The Night Witches, the Five Eighty-Eighth Night Bomber Regiment, and the Women Who Cut Their Engines and Glided a Wood-and-Canvas Biplane Down Onto the German Line

The Night Witches were the airwomen of the Soviet 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, an all-female unit that flew night raids against German forces on the Eastern Front during World War II. Flying obsolete Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes made of plywood and canvas, they cut their engines and glided silently over their targets so the only warning German soldiers heard was a soft swishing sound, like a broom sweeping the sky. The German troops called them Nachthexen - “Night Witches” - and the name stuck.

Who Were the Night Witches?

In the summer of 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Millions of German soldiers poured east, and the Soviets were losing ground, men, and aircraft at a catastrophic rate. They needed anyone who could fly.

Enter Marina Raskova, a famous Soviet navigator and pilot who had set long-distance flying records before the war. She was a household name - the Soviet equivalent of the celebrity aviators Americans admired in that era.

Thousands of young women wrote to Raskova begging to fight. Many were already trained through Soviet flying clubs, but the military kept turning them away: go home, roll bandages, this is men’s work.

Raskova took those letters straight to the top. In October 1941, she won permission to form three all-women air regiments - with women serving as pilots, navigators, mechanics, and armorers. Every job on the flight line done by women. It had never happened anywhere in the world. One of those three units was the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment.

What Plane Did the Night Witches Fly?

They flew the Polikarpov Po-2, and understanding this airplane is key to understanding their achievement.

The Po-2 was a biplane - two wings stacked with wire and struts between them - built from plywood and canvas. It had open cockpits and two seats, one behind the other. Designed in the 1920s as a trainer and crop duster, its top speed was only about 70 to 80 knots. This was not a warplane. It was the aircraft an instructor would use to solo a student pilot.

And yet that little wood-and-fabric trainer had three tricks no modern fighter could answer.

It was deliberately slow. German fighters like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Focke-Wulf Fw 190 were fast, sleek killers - but every fighter has a stall speed. The Po-2 could fly slower than a German fighter could fly and still stay airborne. A fighter screaming in for a gun pass would blow right past the biplane, unable to slow down enough to hold his sights without falling out of the sky himself.

Its construction made it nearly invisible. Against the early-war radar and tracking of the day, a wooden airframe didn’t show up the way a metal one did. When bullets did hit, they punched clean through fabric without striking anything vital - holes the crews patched with needle and thread the next morning.

And it could go silent. That third trick earned them their name.

Why Were They Called the Night Witches?

German flak gunners and searchlight crews learned the little biplanes were coming, and a slow biplane caught in a searchlight was a dead biplane - the light holds you, and the anti-aircraft guns walk their fire right up the beam.

So the crews developed their signature technique. Approaching the target at altitude, they would throttle back to idle - sometimes shutting the engine down entirely - and glide. The engine went quiet, leaving only the wind whistling through the wires and struts. That soft whooshing descent was the sound German soldiers heard in their trenches: no engine warning, just a swish like a witch’s broom, and then the bombs.

They’d glide in silent, drop their load, firewall the throttle, and claw back up into the dark before the searchlights could find the source of the sound.

They often flew in groups of three. Two aircraft would go in first as bait, jinking and weaving to draw every searchlight and flak gun onto themselves. While the ground defenses chased those two, the third aircraft glided in with its engine cut, silent, and put its bombs on target. Then they rotated - each crew taking a turn as the decoy so their sisters could strike.

To the German soldiers, no man could fly like that: coming out of nowhere with no sound, gone before you could aim. So they called them Nachthexen - the Night Witches. When the women learned of the name, they embraced it with pride.

What Was It Like to Fly These Missions?

Brutal beyond most modern comprehension.

The cockpits were open to the freezing air over Russia, Ukraine, and the Caucasus in winter - no canopy, no heat, with wind screaming past at 70 knots. Frostbite was a constant threat. Some airwomen later described their hands freezing to the controls as they leaned over the side to drop bombs by hand.

In the early days, they flew without parachutes - not from recklessness, but by choice. The Po-2 could lift only so much, and every pound of parachute was a pound of bombs they couldn’t drop. They carried the extra ordnance instead.

They usually had no radios, navigating with a map, a compass, a stopwatch, and their eyes - pure dead reckoning in the dark, over territory where a navigation error put you above an enemy airfield.

Because the aircraft could carry only a couple hundred kilograms of bombs at a time, one sortie was never enough. A crew would land, and while they sat in the cockpit, female ground crews sprinted out with flashlights to rehang bombs and refuel by hand - sometimes in five minutes flat - and then the crew took off again. On the busiest nights, a single crew might fly eight, ten, or a dozen sorties before dawn. Some accounts describe eighteen sorties in one night - eighteen trips through the searchlights and the flak. And then they did it again the next night, for years.

Who Was Nadezhda Popova?

Nadezhda “Nadya” Popova is one of the most celebrated of the Night Witches. She joined young, driven in part by the war reaching her own home - her family’s house was overrun and her brother was killed. By the accounts that survive, she flew hundreds of combat missions.

One night stayed with her for the rest of her life. She was shot down, survived, and while retreating on the ground among a column of wounded soldiers and refugees, she met a wounded fighter pilot named Semyon. After the war - after both had survived - they married. Two pilots who met in the wreckage of the worst days of the war and spent the rest of their lives together.

Nadya Popova died in 2013, well into her nineties, and near the end she said she still couldn’t quite believe what she and those young women had done in such fragile airplanes.

What Did the Night Witches Achieve?

The cost was real. Women died - burning in the air without parachutes, held in searchlight beams, lost to weather, ice, and mechanical failure over enemy territory.

The regiment flew for roughly three years, until the end of the war in Europe, completing on the order of 20,000 or more combat sorties - some accounts put the figure above 23,000. Thousands upon thousands of bombs, delivered one wood-and-canvas trip at a time.

For that service, the 588th earned the Soviet Union’s highest honors. It was made a Guards unit, an honorific reserved for the best, and became the 46th Guards Night Bomber Regiment. More than twenty of its women were named Hero of the Soviet Union, the nation’s top decoration - the equivalent of the American Medal of Honor - from a single regiment the army had originally told to go home and roll bandages.

They remained a women’s regiment from first to last: pilots, navigators, mechanics, armorers, and commanders - women who had learned to fly in dusty flying clubs, volunteered, buried their friends, patched bullet holes by lantern light, and flew again the next night.

Why the Night Witches Still Matter

Their story is a rebuttal to anyone who claims a certain kind of person doesn’t belong in the air. The airplane doesn’t care who’s flying it, and the air doesn’t check your papers - it only asks whether you can do the job. These women did it better than almost anyone who ever lived.

There’s also a lesson in pure airmanship. That silent glide - no engine, no radio, barely any instruments, just a stick, a stopwatch, and a clear picture of exactly where the ground was coming up in the dark - is the oldest and purest kind of flying there is. Feel the airplane. Know where you are. Trust your hands. The Night Witches flew on nothing but that, straight into the guns, night after night, until an entire army learned to fear the sound of the wind.

Key Takeaways

The Night Witches were the Soviet 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, an all-female unit formed in October 1941 after aviator Marina Raskova won approval for three women’s air regiments.
They flew the Polikarpov Po-2, a slow 1920s plywood-and-canvas biplane whose low speed, near-invisibility, and ability to glide silently made it deadly at night.
Their signature tactic was cutting the engine and gliding over the target so the only warning was a soft swishing sound - earning the German nickname Nachthexen (“Night Witches”).
Crews flew in open cockpits in freezing cold, often without parachutes or radios, sometimes flying up to 18 sorties in a single night across roughly three years and 20,000+ combat sorties.
The regiment became the 46th Guards Night Bomber Regiment, and more than 20 of its members were named Hero of the Soviet Union.