

The name came from how they attacked. The crews approached the German lines a couple thousand feet up with the engine running, then cut the throttle short of the target and glided in silently through the dark.

The men on the ground heard nothing until the soft whoosh of wind over the wings passed overhead - a sound that reminded German soldiers of a witch’s broomstick sweeping through the night. They called them Nachthexen, the Night Witches. The women earned the name and wore it with pride.

After releasing their bombs - hand-hung under the wings by armorers working bare-fingered in the freezing dark - the pilot would firewall the little engine, claw back up, and run for home.

What Did They Fly Without?

The Night Witches went to war stripped of nearly everything a combat aviator relies on:

No parachutes, at first. A parachute’s weight meant one fewer bomb, so early crews left them behind and carried more ordnance instead.
No radios. They navigated by dead reckoning - stopwatch, compass, and a map on the knee - in the dark and cold, over a landscape lit by searchlights and tracer fire.
No guns. With no forward-firing machine guns, their only defense for most of the war was a slow, patient turn, the darkness, and their own nerve.
No real instruments. Just a few basic gauges, read by the glow of a flashlight held between the teeth.

What they had was each other - and numbers.

How Did They Fly So Many Missions?

Because the Po-2 carried only a couple of bombs at a time, the crews made it count by going back again and again. A single crew might fly eight, ten, or twelve sorties in one night - land, taxi in, let the armorers hang two more bombs and top off the fuel, then launch again into the dark. On record nights, the best crews flew eighteen sorties in a single night.

The conditions were brutal. In open cockpits at 40 degrees below zero, pilots’ hands stopped working after a few hours. Some women had to be lifted from their cockpits, frozen stiff, and handed cups of tea they couldn’t feel. Bare skin stuck to frozen metal and tore away; the armorers loaded bombs with bleeding fingers.

The Searchlight Tactic

To beat the searchlights and flak, the Night Witches developed one of the boldest tactics in aviation history. They flew in groups of three.

Two aircraft would deliberately fly into the searchlight beams - drawing the lights and the guns, then throwing their airplanes around the sky, jinking and splitting apart to pull the beams in opposite directions. While every gun on the ground chased those two decoys, the third aircraft glided in silently, engine cut, and dropped its bombs on target.

Then they rotated. The bait became the bomber, and the bomber became the bait - each crew taking its turn as the target so the others could get through.

What Did the Night Witches Accomplish?

Over the war, the regiment flew more than 20,000 combat sorties - some accounts put the figure closer to 30,000 - from 1942 through the end of the war in 1945. They fought over the Caucasus, Crimea, Poland, and all the way to the outskirts of Berlin, dropping an estimated 20,000 tons of bombs on German positions.

The regiment produced more than 20 women named Hero of the Soviet Union, the nation’s highest honor. Some pilots flew close to 1,000 combat missions apiece - not hours, missions - over enemy lines at night.

Their commander, Yevdokia Bershanskaya, led the regiment for the entire war without ever losing her crews’ confidence. Navigator and pilot Nadezhda Popova flew hundreds of missions, was shot down more than once, and flew 18 sorties in a single night. Years later, as an old woman, she said she still could not understand how they had done it: “I sometimes stare into the blackness and think, how could we?”

Marina Raskova, who started it all, did not live to see the end. She was killed in a crash in early 1943 while flying to the front, was given the first state funeral of the war, and had her ashes placed in the Kremlin wall. The regiment she built flew on to the last night of the war - the Night Witches were in the air over the German capital when it was finally over.

Why the Night Witches Still Matter

Everything a warbird is celebrated for - horsepower, speed, guns, armor, sheer muscle - the Night Witches had none of it. They were handed the least airplane you could send to war and turned it into a legend by flying it better, braver, and more relentlessly than anyone thought possible. They took the aircraft’s greatest weakness - that it was slow, quiet, and small - and made it the very thing the enemy feared in the dark.

That was never about the airplane. It was about the person in the seat. The airplane doesn’t make the pilot - it never did.

Key Takeaways

The Night Witches were the Soviet 588th Night Bomber Regiment, an all-women unit that flew night bombing raids on the Eastern Front from 1942 to 1945.
They flew the Polikarpov Po-2, an obsolete wood-and-fabric biplane trainer with a top speed of just 60–70 mph, gliding in with engines cut for silent attacks.
Founded through the efforts of famed aviator Marina Raskova, who won Stalin’s approval to form three all-women air regiments.
The regiment flew 20,000–30,000 combat sorties, dropped roughly 20,000 tons of bombs, and produced more than 20 Heroes of the Soviet Union, with some pilots flying nearly 1,000 missions each.
Their legacy proves that skill, courage, and relentlessness matter more than the machine - the airplane doesn’t make the pilot.