The Night Witches, the Five Eighty-Eighth Night Bomber Regiment, and the Women Who Bombed the Germans From Plywood Biplanes With the Engine Switched Off

The Night Witches were the female aviators of the Soviet Union’s 588th Night Bomber Regiment, who flew thousands of nighttime bombing missions against German forces from 1942 to the end of World War II. They flew the Polikarpov Po-2, an obsolete plywood-and-fabric training biplane, and earned their nickname by gliding over enemy positions with their engines cut off - the only sound a soft whooshing that German soldiers compared to a witch’s broomstick. It was, on paper, the worst possible aircraft to send into combat. In practice, it made them nearly impossible to catch.

Who Were the Night Witches?

The Germans called them the Nachthexen - the Night Witches. They were young women, most barely out of their teens, flying what looked like the sorriest excuse for a warplane imaginable: an open-cockpit trainer of canvas stretched over wooden ribs, so slow a modern car could pass it on the highway.

The story begins in the fall of 1941. Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, and the front was collapsing as German forces drove east faster than anyone believed possible.

In Moscow was a woman named Marina Raskova - a national hero, the Soviet equivalent of Amelia Earhart, famous across the country for long-distance record flights. Every schoolchild knew her name.

Young women all over the Soviet Union were writing letters begging to fly and fight. Many already held licenses, having trained through the state aeroclubs that taught tens of thousands of ordinary kids to fly gliders and light aircraft in the 1930s. They could fly. They simply weren’t allowed near the front.

Raskova took those letters directly to Stalin and won permission to form three regiments of women - pilots, navigators, mechanics, and armorers, all women from top to bottom. Nobody had ever done such a thing. One of those units became the 588th Night Bomber Regiment.

What Aircraft Did the Night Witches Fly?

They flew the Polikarpov Po-2, and the airplane is half the story.

It was a two-seat biplane designed in the 1920s as a basic trainer - a wooden frame, fabric skin, two open cockpits front and back, and a small air-cooled radial engine turning a wooden propeller. Its top speed was roughly 100 mph downhill with a tailwind, and its cruise was closer to 60–65 mph. A Piper Cub would look like a hot rod beside it.

On paper, that made it a death trap over a battlefield. In reality, its weaknesses became weapons.

The Po-2 was so slow it flew below the stall speed of the German fighters sent to intercept it. A Messerschmitt Bf 109 making a firing pass would blow right past the tiny biplane and be forced to come around again. The women learned to throttle back and practically hover, jinking down into the treeline where the fast fighters could not follow.

The wood-and-fabric airframe was also hard for the radar of the day to detect, and its small engine ran quiet. Together, those traits made their signature tactic possible.

How Did the Night Witches Bomb With the Engine Off?

They flew in groups of three toward a German position. Two aircraft went in first as bait, drawing the searchlights and antiaircraft fire. While the defenders were fixated on those two, the third pilot cut her engine and glided in - dead stick, silent, over the enemy lines in total darkness.

The only thing German soldiers on the ground heard was a soft whooshing: the wind sighing through the wires and struts of the little biplane as it ghosted overhead. Then the bombs came off the racks. That whispering swish in the dark is exactly why the Germans called them witches - it sounded, they said, like the swish of a broomstick.

The pilot would then restart her engine, and the three aircraft would swap roles and do it again. This wasn’t a stunt. Their aircraft were wood and canvas soaked in flammable dope; a single tracer round could turn one into a torch. Cutting the engine to come in silent was the difference between getting home and burning up over a trench.

How Many Missions Did They Fly?

Because the Po-2 could carry only a few hundred pounds of bombs - sometimes just crude ones rolled off by hand - a single trip over the target did almost nothing. To do real damage, they had to go back again and again.

So they flew all night, every night the weather allowed. Ground crews, also women, ran out in the dark to reload bombs by hand in minutes, fingers cracked and bleeding from the frozen metal, then refueled and launched the aircraft again.

Eight sorties a night was a normal shift. On the worst nights - over the Crimea, and later pushing into Poland and Germany - some flew 15, 16, even 18 trips before sunrise. Over a full career, some of these women flew close to 1,000 combat sorties. Not a thousand hours - a thousand times over the guns, in an airplane made of sticks and canvas.

What Was It Like in the Cockpit?

It was brutal. The open cockpit had no canopy and no heater, nothing between the pilot and the sky. Temperatures dropped to 30 below zero, and a 100-mph river of icy wind poured straight into the crew’s faces. Pilots later described frostbite and skin left behind on the frozen metal of the airframe.

There was no radio. Pilot and navigator communicated through a speaking tube or simply shouted to each other. Navigation was by dead reckoning - a stopwatch, a compass, and memorized rivers and roads in the dark.

For most of the war there were no parachutes. The command decided the extra weight cost them bombs, so the crews flew without. If the aircraft caught fire, they rode it down.

When they came over the target, searchlights swept the sky in great cones of blue-white light. To be “coned” was to be pinned like a moth to a board while every gun on the ground opened up. This was flying on the ragged edge - slow, underpowered, heavily loaded, at night, in weather, with no instruments and no way to call for help. It was pure, seat-of-the-pants airmanship: hands, feet, nerve, and a wooden propeller.

Nadezhda Popova and the Legacy of the 588th

One of the most famous Night Witches was Nadezhda Popova, who flew with the regiment from its early days. On one night, she is said to have flown 18 sorties. Her aircraft came home riddled so often she stopped counting the holes - until one night she landed and found 42 of them, in the wings, fuselage, her helmet, and her map. Then she went back up.

By the end of the war, Popova had flown roughly 852 combat missions. She survived to old age and told her story. Many of her friends did not.

The 588th Night Bomber Regiment flew from 1942 to the end of the war, fighting over the Caucasus, the Kuban, Novorossiysk, and Sevastopol, then westward into Poland and up to Berlin. Twenty-three of its members were named Heroes of the Soviet Union, the nation’s highest honor. It became the most decorated female unit in the entire Soviet air force. More than 30 of its women died in the effort.

Heroism in the air was never about horsepower. Some of the bravest flying of the entire war was done low and slow, in the dark and the cold, in a plywood trainer with the engine switched off - by a teenage girl gliding silent over the guns because it was the only way she and her friends would live to fly again the next night. That is airmanship, in an airplane you could build in a barn.

Key Takeaways

The Night Witches were the women of the Soviet 588th Night Bomber Regiment, active from 1942 to the war’s end, and the most decorated female unit in the Soviet air force.
They flew the Polikarpov Po-2, a 1920s plywood-and-fabric trainer whose extreme slowness (cruise ~60 mph) let it fly below the stall speed of German fighters.
Their signature tactic was cutting the engine and gliding in silently at night - the whooshing sound inspired the “witch” nickname.
With tiny bomb loads, crews flew up to 18 sorties a night, and some accumulated close to 1,000 combat missions, enduring open cockpits, no radios, and (for most of the war) no parachutes.
Twenty-three members earned the title Hero of the Soviet Union; pilot Nadezhda Popova flew about 852 missions and once returned with 42 bullet holes in her aircraft.