When people picture soldiers fighting in World War II, they often imagine men carrying machine guns. Yet one of the war's most remarkable stories belongs to women flying bombers in the night sky over the Soviet Union.
The roots of that story reach back to the sweeping industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s. That era opened up employment for women, and in truth there was hardly any profession closed to them.
Soviet propaganda encouraged women to join the workforce and to operate the vast machinery of modernization. The most striking symbol of that machine age was the airplane.
Many women were inspired by the Soviet hero Marina Raskova, who set world records on long-distance flights and proved what Soviet pilots and aircraft could do. Newly popular flying clubs gave women a way out of domestic monotony or poverty and a chance to become pilots or aircraft mechanics.
Then came the summer of 1941. Weeks after the German invasion, hundreds of thousands of Soviet women volunteered for the army as nurses, signal operators, and anti-aircraft gunners.
Experienced female pilots from the flying clubs served as instructors and advisers to male recruiters, but they were not allowed to fly in combat. The reasoning was that enough male pilots already existed for the fight.
Marina Raskova was determined to change that. Using her influence in Moscow's political circles as a Hero of the Soviet Union, she appealed directly to Stalin and won permission to form three all-female flying units: the 586th Fighter Regiment, the 587th Heavy Bomber Regiment, and the 588th Night Bomber Regiment.
Raskova was a born leader, and hundreds of young women across the Soviet Union answered her call, hoping to become elite female pilots. By mid-October, as the German advance left Moscow panicked and chaotic, Raskova set up her training camp at a large airbase in the town of Engels on the Volga River.
There, women of the three regiments trained on aircraft, engines, weapons, aeronautics, and military drill. College students were trained as navigators, while women with factory or armory experience worked as mechanics.
Naturally, every volunteer wanted to be a famous fighter pilot, but only the most talented and experienced were taken into the fighter regiment. They needed lightning-fast reactions and the mental strength to stay calm in combat.
Long-serving professional pilots were kept in Raskova's own heavy bomber regiment. Those with less experience were placed in the night bomber regiment, yet these women may have needed more courage than anyone.
The night bombers had to fly the Polikarpov U-2. Compared with modern dive bombers of the time, it was a fragile biplane built in the late 1920s and used mainly for training.
It had two cockpits, one for a student and one for an instructor. It was a small, slow aircraft made of light plywood and percale, a fine cotton fabric.
It was cheap, simple, and obsolete, but reliable for transporting the wounded, supplying rations, or conducting reconnaissance. The Soviets called it the "crop duster" or the "duck," while the Germans knew it as the "sewing machine" or "plywood rust."
Because it was completely unarmored and far too slow to escape German fighters, it could only operate in the darkness of night. Even small-arms fire could easily bring it down.
Yet the overall situation was so dire that these small aircraft became a symbol of hope and resistance. Over time, the women came to appreciate the simplicity of the crop duster, since the women of the heavy bomber regiment had to fly the difficult Pe-2, nicknamed the "bitch."
Despite the Soviet ideal of equality between men and women, Russia's patriarchal mentality was harsh. Forced to wear boots, tunics, and coats made for men, and lacking feminine mannerisms, the women were constantly mocked by their male colleagues.
But this only hardened their resolve, because to them a soldier was a soldier. Raskova ordered the women to cut their hair short, and the battalion commissar banned gossip and any kind of flirtation or frivolous behavior.
By late May 1942, they had received enough U-2 aircraft for combat. By summer they left their airfield for the Southwestern Front to help stop the German advance toward Stalingrad and the Caucasus.
As Axis forces pushed toward Rostov, Raskova's night bombers struck German ammunition dumps, fuel depots, vehicles, and ground troops. Finding targets and getting close to enemy lines was the navigator's job.
The pilot would then cut the engine and glide silently through the night. The first aircraft dropped flares to illuminate the target, and then the bombs fell. They would restart the engine and escape before the Germans could return fire.
The U-2s were converted into bombers with simple, basic additions. Bombs weighing up to 300 kilograms hung beneath the wings.
They could not inflict heavy damage, but that was never the night bombers' main purpose. Their job was to keep the enemy constantly on edge, disturb their sleep, exhaust them mentally, and give them no rest.
That is why the Germans hated them so fiercely. When they learned the night bombers were usually women, they gave them their famous nickname: "Nachthexen," or Night Witches.
Every morning the women returned with red faces and bloodshot eyes. They had turned their lives around the night, eating their evening meal in the morning and going straight to sleep.
They were always tired and hungry, but they were proud to show the Soviet Union that women could fly as skillfully as men. With every successful mission, they earned more respect from male pilots and officers.
That did not protect them from the dangers they faced every day. They had no parachutes, because the Soviet high command believed the aircraft would glide down easily if the engine failed.
They completely ignored the fact that the percale fabric and plywood structure burned very quickly. If that happened, both pilot and navigator were likely to burn to death.
According to the Soviet high command, that was preferable to being captured alive by the Germans. In fact, those who crashed or were forced down in enemy territory were ordered to fight to the end, because capture was dishonorable for any Soviet soldier and brought lifelong shame.
Even pilots who landed in enemy territory and then slipped back to their own lines were interrogated and often sentenced to death by commissars. On January 4, 1943, Raskova died in an accident while traveling to the Stalingrad Front, but the 588th Regiment was determined to keep her ideal alive.
As one pilot wrote, then it was simply time to drop bombs. Under the Soviet counteroffensive, the Germans began a hurried retreat from the Caucasus, giving the Night Witches plenty of opportunities to strike the withdrawing troops.
From the plains of Stalingrad to the high mountains of the Caucasus, the fame of the Night Witches spread. Even the harsh conditions of flying high in open cockpits on frozen winter nights could not keep these women from their missions.
In fact, only once were they forced to stay on the ground for a time. On the night of July 31, 1943, during the German counterattack on the Taman Peninsula near Novorossiysk, the Night Witches approached German positions and noticed that the anti-aircraft batteries were strangely silent.
Suddenly flares lit up the sky. It was an attack by German night fighters, and within moments the U-2s were falling from the sky and burning on the ground. Surviving pilots scattered and fled into the darkness.
Losing so many aircraft in one night was a heavy blow to the regiment, but it did not last long. The war that eventually turned against the German invaders carried these witches further west, to the Kuban, Crimea, Belarus, Poland, and finally Germany.
Sometimes they flew as many as a dozen missions in a single night, with only a few minutes of rest between them. There are many stories of those young women from different backgrounds, who shared their own personal experiences of heroism, tragedy, and ideals.
"We were young and fearless. The fear came later," one survivor recalled. Their heroic achievements brought more Hero of the Soviet Union titles than any other Soviet bomber regiment, 23 by the end of the war, with at least 800 missions typically required for the honor.
After the war and the regiment's disbandment, their commissar Yevdokiya Rachkevich took it upon herself to find the crash sites of every lost pilot, so that the true history of the regiment and the women who fought there could be told.