The aircraft they flew were by any modern standard laughable. The Polikarpov Po-2 was a 1928 biplane design built of plywood and canvas, open-cockpit, with a top speed of 94 miles per hour — slower than many German fighters from a decade earlier. It could carry a bomb load of six 110-pound bombs maximum and had no radio, no radar, no parachute most of the time (adding a parachute meant removing bombs), and no guns.
The women of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment flew it every night for four years.
The Regiment
Marina Raskova, one of the Soviet Union's most celebrated aviators and a personal friend of Stalin, had petitioned in 1941 to be allowed to form an all-female aviation regiment. Stalin approved her request for reasons that mixed genuine appreciation of the USSR's large pool of trained female pilots with an understanding of the propaganda value of such a unit. Three women's regiments were established. The 588th flew the night bombing mission.
The pilots were largely university students — women who had been studying mathematics, physics, literature, and then found themselves posted to the Southern Front with instructions to harass German positions, disrupt sleep, destroy supplies, and generally make themselves as destructive as possible within the considerable limitations of their equipment.
The Method
What the Po-2 lacked in every measurable quality of combat aircraft performance, it partially compensated for through a characteristic that became the regiment's signature tactic: its extremely low stall speed.
A Po-2 approaching at low altitude could cut its engine, glide nearly silently for several hundred meters, drop its bombs, and then restart once past the target. The aircraft's wooden construction and fabric covering made it effectively invisible to German radar. The darkness completed the concealment.
The gliding aircraft made a sound. German soldiers and anti-aircraft crews, interviewed after the war, repeatedly described it the same way: a soft, rushing, almost whispering sound. Like a broom sweeping through the air. Like something from a fairy tale — and not the reassuring kind.
German anti-aircraft crews nicknamed the regiment die Nachthexen — the Night Witches. The Luftwaffe offered the Iron Cross to any German pilot who shot one down. They were difficult to intercept: if a Messerschmitt dove on a slow-moving Po-2 at combat speed, it would simply overshoot. The pilots developed evasion tactics based entirely on this fact, spreading their aircraft, timing their approaches, making German night fighters burn fuel hunting phantoms.
The Numbers
The 588th flew 23,672 combat sorties by the end of the war. Each pilot averaged approximately 800 sorties — some flew more than 1,000. They flew on nights so cold that fuel lines froze and hands stuck to metal. They flew over Stalingrad. They flew over Crimea. They flew over the Caucasus.
Thirty members of the 588th died. Twenty-three were awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest military honor the USSR could bestow.
When the war ended and Soviet veterans marched in the victory parades, the 588th was not invited to participate. Their aircraft were considered too obsolete. The regime that had used them without hesitation for four years deemed the memory of plywood biplanes insufficiently impressive for the victory celebration.
The surviving pilots attended privately, as civilians. They had earned that much for themselves.
Sources & Further Reading
Reina Pennington, "Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat" (University Press of Kansas, 2001); Anne Noggle, "A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II" (Texas A&M Press, 1994).
