In the 1930s, with the clouds of war gathering over Europe once more, the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin pushed to demonstrate its technical prowess to the rest of the world. This was especially true in the air, where the Soviets established a number of endurance records for aircraft.
To show how far the Soviet Union had come culturally, several of these record-breaking efforts included female pilots and aircrew. None were more famous than Marina Raskova, often credited as the Soviet Union's Amelia Earhart.
Raskova was the first woman to qualify as a navigator in the Soviet air force in 1933. She was part of a record-breaking attempt for female aviators that saw her crew fly over 4,000 miles in a converted DB-2 long-range bomber.
This earned her celebrity status in the Soviet Union and, crucially, influence over Stalin himself. When war finally broke out between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Raskova would come to Stalin with a plan for women to join the men in the fight against the fascists.
That plan would result in one of the most famous flying units of World War II: the Night Witches.
The sheer scale of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, dubbed Operation Barbarossa, cannot truly be appreciated today even with all the facts and figures available. It was one of the largest single military campaigns in history.
It included over 3.8 million German and pro-Axis troops marching in three grand armies eastward, supported by nearly 4,000 tanks and 5,000 aircraft. Even more incredibly, this force was seemingly able to amass without any Soviet response on their side of the border.
Stalin remained convinced that Germany would never dare attack the Soviet Union. That belief was shattered on June 22, 1941.
The German force began a march eastward that seemed almost totally unstoppable, as Soviet troops were caught ill-prepared and poorly equipped to fight the armored Nazi juggernauts. The Soviet air force, which had suffered from decay and neglect due to a loss of experienced officers during Stalin's purges of political opponents, proved feeble in offering any real resistance to the German Luftwaffe and its highly experienced pilots.
Much of the Soviet air force was obliterated on the ground, sometimes because they were caught by total surprise and other times because Soviet leaders were afraid to do anything without orders from their superiors, who themselves would not do anything without Stalin's approval. Within just seven days of the invasion, a staggering 4,000 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed.
Stalin's response was to simply throw more of his people at the Germans. Numbers seemed to matter more to him than adequate training or equipment, and to achieve these numbers he invoked the patriotism of the Soviet people to confront the fascist invaders.
Thus, to the Soviet Union, the Second World War became known as the Great Patriotic War. From all over the vast country, men raced to sign up for the front, either because of their belief in their duty or because they were afraid of the consequences to them and their families if they did not.
But the men were not alone. Many women began demanding that they too be allowed to serve their motherland in combat roles. A vast letter-writing campaign was soon undertaken, with women pleading to join the men in the fight against the Nazis, but most were ignored.
However, there was one woman eager to fight who was not so easy to dismiss, for she knew Stalin himself. It was, of course, Marina Raskova.
Demonstrating perhaps more courage than most men within his inner circle, Raskova repeatedly wrote letters to Stalin making the case for why women should be allowed to fight. Given that this was not only a war between nations but between fascism and socialism, she argued it was foolhardy not to include some 50 percent of the population in the fight.
She proposed forming three aviation regiments: two of which would be mixed genders and one of which would be an all-female regiment, regarding both air crew and ground crew. Dubbed the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, this unit would be tasked with night harassment missions.
The primary aim of these missions was to prevent German and Axis troops from resting during the hours of darkness, when most large-scale operations stopped, as well as tiring out the enemy troops. This would also inhibit repairs and maintenance to German equipment as they focused on trying to shoot down the Soviet planes.
Additionally, the psychological impact of these missions would further hamper the invading troops' effectiveness as discipline and morale broke down from a lack of rest and the strain of wondering when the next attack would be. On October 8, 1941, Stalin agreed to allow the female aviation regiments to be formed.
Now the 588th Regiment needed to find an aircraft for their needs, and it would come in the shape of a rather unassuming little-known trainer known as the Polikarpov U-2. The little Soviet biplane, perhaps better known by its later designation of Po-2, was designed primarily for agricultural purposes such as crop dusting.
But such was the need for aircraft to fight the Germans that many were requisitioned and crudely armed for combat. With a top speed of just 94 miles per hour, a bomb load of just 770 pounds and often only a pistol for defense, the thought of taking this aircraft to combat with the prowling Luftwaffe fighters must have been a terrifying prospect for the unfortunate pilots selected to fly it in those dark early days.
However, by the time the 588th was being formed in early 1942, many of the shortcomings of the little Polikarpov biplane would actually prove advantageous in the night harassment mission. Its slow speed made navigating at night much safer, as it gave the pilot and navigator ample time to get out of trouble.
Its small engine was relatively quiet, meaning often the Germans did not hear them coming until they struck. As for its small bomb load, the main goal of the 588th was to disrupt the enemy's ability to rest and prepare for upcoming battles, and with their growing skill and unnerving accuracy, these small bombs were enough to keep the Germans on edge.
The Germans looked into the night sky for the sound of a low-powered engine or the black silhouette of a biplane. Their accuracy was such that as the 588th became more experienced, they would also add precision night bombing to their resume, targeting railways, bridges and German artillery positions using flares to illuminate them.
They were truly pilots of the stick and rudder era, relying on skill and cunning rather than technology. As for fear of interception, the biplanes flew much slower than the stall speeds of the radar-equipped German night fighters, and at such low altitudes their radar signatures often got confused with the surrounding hills and trees.
They were thus extremely difficult targets to locate and engage, except for when they were still flying in the late evening or early morning and daylight would illuminate them. By far the biggest threats came from the anti-aircraft guns being guided by German searchlights.
When discovered this way, the aircraft would struggle to escape as the crew found themselves in a hail of gunfire. If the lack of armored protection was not enough, the Po-2 was also prone to catching fire when struck.
If an aircraft was hit, it would be down to the pilot's skill to bring it down to earth as quickly and safely as possible, for the women of the 588th did not carry parachutes. In fact, the Night Witches flew at such low altitudes that parachutes were of little use even if the unfortunate flyers could deploy them after jumping from their stricken planes.
With the unit approved, its mission outlined and an aircraft assigned, the 588th now needed brave women to fill its ranks. The women who served in the 588th came from all walks of Soviet life.
Zhenya Rudneva was born on Christmas Eve 1920. Her father was Ukrainian while her mother was of the Orthodox Jewish faith, something she had to give up in order to marry Zhenya's father.
As such, Zhenya knew very little of her mother's side of the family, who had disowned them, or her Jewish heritage. Instead she grew up in the new Soviet Union, the world socialist superpower where women seemed to have far more opportunities than in most other countries of the day.
Always something of a dreamer, Zhenya became fascinated with astronomy. Having worked hard at compulsory education level, she earned a place in the astronomy department of the faculty of mechanics and mathematics of Moscow State University.
Zhenya proved herself an excellent and passionate student, and her lecturers anticipated great things for her future in the field of science. Like many of her peers, she answered the call to do her duty when the Germans invaded, and when she heard that an all-female aviation regiment was being formed she eagerly requested to join.
Completing her military training, she soon found herself on the train with lots of other women as they traveled to the front lines to fight the Germans and their allies in south-western Russia and Ukraine. Zhenya religiously kept a diary of her experiences as well as writing to her parents, offering an intimate insight into her time with the regiment.
On the train ride she described how they had a doctor on board and how he made them all feel like children as he constantly told them what to do and what not to do in order to keep healthy. Speaking of her time in the army thus far and her hopes for the future, she wrote of a silly thought, a total paradox: it was wartime, there was too much fear and blood, but she was living the happiest days of her life.
At least, she wrote, her life in the regiment would be her brightest memory. Her words seem rather naive but at the same time speak of the comradeship experienced by many soldiers as they shared their wartime experiences.
Regarding the disruption to her studies, she would later explain that she really missed astronomy but did not regret that she went into the army. Let's break up the invaders, she said, then we will undertake to restore astronomy; without a free motherland there can be no free science.
Maria Smirnova was another who answered the call of the motherland. Born to a family of peasants in 1920, at the age of 13 her family moved to Tver on the Volga River, where soon after she trained to become a teacher.
Throughout the second half of the 1930s she taught at a primary school near an aerodrome, where the sight and sound of the aircraft taking off and landing captured her imagination. In 1937 she was accepted into the flying program there, the only woman at the time, and not long after completing her training her experience as a teacher saw her become an instructor.
Upon the outbreak of war she hoped to put her flying skills to good use in repelling the Nazi invaders, but like so many she was initially disappointed that the air force were not taking female applications for combat. All that changed when Stalin agreed to Marina Raskova's requests, and given her flight experience Maria was appointed early as a deputy commander within the regiments.
When speaking about the role of women in combat, Maria Smirnova explained what they all thought then: was the war a woman's business? Of course not, but then they didn't think about that. They defended their fair motherland and their people whom the fascists had trampled.
With the first band of pilots having undertaken their flight training at Engels Military Aviation School, in June 1942 they prepared to deploy to the front, specifically in southern Russia. Exactly where the members of the 588th would be flying from was not known to them until the last second before deploying, partly for security reasons and partly because at that time the southern front was so fluid in nature.
Sharing an airfield with all-male squadrons, members of the 588th did not receive particularly enthusiastic welcomes from their male counterparts. Many of them had seen heavy fighting in which a great number of their comrades had been lost, and viewed the all-female squadron and their little biplanes with suspicion, believing they were only good for propaganda and little else.
Nevertheless, on June 12, 1942, the 588th went into combat for the first time, striking at the invading Nazis. Recounting the operations after the war, Maria explained that on the first mission they lost their commander of the squadron and she was appointed to take her place.
She had 10 pilots and 10 navigators in her squadron. They flew through the front lines, breaking through three defense lines fortified with German artillery, to bomb targets such as fascist aerodromes, railway stations and tracks, field headquarters and bridges.
They flew in a line three minutes apart, and the enemy was well aware of their timing. The Germans had to be on the alert all night long and did not get a wink of sleep.
However, an unexpected consequence for the 588th was that they too would often struggle to sleep during the hours of daylight when their own operations ceased. Spending all night flying mission after mission with anti-aircraft fire filling the skies and seeing their comrades shot down often saw them filled with adrenaline or mourning the loss of a friend, and this severely affected their own ability to sleep.
Maria herself suffered from severe anxiety to such an extent that at one point she was sent away for treatment, only for her to run away and hitchhike back to the regiment. She simply could not relax knowing they were still flying night after night; she would try to hide it from them, but the anxiety would continue to plague her for the rest of the war and beyond.
It was impossible for anyone not to be affected by the fear of losing a friend. As Zhenya Rudneva explained after a particularly heavy night of operations in which her aircraft was hit by ground fire, her hands and legs were trembling and she saw a plane burning down; her plane was flying like a drunkard but she didn't care.
At 11 pm another plane was shot down. Her heart skipped a beat and she ran to each landing plane to see who made it back. Her friend Gayla didn't.
As it was for the rest of the Soviet air force, the 588th had hard lessons to learn. However, they quickly proved their worth, developing tactics to evade the German searchlights and get as close to the enemy as possible to put their bombs on their targets.
One tactic the regiment would become especially known for was to reduce their engines to idling and effectively glide towards their targets, reducing their noise down to almost nothing until they were directly over the German positions, where they unleashed their bombs before disappearing into the black of night. German soldiers who had become aware of the all-female units constantly harassing them at night likened the sound of the idling biplanes going overhead to that of a witch on her brew, and so they gave them the name the Night Witches.
The term was intended to be derogatory, but when the 588th learned of this they embraced it wholeheartedly, and from then on they would be known as such. The Night Witches proved themselves to be courageous, daring and committed to the defense of the motherland, to such an extent they began to earn the respect of their male counterparts who had first scoffed at them.
Away from the fighting they became an inspiration to young women across the Soviet Union as well as lifting the morale of the people, as they appeared in propaganda movies and news articles that were widely distributed. Then in October 1943 their prestige was further enhanced when the 588th was renamed the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, the title of Guards being applied to the most elite of Soviet military units.
Many stories of their daring began to be circulated in excited conversations that often embellished the facts, but none more so than among the Germans themselves. Some of the stories that emerged among German ranks regarding the women border on the fantastical, ranging from the units being comprised entirely of convicted criminals that had been sentenced to death and were fighting for their freedom, to them even being part of Soviet medical experiments designed to allow their pilots to stay awake for 24 hours.
Perhaps the Germans simply did not want to believe they were just ordinary women volunteering to fight for their people, because that is exactly what they were. Behind the glamorous image portrayed in the Soviet propaganda films, they were still fighting a war and they were still taking losses.
During one flight supporting the offensive in the Crimea, Maria was leading a two-plane attack when by chance they were spotted in the low light by a keen-eyed pilot of the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, one of the premier German fighter planes. The pilot made a high-speed attack, but using her Po-2's low-speed agility she managed to evade the German bullets, although sadly the plane following her was not so lucky.
Its pilot, Darya Nossel, was killed instantly and her body slumped forward onto the controls, sending the plane into a dive. Nossel's navigator, Irina Kashirina, wrestled the duplicate controls in her cockpit, but Nossel's body kept pushing the stick forward.
So she reached out and grabbed her dead pilot by the collar, pulling her off the stick. With one hand on the control stick and the other holding her dead comrade's body, Kashirina managed to nurse the plane back to base.
The legend of their invulnerability to fighters was smashed almost entirely on the night of July 31, 1943. Again Smirnova was leading an attack, this time against German troops near Temryuk.
Prior to the attack she had personally conducted a reconnaissance of the area, pinpointing targets for the rest of the units to bomb. But as they approached their target she could sense something was off.
As usual, searchlights scoured the skies looking for them, but instead of the usual hail of anti-aircraft fire there was nothing. It was then she realized just what was going on: the guns weren't firing because German fighter aircraft were operating in the area, using the searchlights to illuminate the Soviet biplanes so they could attack.
As she explained after the war, they had not been attacked in this way before and had not developed tactics to counter the attack of fighter planes. She had considerable experience in combat and maneuvered to escape the searchlights, for to escape the searchlights was to escape the fighter, but behind her flew young inexperienced crews.
Four of the aircraft following her were shot down. The tracer bullets set their planes on fire; their planes were so vulnerable they were burning like sheets of paper. Tragically, one of those who died that night was Irina Kashirina.
While incidents like this were thankfully few in number, particularly as the war dragged on and the Germans became increasingly worn down, losses continued among the unit. New tactics were devised, such as having the most experienced pilots act as decoys because they knew how to evade the searchlights, but the danger was always present.
On April 9, 1944, Zhenya Rudneva's plane would fail to return from a combat mission. The young astronomer was just 23 years old.
Later it was learned that her body was recovered and buried as just another unknown soldier on the battlefield. It would not be until 1966 that she was formally identified.
One death that would seriously affect the Night Witches' morale concerns someone who wasn't even in their regiment. On January 4, 1943, Major Marina Raskova was flying with the mixed-gender dive bomber unit when she was killed near Stalingrad, her plane crashing on the banks of the Volga River.
She was given the first state funeral of the war and was commemorated within a few months with a ship transferred from the United States being given her name. In all, the Night Witches would lose 32 of its 261 members.
While that is a tragedy, it has to be weighed against the sheer numbers of sorties the regiment flew against the Germans. A flight commander named Irina Sebrova flew a staggering 1,008 missions and for that was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest accolade for service to the state.
She would be one of 23 women in the regiment, including Smirnova, who would receive the award. Given this high volume of sorties, the loss ratio among them was remarkably low, even more so when you include the fact that some of those 32 deaths were attributed to an outbreak of tuberculosis.
Wherever the front lines were, the Night Witches were not far behind, and this included chasing the retreating German army out of the Soviet Union and into Poland and then Germany itself. As such, the regiment had to be adept at moving their airfields quickly to keep up with the fluctuating front line.
During one hair-raising moment in Belarus, the regiment landed in a clearing which was to become their new airstrip. While waiting for the trucks with fuel and ammunition to arrive, some of the members of the regiment went exploring and to their horror discovered camouflaged German tanks nearby.
Knowing it was only a matter of time before they were discovered, they returned to their aircraft and took off, using the tiny amount of fuel they had left to escape. On May 4, 1945, the Night Witches flew their final operations just 37 miles from Berlin.
Three days later they heard the news they had been dreaming of for the past four years: Germany had surrendered and the war was over. From having to essentially pester Stalin to allow them to fly, to becoming the most highly decorated unit in the Soviet air force, the Night Witches had carved out a legend for themselves within their own lifetime.
The future seemed bright for these heroes. Sadly, it was not to be.
With the regiment stood down, its members were released back to civilian life. Some returned to ordinary jobs or married and had children, while others such as Smirnova tried to use their fame to carve out careers for themselves in the growing Soviet civil aviation sector flying airliners.
Unfortunately, the war had taken its toll on her both physically and mentally, and she failed to start a career as an airline pilot. Furthermore, there seemed to be a collective effort to disregard the female aviators altogether once the war was over, their regiment even being declined permission to participate in the flyover as part of the victory parade, the official reason being that their planes were too slow.
Nevertheless, there were those who remembered the legend of the Night Witches, their memory being kept alive in books and later films and TV shows. Every year after the war the regiment would have a reunion on May 2nd, where they would remember those brave women who failed to return after setting off into the night.
For one of their members, her name continues to fly through a sky of black emptiness curtained with twinkling stars. In 1972 astronomers named an asteroid in honor of the Night Witch who dreamed about the stars. They called it Rudneva.