The Night Witches: the Soviet women who bombed by night

They took off in the dark, two women to an aircraft, in open cockpit biplanes built to teach beginners how to fly. For three years the 588th Night Bomber Regiment bombed German positions from the foothills of the Caucasus to the Oder, and it stayed all female to the end. The nickname the Germans are said to have given them, the Night Witches, has outlived almost everything else about them. This page keeps to what the records and the historians say.

Marina Raskova and the three women's regiments

Marina Raskova was famous before the war began. In September 1938 she was the navigator of the Rodina, a record long distance flight across the Soviet Union with Valentina Grizodubova and Polina Osipenko, and all three were made Heroes of the Soviet Union. When Germany invaded in June 1941, women pilots who tried to enlist were at first turned away. Raskova lobbied the air force headquarters with letters from women who wanted to fly in combat.¹

Order No. 0099 of the People's Commissariat of Defense, dated 8 October 1941, created three regiments: the 586th Fighter, the 587th Bomber and the 588th Night Bomber. The recruits, mostly students in their late teens and early twenties, went by train to the flying school at Engels on the Volga to train. Of the three, only the 588th stayed all female for the whole war.²

Raskova took command of the bomber regiment herself. In January 1943, leading a flight of its aircraft to a new base near the Stalingrad front, she was killed when her aircraft crashed in bad weather.³

Who commanded the Night Witches?

The 588th had a single commander from formation to the end of the war: Yevdokiya Bershanskaya. She was 29, an experienced pilot who had already flown at night. Under her, the regiment trained its own replacements: navigators became pilots and mechanics became navigators, so it never had to leave the front to rebuild.⁴

The regiment left Engels for the Southern Front at the end of May 1942. Its first combat mission came in June; Russian accounts date it to 12 June 1942. Only three aircraft flew that night, and one crew did not come back.⁵

The Po-2: a trainer turned night bomber

The regiment flew the Polikarpov U-2, later called the Po-2: a two seat biplane of wood and fabric with open cockpits, designed as a trainer. It had no radio, and for most of the war no defensive machine gun. Pennington gives a top speed of about 90 mph, roughly 145 km/h; Russian accounts give a top speed of about 100 to 120 km/h. The bombs hung under the wings and fuselage, usually 150 to 200 kg a sortie.⁶

Its weakness was also its use. It was slow enough to fly very low and turn tightly, and its top speed was below the stall speed of the German fighters sent after it. Being wood and fabric, it also caught fire easily.⁷

How did the Night Witches fight?

Each crew was a pilot and a navigator. Pennington describes the routine: aircraft went out singly, three to five minutes apart, cut the engine when they could and glided in so that no motor could be heard, dropped flares, bombed, and left at very low altitude. When searchlights caught one aircraft, the next crew in line went for the lights. Some later retellings, including Popova's obituary in The New York Times, describe a fixed drill of three aircraft, two drawing the searchlights while the third bombed.⁸

A sortie lasted 30 to 50 minutes. How many a crew flew in one night depends on the source: up to 14 or more in Pennington, 6 to 12 in a Russian summary, 8 to 18 in the National WWII Museum and The New York Times. To save weight for bombs, crews flew without parachutes until 1944. For many of the women, the National WWII Museum notes from an interview with the regiment's chief of staff, Irina Rakobolskaya, death was better than being taken prisoner.⁹

From the Caucasus to the Oder, 1942 to 1945

The regiment's first months were the German summer offensive of 1942. It flew on the Don and then, as the army fell back, in the defense of the Transcaucasus; Pennington adds that it bombed river crossings on the Mius and dates the Transcaucasus fighting to August to December 1942. In February 1943 it was renamed the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, an honor given to units that had distinguished themselves.¹⁰

Through 1943 it flew over the Kuban and the Taman peninsula and in support of the fight for Novorossiysk, and it received the honorific name Taman. Its worst night came at the turn of July and August 1943, when German night fighters, not met before, shot down four crews, eight women, within minutes.¹¹

From November 1943 to May 1944 the regiment flew over Kerch, the Crimea and Sevastopol. In June and July 1944 it was in Belarus (near Mogilev and Minsk, according to Pennington), then in Poland and East Prussia, and in March 1945 it took part in the fighting for Gdańsk. It ended the war flying near the Oder, supporting the last Soviet offensive on Berlin. It was disbanded on 15 October 1945.¹²

How many missions did the Night Witches fly?

The precise figure in Russian sources is 23,672 combat sorties. Pennington and the National WWII Museum give more than 24,000, and Popova's obituary in The New York Times about 30,000. The bombs dropped are usually put at about 3,000 metric tons, plus some 26,000 incendiary munitions.¹³

Losses are counted in different ways. Pennington, citing a regimental album edited by Bershanskaya, gives 31 dead, about 27 percent of the flying personnel. The National WWII Museum gives 32. Russian accounts count 23 killed in combat, and one adds nine who died of wounds.¹⁴

The number of Heroes of the Soviet Union is 23 or 24. Russian newspapers give 23, while the National WWII Museum and the H-Net review of Pennington's book give 24, 18 pilots and 6 navigators. One navigator of the regiment, Tatyana Sumarokova, was honored only in 1995, as a Hero of the Russian Federation.¹⁵

Several crews passed 800 sorties. Irina Sebrova is credited with more than 1,000, 1,008 in the chief of staff's count cited by Pennington and 1,004 according to 360.ru. Natalya Meklin, later the writer Natalya Kravtsova, flew about 980. Nadezhda Popova flew 852. She was shot down several times, once over the North Caucasus in 1942. Pennington and The New York Times call her the regiment's deputy commander, The Washington Post a squadron commander.¹⁶

Legend and record

The name itself is the first problem. Night Witches is said to come from German soldiers, who heard only the rush of air as the engines idled above them. Pennington asks how German troops would have known that women were flying these particular aircraft, since dozens of Soviet night bomber regiments flew the Po-2 and only one of them was all female. The label is also often stretched to every Soviet woman pilot; properly it belongs to the night bomber crews alone.¹⁷

Pennington suggests that the nickname caught on in English partly because of Bruce Myles's 1981 book Night Witches. The same care applies to details repeated online: the claim that the women never had parachutes is wrong for the last year of the war, and the round totals of sorties, tonnage and dead vary from source to source, as shown above.¹⁸

How the Night Witches are remembered

After 1945 most of the women were demobilized, and the Soviet air force did not go on recruiting and training women pilots. Veterans wrote memoirs, and Yevgeniya Zhigulenko, a pilot of the regiment, later directed a feature film about it, Night Witches in the Sky (1981). Popova's death in Moscow in July 2013, at 91, brought a new wave of articles in the West.¹⁹

The regiment's record stands without the legend: three years of continuous front line service in an aircraft built for flying lessons. It sits alongside the other lives in our guide to women warriors in history, and it is one of the best documented of them.