The Night Witches, the Polikarpov Po Two Biplane, and the Soviet Women Who Bombed Germany's Eastern Front from Open Cockpits

Between 1942 and 1945, an all-female Soviet aviation regiment flew an obsolete crop-dusting biplane on nightly bombing raids over German-held territory on the Eastern Front. They cut their engines on final approach to glide silently over targets, earned the highest Soviet military honors, and became so feared that German fighter pilots received special commendations for shooting one down. The unit was called the 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, but the German soldiers they bombed called them the Nacht Hexen - Night Witches.

How the Night Witches Came to Exist

Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, launched in June 1941 with three million soldiers and Luftwaffe air superiority so complete that Soviet aircraft were destroyed by the thousands, most of them on the ground before they could get airborne. Stalin needed pilots, aircraft, and anything capable of pushing back.

The person who stepped into that crisis was Marina Raskova. In the Soviet Union, Raskova was as well known as Amelia Earhart was in America. In 1938, she and two other Soviet women flew the Rodina from Moscow to the Soviet Far East, setting a women’s distance record. The flight ended with Raskova bailing out over Siberia and surviving alone for ten days before rescue. She returned to a state reception and Stalin’s personal award of the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. She was 26 years old.

By 1941, Raskova was a major in the Soviet Air Force with a proposal: the Soviet civil aviation system had trained hundreds of women pilots who had real hours, real navigation skills, and no combat assignments because the military had never considered them for one. She went directly to Stalin and made the case for three all-female aviation regiments - a fighter regiment, a dive bomber regiment, and a night bomber regiment. Stalin said yes.

Training: Three Months Instead of Two Years

Orders went out in October 1941. Women pilots, navigators, mechanics, armorers, and ground crew reported to Engels on the Volga River. They ranged in age from 17 to 26 - university students, former flight instructors, women who had never left their home provinces.

The Soviet Air Force issued them men’s uniforms because it had never manufactured women’s flight gear and had no time to start. Boots ran three to four sizes too large; they stuffed them with rags. Helmets didn’t fit over their hair; they cut their hair. The standard pilot training pipeline ran two years. Raskova ran hers in three months.

The night bomber regiment - the 588th - was placed under the command of Major Yevdokia Bershanskaya, a former civilian flight instructor who was 26 years old when she took command. She led the regiment without interruption from its formation to the end of the war.

The Polikarpov Po-2: Why an Obsolete Biplane Became the Right Aircraft

The aircraft the 588th flew was the Polikarpov Po-2, designed in 1928 as a crop duster and trainer by Soviet engineer Nikolai Polikarpov. Two wings. A wooden frame skinned in fabric. Wire bracing and struts. Open cockpits, front and back. A 100-horsepower engine turning a wooden propeller. Maximum speed: roughly 94 miles per hour. By 1941, every military planner had written it off as a serious combat aircraft.

What made it dangerous was not performance - it was physics. The Messerschmitt Bf 109, the Luftwaffe’s primary fighter over the Eastern Front, needed to fly at well over 150 miles per hour to maintain controlled flight. Throttle back to match the Po-2’s airspeed and the aircraft stalled. German night fighters trying to intercept the biplanes literally could not slow down enough to engage them. The Po-2 occupied an airspeed range where no military fighter could follow.

Flying the Po-2 was not comfortable. In a Russian winter, with temperatures dropping to 40 or 50 below zero, an open cockpit at altitude was an endurance test by any measure. Crews wrapped themselves in sheepskin coats and stuffed newspapers inside their flight suits. Instruments frosted over. Engine oil thickened. The fabric of the wings stiffened in the worst cold until it cracked under pressure.

The navigator in the front seat had no heat, no meaningful windscreen, and hands that had to remain functional enough to hold a map, work a compass, and release bombs at the right moment. Navigation was entirely by dead reckoning - compass heading, elapsed time on a stopwatch, and whatever landmarks they could identify by moonlight or by memory. No radio aids. No radar. No electronic assistance of any kind.

The Tactic That Made German Soldiers Fear the Dark

The Po-2 could carry roughly 660 pounds of bombs - far less than any conventional military bomber. The weapon was never the payload; it was the sortie rate.

A crew from the 588th routinely flew eight to ten sorties per night. Land, reload, refuel, take off again, repeat until dawn. Fifteen sorties in a single night was documented. The record for one crew in one night was 18 sorties. Over weeks and months, those numbers built into a sustained campaign. By the end of the war, the regiment had flown over 23,000 combat sorties and dropped 23,000 tons of bombs on German targets.

The operational tactic refined this further. A small group would approach a target together. The lead aircraft flew low and drew the searchlights and antiaircraft guns, deliberately making itself visible and pulling every gun barrel in the sector toward itself. The work was lethal - a single antiaircraft round in a fabric aircraft was typically fatal.

While the lead crew worked the defenses, the second aircraft climbed above the cone of light and noise. At the right moment, the pilot cut the engine completely. In an aircraft weighing roughly 2,000 pounds, with no power, the only sounds were wind through the rigging wires, the creak of the wooden frame, the hiss of airflow over the wings. The aircraft glided silently toward the target in the dark. Bombs released. Nose up. Engine restarted. Gone before the searchlights could find the source of the explosions.

It was the German soldiers who coined the name “Night Witches,” borrowing from folklore because nothing in their military training had prepared them for what they were experiencing. German commanders issued advisories telling forward units to disperse at night, move positions regularly, and set up decoys. Luftwaffe fighter pilots who shot one down received special commendation - a measure of the institutional priority the German military had come to place on stopping them.

Notable Pilots of the 588th

Nadezhda Popova joined the regiment in its first days and flew 852 combat sorties before the war ended. She entered as a young pilot who had never dropped a bomb in combat and finished as one of the most experienced aviators in any air force in the world.

Irina Sebrova flew 1,008 combat sorties - a thousand nights in an open cockpit over enemy territory. A thousand engine cuts and silent glides through the dark.

23 members of the 588th received the Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest honor the state could award - more per capita than almost any other unit in the Soviet Air Forces. 30 pilots from the regiment were killed in combat: shot down by antiaircraft fire, caught by German night fighters, lost to obstacles or weather.

Marina Raskova and the Regiment’s Fate

Marina Raskova, who made the three regiments possible, did not survive to see the end. In January 1943, she was killed leading the 587th regiment to its frontline posting in bad weather near the Volga River. She was 30 years old. Stalin gave her a state funeral in Red Square, one of the first women in Soviet history to receive one.

In February 1943, the 588th was redesignated the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment. The Guards designation was the Soviet military’s highest institutional recognition for a unit that had performed beyond all normal expectations.

The regiment flew through the defense of the Caucasus, the fighting in Crimea, Stalingrad, and the long push westward through Ukraine, Poland, and into Germany itself. Germany surrendered in May 1945. The Night Witches came home, returned their flight suits, and largely went back to ordinary life. In the West, the story remained almost entirely unknown for decades - the Cold War kept Soviet military history at arm’s length, and Moscow made little effort to publicize it. English-language accounts began appearing in the 1980s as veterans gave interviews and researchers published their findings.

The primary histories are Bruce Myles’s Night Witches, Anne Noggle’s oral history A Dance With Death, and Reina Pennington’s Wings, Women, and War.

Key Takeaways

• The 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment was formed in October 1941 on Stalin’s direct authorization after a proposal by Marina Raskova, one of the Soviet Union’s most celebrated aviators.
• The regiment flew the Polikarpov Po-2, a 1928-era fabric biplane with a top speed of 94 mph - slow enough to stall the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter attempting to intercept it.
• Crews flew up to 18 sorties per night, accumulating 23,000 combat sorties and 23,000 tons of bombs dropped over the course of the war.
• The signature tactic - cutting the engine on final approach to glide silently over targets - gave German soldiers no acoustic warning before bombs hit, which is how the regiment earned the name Nacht Hexen (“Night Witches”) from the enemy.
• 23 pilots received the Hero of the Soviet Union; 30 were killed in combat. The regiment was redesignated the 46th Guards in February 1943, the Soviet military’s highest honor for a unit in the field.