At 2 am on the morning of June 8th, 1942, Junior Lieutenant Nage de Papova sat in the open cockpit of a Polyarpov Potu biplane, watching a wall of German anti-aircraft fire rise up to meet her.
She was 20 years old, a former flight instructor from Ukraine, and she was currently freezing to death 2,000 ft above the southern front.
The wind whipped through the open cockpit, cutting through her thin leather helmet and freezing the tears in her eyes before they could even roll down her cheeks.
There was no glass canopy to protect her.
There was no armored tub to stop the bullets.
There was just a thin layer of plywood and fabric separating her body from the freezing Russian knight and the German army waiting below.
Pova gripped the control stick with hands that felt like blocks of ice.
The plane she was flying was a joke.
It wasn’t a war plane.
It was a crop duster.
It was designed to spray pesticide on wheat fields, not to drop bombs on the most advanced military machine in history.
The engine sputtered and coughed, sounding like a lawnmower fighting through tall grass.
It vibrated so hard that her teeth rattled in her skull.
Below her, the German search lights swept the sky, looking for the source of the noise.
They were looking for a heavy bomber, a metal giant like a B7.
They weren’t looking for a toy plane made of canvas and wood that looked like it had been stolen from a museum.
If a single search light beam caught her, she was dead.
The POU didn’t have self-sealing fuel tanks.
It didn’t have armor plating.
If a tracer bullet hit the wing, the doped canvas would catch fire like a pile of dry leaves soaked in gasoline.
The plane would burn up in seconds, turning into a falling torch, and Papova didn’t have a parachute.
The commanders had ordered them to leave the parachutes behind.
They said the parachutes were too heavy for the underpowered engine.
They said the extra weight meant fewer bombs, but Pova knew the real reason.
A parachute meant you might be tempted to jump.
Without one, the plane was your coffin.
You either flew it home or you burned with it.
The mission was suicide, plain and simple.
The German army had pushed deep into the Soviet Union, crushing everything in its path with tanks and precision air strikes.
The Red Army was bleeding out.
They were desperate.
They needed to stop the German advance at any cost, and the cost tonight was a regiment of young women flying obsolete training planes against the seasoned veterans of the Luftwaffa.
Pova looked over the side of the cockpit.
She could see the muzzle flashes of the German flack guns sparking like camera flashes in the dark.
They were getting closer.
The air turbulence from the explosions tossed her tiny plane around like a leaf in a storm.
She fought the stick, musling the biplane back to level flight.
She wasn’t thinking about the motherland.
She wasn’t thinking about Stalin.
She was thinking about keeping her wings attached for 5 more minutes.
To understand how desperate the situation was, you have to go back 8 months.
In October of 1941, the German Vermacht was standing at the gates of Moscow.
You could hear the artillery from the Kremlin.
The Soviet air force had been obliterated on the ground in the first week of the invasion.
The Russians were throwing everything they had into the meat grinder.
Factory workers, farmers, school teachers.
It was total war.
In this chaos, a famous female pilot named Marina Ruscova went to Joseph Stalin with a radical idea.
She wanted to form an all-female combat regiment.
Ruscova wasn’t just a pilot.
She was a celebrity, the Soviet equivalent of Amelia Earheart.
She told Stalin that there were thousands of women who wanted to fight.
women who were tired of digging anti-tank ditches and wanted to shoot back.
Stalin was skeptical.
No country in history had ever sent women into aerial combat.
War was a man’s job.
But Stalin was also a pragmatist.
He looked at the map.
He looked at the casualty reports.
He realized he was running out of men.
So he signed the order.
He authorized the creation of three female air regiments.
It sounded progressive on paper.
In reality, it was a logistical nightmare.
When the women arrived at the training base in angels, they were greeted with chaos.
There were no uniforms for them.
The quarter masters threw bundles of men’s clothing at them.
The tunics were huge, hanging off their shoulders like potato sacks.
The pants were so big they had to cinch the belts tight enough to cut off their circulation just to keep them up.
But the boots were the worst insult.
The smallest size available was a men’s 42.
The women had feet that were sizes 35 or 36.
They looked ridiculous.
They had to tear up their bedding and stuff rags into the toes of the boots just to be able to walk without tripping.
They marched around the base looking like children playing dress up in their father’s closets.
The male instructors looked at them and laughed.
They called them the powderpuff squad.
They asked if they were going to bomb the Germans with lipstick tubes.
They bet money on how long it would take before the girls started crying and went home.
The men refused to salute them.
They refused to share the mess hall tables.
They treated the whole project as a publicity stunt, a joke designed to boost morale on the home front while the real soldiers did the fighting.
But the women didn’t cry.
They stuffed more rags in their boots, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work.
They trained 14 hours a day.
They studied navigation, mechanics, and ballistics until their eyes blurred.
They were determined to prove that they weren’t just girls in big boots.
They were soldiers.
Then came the day they were issued their aircraft.
The women lined up on the tarmac, expecting to see modern fighters.
They expected yaks or migas, fast metal planes with cannons and radios.
Instead, they saw rows of polycarpus.
The silence on the runway was deafening.
The POU was a biplane from the 1920s.
It had an open cockpit, fixed landing gear, and a 5-cylinder engine that produced a pathetic 100 horsepower.
It was slower than a Mercedes staff car driving on a highway.
Its top speed was 90 mph.
If the wind was blowing hard enough against the nose, the plane would actually fly backward relative to the ground.
The male pilots howled with laughter.
They asked the women if they were planning to crop dust the Germans to death.
They called the plane a flying sewing machine because of the rhythmic sound the engine made.
It was an insult to give a combat pilot a po.
It was like giving a race car driver a bicycle and telling him to win the Indianapolis 500.
The plane had no guns.
It had no bomb bay.
To drop bombs, the navigator had to lean over the side of the cockpit and pull a wire release or sometimes just throw the bombs out by hand like grenades.
It was primitive.
It was dangerous.
It was garbage.
But Major Rascova didn’t let them complain.
She told them that the POU had advantages that the men were too arrogant to see.
It was slow, yes, but that meant it was maneuverable.
It could turn on a dime.
It could fly at treetop level, hiding in the ravines and valleys where the fast German fighters couldn’t go.
And most importantly, it was made of wood and fabric.
That meant it was invisible to the primitive German radar.
The radar waves would pass right through the canvas without bouncing back to the electronic eyes of the enemy.
The night witches didn’t exist.
They were ghosts.
So, the women stopped complaining.
They embraced the sewing machine.
They learned to fix the engine with bobby pins and wire.
They learned to patch the bullet holes in the wings with their own shirts.
They turned the training base into a factory of efficiency.
While the men were sleeping, the women were practicing night landings on a strip of dirt illuminated by three kerosene lanterns.
They were learning to fly by feel, sensing the wind on their faces because the instrument panels were too dark to read.
They were preparing to take a museum piece into the heart of the most heavily defended airspace in the world.
Back in the cockpit, Pova checked her altimeter.
It was hard to read in the dark, but the needle was dropping.
She was approaching the target area.
Below her was a German supply depot, a cluster of trucks and ammunition dumps that was fueling the offensive.
It was ringed by search lights and quad-mounted 20mm cannons.
A normal bomber would fly high, drop its load, and run.
But Pova couldn’t fly high.
Her plane couldn’t climb fast enough.
She had to go in low.
She had to thread the needle between the search light beams and drop her bombs right into the enemy’s lap.
She looked at her navigator, Kadia, in the seat behind her.
Kadia gave a thumbs up.
Her face was covered in grease to protect her skin from the frostbite, making her look like a demon in the faint light of the stars.
They were ready.
They were about to try a tactic that the flight manual said was impossible.
A tactic that relied on the one thing the POU could do better than any other plane in the sky.
Glide.
Pova put her hand on the throttle.
She didn’t push it forward to gain speed.
She pulled it back.
She killed the engine.
When Junior Lieutenant Pova cut the engine, the world changed instantly.
One second, her ears were filled with the deafening rattle of the five-cylinder motor.
The next, there was nothing but the sound of the wind whistling through the bracing wires.
It was a ghostly hollow sound, like a flute being played in a graveyard.
This was the secret weapon of the night witches.
It wasn’t a piece of high-tech radar jamming equipment or a stealth coating.
It was simple physics.
The POU was a biplane, meaning it had two sets of wings that created a lot of lift.
It meant the plane could stay in the air at speeds so slow that a modern German fighter would fall out of the sky like a stone.
By cutting the power, Pova turned her crop duster into a glider.
She pushed the nose down, trading altitude for speed, sliding through the dark air like a shark swimming in deep water.
Below her, the German depot was a hive of activity.
She could see the tiny sparks of cigarettes where centuries were standing.
She could see the headlights of trucks moving supplies.
The Germans were listening.
They had sound locators, big metal ears that amplified the noise of approaching aircraft engines.
They were waiting for the roar of a heavy bomber.
They weren’t waiting for the whisper of a canvas kite.
Pova checked her altitude.
800 ft.
600 ft.
The ground was rushing up to meet her.
She was so close she could almost smell the diesel fumes from the trucks.
This was the moment of maximum danger.
If she misjudged the glide, she would smash into the trees.
If she dropped too early, the bombs would miss.
If she dropped too late, the blast would blow her own wooden wings off.
She didn’t have a bomb site.
The POU was too primitive for that.
Instead, the women had painted lines on the wings with red lipstick or chalk.
When the target lined up with the mark on the wing and the engine cowling, you pulled the release.
It was eyeball engineering, the kind of thing a kid would do with a slingshot.
Pova watched the supply trucks drift under her wing.
She waited.
Her heart was pounding against her ribs, but her hands were steady.
She lined up the lipstick mark with the lead truck.
She yanked the wire release cable hard.
The plane jumped.
It felt like a giant hand had let go of the tail.
Two 100-lb bombs fell away from the racks under the wings.
Because the plane was moving so slowly.
The bombs didn’t curve forward like they would from a fast fighter jet.
They dropped almost straight down.
Pova slammed the throttle forward.
This was the terrifying part.
The engine had been cold for 30 seconds.
In the freezing Russian winter, oil turns to sludge.
Spark plugs ice up.
There was a very real chance the engine would just cough and die, leaving her to glide silently into a German prisoner of war camp.
For two heartbeats, the propeller just windmilled in the air.
The engine sputtered and coughed.
Then, with a roar that sounded like a chainsaw kicking to life, the engine caught.
Blue flame shot out of the exhaust ports.
At the same exact moment the bombs hit the ground.
The supply depot erupted.
The shock wave punched the bottom of the plane, throwing it upward.
Pova wrestled the stick, banking hard to the left to get away from the fireball.
The element of surprise was gone.
The sewing machine was screaming now, announcing its presence to every gunner within 5 mi.
The ground lit up.
It looked like someone had kicked an antill.
Tracers streamed upward, weaving a net of green and yellow fire.
Search lights swung wildly, trying to lock onto the sound, but the Germans were confused.
They were aiming for a fast plane.
They were leading the target, firing where they thought the plane would be in 2 seconds.
But the POU was flying so slowly that the German bullets were passing harmlessly in front of the nose.
Pova danced through the flack.
She kicked the rudder pedal, skidding the plane sideways, then dipped the wing, then pulled up.
She was flying like a leaf caught in a gale.
The canvas skin of the wings popped and drumed as shrapnel tore through it, but the wood held.
She crossed the front lines and headed for the darkness of the Soviet rear.
She was alive.
She had dropped her payload, but the night wasn’t over.
For a normal bomber crew, one mission a night was a full day’s work.
It took hours to fly to the target, hours to fly back, and hours to debrief.
But the Night Witches didn’t operate like a normal air force.
Their planes could only carry two small bombs.
To do any real damage, they had to hit the enemy again and again and again.
They had to be mosquitoes.
One bite is annoying.
A thousand bites will drive you insane.
Pova landed on the dirt strip at the forward base.
The wheels hadn’t even stopped rolling before the ground crew was swarming the plane.
These were the other women of the regiment, the mechanics and armorers.
They were teenage girls with grease under their fingernails and sheer exhaustion in their eyes.
They didn’t have forklifts or hydraulic loaders.
They lifted the 100-lb bombs by hand, two girls to a bomb, grunting as they heaved them onto the racks.
They refueled the plane with buckets and a hand crank.
There was no time for coffee.
There was no time to warm up by the stove.
The turnaround time was 5 minutes.
five minutes to reload, refuel, and check for bullet holes.
Pova drank a cup of water, wiped the oil from her goggles, and took off again.
She flew 18 missions that night.
18 times she flew into the teeth of the German anti-aircraft guns.
18 times she cut her engine and glided into the dark.
By the time the sun came up, her body was wrecked.
The vibration of the engine had left her hands numb.
Her eyes were burning from the wind.
She had to be lifted out of the cockpit because her legs were too cramped to move.
She had dropped nearly two tons of explosives, 200 lb at a time.
And she wasn’t the only one.
The entire regiment had been buzzing back and forth all night, a conveyor belt of destruction.
The physical toll on the women was horrific.
The open cockpits meant they were exposed to temperatures that dropped to 30° below zero.
Frostbite was a constant enemy.
If you touched a metal part of the plane with your bare hand, your skin would freeze to it instantly, ripping off when you pulled away.
The wind blast caused the skin on their faces to crack and bleed.
They aged years in a matter of weeks.
They stopped getting their periods.
They stopped thinking about food or romance or the future.
They existed only for the rhythm of the night.
Take off, climb, cut engine, drop, run, repeat.
But if it was hard on the women, it was a nightmare for the Germans.
The Vermacht was the most disciplined army in the world.
But the night witches broke them.
It wasn’t the physical damage that did it.
A 200- lb bomb can blow up a truck or a bunker, but it can’t destroy an army.
The real weapon was sleep deprivation.
The human mind can only function for so long without rest.
The Germans would fight the Red Army all day, holding the line against tanks and artillery.
They would collapse into their bunks at night, desperate for sleep.
And then, just as they drifted off, they would hear it.
the soft whistling sound of the wind, then the sharp explosion of a bomb, then the rattle of the sewing machine engine flying away.
They would run to the guns, fire into the dark, and go back to bed.
10 minutes later, it would happen again.
The whistle, the explosion, the engine noise all night long, every night for weeks, the German soldiers started to hallucinate.
They became jumpy, paranoid.
They were terrified to close their eyes.
They started calling the pilots nachen, night witches.
They believed the women were given special pills that allowed them to see in the dark like cats.
They believed the planes were greased with a special chemical that made them slide through the air.
They created a mythology around these women because they couldn’t admit the truth that they were being beaten by school girls in crop dusters.
The humiliation went all the way to the top of the Luftwafa.
The German air force prided itself on having the best pilots and the best machines.
Their Messmmet fighters were masterpieces of engineering.
To be bombed by a POU was an insult to the Aryan race.
It was like being beaten up by a toddler.
The German high command issued a standing order.
Any German pilot who shot down a knight witch was automatically awarded the Iron Cross.
This was one of the highest military decorations in Germany, usually reserved for acts of extreme bravery.
And here they were handing it out just for shooting down a plane made of plywood.
That is how much they feared the witches.
But shooting them down was harder than it looked.
The German fighter planes like the MI109 were designed for speed.
They had a stall speed of around 100 mph.
That meant if they flew any slower than that, they would fall out of the sky.
The POU had a top speed of 90 mph.
This created a bizarre tactical problem.
If a German fighter tried to get behind a Night Witch to shoot her down, he would zoom past her before he could even line up his guns.
It was like a Ferrari trying to chase a bicycle in a parking lot.
The German pilots had to lower their landing gear and drop their flaps just to slow down enough to get a shot, which made them vulnerable to stalling.
The women learned to exploit this.
When they saw a German fighter coming, they wouldn’t try to outrun it.
That was impossible.
Instead, they would turn sharply toward a tree line or dive into a deep ravine.
The POU could hug the ground like a tractor.
The German pilot, terrified of crashing his expensive high-speed fighter into the trees, would have to pull up.
The witches played a deadly game of chicken.
Using the earth itself as a shield, they lured the German aces into traps, forcing them to fight on the night witch’s terms, low and slow.
By the winter of 1943, the joke was over.
Nobody was laughing at the sewing machines anymore.
The 588th regiment was given the elite title of guards regiment.
They were legends in the Red Army, but the Germans were adapting.
They realized that standard air defense tactics weren’t working.
They stopped trying to chase the witches and started building traps.
They brought in flack circuses, massive concentrations of search lights and anti-aircraft guns arranged in concentric circles around the targets.
They set up kill zones where the light was so bright it was like flying into the sun.
Pova felt the shift during a mission over the Cuban bridge head.
She was flying her third sorty of the night.
Flanked by two other POS.
They were approaching a German airfield preparing to cut their engines.
Suddenly, the ground didn’t just sparkle with muzzle flashes.
It turned into daylight.
Four massive search lights clicked on simultaneously, converging on her plane.
The beams blinded her instantly.
She couldn’t see her instruments.
She couldn’t see the ground.
She was trapped in a cone of white light pinned against the sky like a bug on a collection board.
Then the flack started.
This wasn’t the random firing of terrified sentries.
This was coordinated radar directed fire.
The shells were bursting so close that the plane was being tossed upside down.
Shrapnel shredded the right wing, tearing huge gaps in the canvas.
Pova fought the stick, banking hard, trying to slip out of the light, but the beams followed her.
They were locked on.
She looked to her left and saw her wingman, a girl named Dia.
Dsia’s plane was glowing.
A tracer had hit the fuel tank.
There was no explosion, just a sudden, silent eruption of fire.
The canvas wings vanished in a sheet of orange flame.
Dsia didn’t have a parachute.
She didn’t scream over the radio, she just burned.
The plane nosed over and fell, a streak of fire painting a line down to the earth.
Pova screamed, but the sound was swallowed by the roar of the flack.
She was alone now.
The trap had sprung, and as she pushed the nose of her battered crop duster down, trying to dive into the shadows, she saw something even worse than the flack.
Above the search lights, patrolling the edge of the light like sharks waiting for a seal, were the silhouettes of German knight fighters.
They weren’t trying to slow down anymore.
They were waiting for the search lights to serve the witches up on a silver platter.
The German trap over the Cuban bridge head was a masterpiece of industrial violence.
They called it a flack circus, but there was nothing funny about it.
It was a kill box designed specifically for the night witches.
The Germans had arranged dozens of high-powered search lights in a massive circle, creating a wall of light that stretched 5,000 ft into the air.
Once a plane entered that circle, the lights would snap shut like the jaws of a steel trap.
Pova was right in the middle of it.
The beams were so intense that the heat coming off them felt physical, like opening an oven door.
She was blinded.
Her pupils contracted to pinpoints, leaving her unable to read her gauges or even see the ground.
She was flying entirely by the feel of the vibration in the stick and the screaming of the wind in the wires.
Above the wall of light, the German knight fighters were waiting.
These weren’t the standard single engine fighters.
They were messers 1110, heavy destroyers with twin engines and radar antennas bristling from their noses like whiskers on a catfish.
They carried cannons that fired explosive shells the size of bananas.
A single hit from one of those shells wouldn’t just damage a potu, it would vaporize it.
Pova felt the wash of turbulence as one of the fighters dove past her.
It was moving so fast that the air pressure alone nearly flipped her biplane over.
She wrestled the stick with both hands, her muscles burning, trying to keep the wings level.
She couldn’t see the fighter, but she could hear the roar of its daimler bent engines drowning out the lawnmower rattle of her own motor.
The German pilot made a mistake.
He came in too fast.
He was used to fighting other metal warplanes, machines that moved at 300 mph.
He misjudged the sheer slowness of the Night Witch.
He lined up his sights on the glowing white cross of Pova’s plane, squeezed the trigger, and unleashed a stream of cannon fire.
But by the time the shells left his barrels, he was already overshooting the target.
The tracers whipped past Papova’s left wing, missing by inches, looking like a string of angry red hornets.
The fighter zoomed past her, unable to slow down without stalling.
He had to pull up, banking hard to circle back for another pass.
Pova knew she had about 40 seconds before he came back.
She couldn’t outrun him.
She couldn’t outclimb him.
Her only chance was to go where he couldn’t follow.
She slammed the stick forward, pushing the nose of the potu down into a steep dive.
She was heading straight for the source of the search lights.
It was a move that went against every survival instinct in a pilot’s brain.
You don’t dive toward the guns, you fly away from them.
But Povven knew the geometry of the trap.
The heavy German flack guns had safety stops to prevent them from hitting their own troops or the search light crews.
If she got low enough, right down on the deck, the big guns couldn’t depress their barrels low enough to hit her.
She would be underneath their umbrella.
The wind screamed as the little biplane picked up speed.
The wooden frame groaned under the stress.
The canvas skin on the wings rippled violently, threatening to tear away from the ribs.
She was diving blindly into a well of light.
At 500 ft, the air was filled with smaller caliber fire.
Machine guns and rifles firing wildly from the ground.
Bullets punched through the floor of the cockpit.
The impact sounded like a hammer striking a drum.
One bullet smashed the instrument panel, sending glass flying into her lap.
Another tore through the fabric of her flight suit, grazing her thigh.
She didn’t feel the pain.
She only felt the adrenaline pumping through her veins like jet fuel.
She leveled off at 50 ft.
She was so low that she was skimming the tops of the German tents.
The search lights couldn’t track her this close.
They were designed to sweep the sky, not the ground.
She was flying through the camp like a runaway car.
She saw German soldiers diving into the mud.
She saw the terrified faces of the flack crews as the sewing machine buzzed over their heads.
This was the night witch advantage.
A German fighter pilot would never dare fly this low at night.
His plane was too fast and his reaction time too slow.
If he twitched the stick at 300 mph at this altitude, he would be a fireball in the trees before he could blink.
But the potu was a tractor.
Pova could fly it through a barn door if she had to.
She banked hard to the right, heading for a dark ravine on the edge of the camp.
The ravine was a narrow cut in the earth, lined with tall pine trees.
It was a death trap for a normal plane, but for Papova, it was a sanctuary.
She dropped the plane into the cut, flying below the level of the treeine.
The darkness swallowed her instantly.
The search light swept overhead, their beams cutting through the smoke, but they couldn’t find her down in the hole.
She was invisible again.
She reduced the throttle, quieting the engine, and wo the plane through the twists and turns of the ravine, using the earth itself as armor.
But the German fighter pilot wasn’t giving up.
He had seen her dive.
He knew she was down there.
He circled overhead, waiting for her to pop up.
He was like a hawk circling a rabbit hole.
He knew she couldn’t stay in the ravine forever.
Eventually, the terrain would rise or she would run out of fuel.
He just had to wait.
Pova checked her fuel gauge.
It was smashed.
She checked her compass.
It was spinning wildly.
She was flying blind, wounded, and lost in a hole in the ground with a predator waiting upstairs.
She flew down the ravine for three mi, her wheels almost brushing the tops of the bushes.
She needed to trick the fighter.
She spotted a small clearing ahead where a farmhouse was burning, likely set ablaze by the earlier bombing run.
The fire was casting a glow into the sky.
Pova had an idea.
It was dangerous, but everything tonight was dangerous.
As she approached the fire, she pulled back on the stick and shoved the throttle to full power.
The POU popped up out of the ravine outlined perfectly against the orange flames of the burning house.
She made herself a target.
The German pilot saw it immediately.
He rolled his heavy fighter and dove.
He thought she had made a mistake.
He thought she was panicking and trying to climb.
He lined up for the kill.
His engines screaming as he built up speed for the attack.
He committed to the dive.
He was coming down like a thunderbolt, focused entirely on the silhouette of the biplane.
At the last possible second, just as the German opened fire, Pova cut her engine and kicked the left rudder pedal to the floor.
The POU didn’t turn, it snapped.
It entered a violent spin, dropping out of the sky like a stone.
To an observer, it looked like she had been hit.
The German pilot thought he had killed her.
He saw the plane falling, spinning out of control toward the trees.
Satisfied and terrified of hitting the ground himself at 400 mph, he yanked his stick back and climbed away, roaring back into the safety of the upper sky.
But Pova wasn’t dead.
She was wrestling the machine.
A spin at 200 ft is usually fatal.
The ground is coming up too fast to recover.
But the POU had one miraculous quality.
It wanted to fly.
It was so light and had so much lift that it practically recovered itself if you just let go of the controls.
Pova neutralized the rudder and pushed the stick forward.
The spin stopped.
The wings bit into the air.
She pulled up gently, feeling the G-forces press her into the seat.
The landing gear brushed the tips of the pine trees, snapping off a few branches, but she was flying.
She leveled off in the darkness alone.
The fighter was gone.
The search lights were miles behind her.
She limped back to the airfield.
The plane was a wreck.
The fabric was hanging off the fuselage in strips, fluttering in the wind.
The engine was leaking oil, spraying a hot black mist over her windshield.
When she finally touched down, the landing was rough.
The plane bounced twice and skidded to a halt.
The ground crew ran out, expecting to pull a corpse from the wreckage.
They found Pova sitting in the cockpit, shaking so hard she couldn’t unbuckle her harness.
She was soaked in sweat despite the freezing cold.
Her flight suit was stained with blood from the grays on her leg.
Her mechanic, a girl named Vera, who was only 18, climbed onto the wing.
She looked at the bullet holes in the cockpit floor.
She looked at the smashed instrument panel.
Then she looked at Pova.
The plane is finished.
Vera said, “The main spar is cracked.
The engine is shot.
We have to scrap it.” Pova looked at her.
She didn’t look like a hero.
She looked like a ghost.
Her eyes were hollow, rimmed with black grease and exhaustion.
She looked at the line of other planes waiting to take off.
She looked at the piles of bombs waiting to be loaded.
She knew the mission wasn’t over.
The Germans were still in the bridge head.
The war was still going on.
She unbuckled her harness and climbed out of the ruined cockpit.
She stood on the wing for a moment, steadying herself, forcing her legs to stop shaking.
“Get me another plane,” Pova said.
Her voice was a rasp dry from the smoke and the fear.
“But you’re wounded,” Vera said.
“You need a doctor.” Pova shook her head.
“The doctor can wait.
The Germans won’t.
” She limped across the tarmac to the next Po in the line.
She climbed into the cockpit, wincing as her leg bent.
She checked the fuel full.
She checked the bomb racks.
Loaded.
She looked at the navigator, a new girl who looked terrified.
Pova gave her a thumbs up.
just like she had given Kadia hours ago.
Contact, she yelled.
The mechanic swung the propeller.
The engine coughed and roared to life.
Pova didn’t wait for a warm-up.
She pushed the throttle forward.
The fresh plane smelling of dope and gasoline rumbled down the dirt strip and lifted into the air.
She turned south back toward the wall of light, back toward the fighters, back toward the nightmare.
She had survived the trap once.
Now she was going back to do it again because that is what a night witch did.
She didn’t stop until the dawn came or until she didn’t come back.
This wasn’t just courage.
This was a cold, hard refusal to accept reality.
The Germans had the technology.
They had the radar, the cannons, the speed.
They had the math on their side.
But Pova had something the German manuals didn’t account for.
She had a plane that was too stupid to die and a will that was too hard to break.
She flew four more missions that night.
By the time the sun finally cracked the horizon, turning the sky a bloody shade of red, she had dropped another,000 lbs of explosives on the enemy.
She landed the plane, climbed out, and collapsed on the grass under the wing, asleep before her head hit the ground.
The war didn’t stop for the 588th Regiment.
It just stretched out into an endless, grueling marathon of freezing nights and burning targets.
For three long years, the Night Witches flew.
They flew through the muddy spring thaws where the airfields turned into swamps, and they had to physically lift the tails of their planes to help them take off.
They flew through the scorching summers where the dust clogged the engines and the heat in the open cockpits made them pass out from dehydration.
And they flew through the brutal Russian winters where the temperature dropped so low that the mechanics had to heat the engine oil over open fires just to get it liquid enough to pour.
The regiment moved west following the front lines pushing the Germans back mile by bloody mile.
They bombed the Germans in the Caucasus.
They bombed them in the Crimea.
They bombed them in Poland.
As the Red Army advanced, the night witches became the grim reapers of the retreat.
The Germans were exhausted, beaten, and terrified.
And every night, the sound of the sewing machines reminded them that there was no escape.
The psychological impact was devastating.
German letters home were filled with complaints about the Russian harpies who wouldn’t let them sleep.
The rumor about the iron cross persisted until the very end of the war.
It became a badge of honor among the Luftwafa pilots.
You could shoot down 10 yaks and get a pat on the back.
But if you shot down a crop duster flown by a girl, you were a legend.
By 1944, the regiment had flown over 20,000 sorties.
Think about that number.
20,000 times a woman climbed into a plywood box, took off into the dark, and tried to kill the enemy.
The physical toll was visible on their faces.
They weren’t the fresh-faced girls who had stuffed rags in their boots in 1941.
They were hardened veterans.
Their skin was leathery from the wind.
Their eyes were dark and sunken.
Many of them stopped menstruating because of the constant stress and lack of food.
They lived on adrenaline and cigarettes.
They didn’t talk about the future.
They didn’t talk about husbands or children.
They only talked about wind speed, fuel mixtures, and bomb loads.
But they also became masters of their craft.
They developed tactics that bordered on insanity.
When the German search lights became too intense, they started flying in pairs.
One plane would fly in loud, revving the engine, drawing the lights and the flack.
While the Germans were distracted by the wild plane, the second plane would glide in silently from the opposite direction and drop the bombs.
Then they would switch roles.
They played a deadly game of tag with the anti-aircraft gunners, dancing through the beams of light.
They learned to read the landscape in the pitch black, navigating by the reflection of the stars on the rivers and the shapes of the forests.
They didn’t need radios or radar.
They had become creatures of the night.
In the spring of 1945, the night witches arrived at their final destination, Germany.
They were flying over the heart of the enemy Empire.
The targets were no longer muddy trenches or supply depots in the wilderness.
They were bombing German towns, German airfields, and the roads leading to Berlin.
The airspace was crowded and dangerous.
The sky was filled with American bombers by day and British bombers by night.
The little potus were like minnows swimming in a tank of sharks, but they kept flying.
They wanted to see the end.
They wanted to drop their last bombs on the people who had invaded their home.
On one of the final nights of the war, Nage Deova flew a mission over the outskirts of Berlin.
The city was burning.
The fires were so massive that she didn’t need to look at her instruments.
The glow from the ground lit up the cockpit like it was noon.
She could see the Russian tanks moving through the streets.
She could see the tracers arching over the Reich stag.
She cut her engine one last time.
She glided over the wreckage of the German capital, the wind whistling through the wires.
She dropped her bombs on a column of retreating German vehicles.
As she turned for home, she looked down at the destruction.
The invincible army that had stood at the gates of Moscow was gone.
The sewing machines had helped stitch their shroud.
The war ended in May of 1945.
The guns fell silent.
The lights came back on in Europe.
For the women of the 588th, it was a moment of supreme victory.
They had survived.
They had won.
They had proven every skeptic, every mocker, and every laughing instructor wrong.
They had dropped 23,000 tons of bombs.
They had produced 23 heroes of the Soviet Union, the highest honor the country could bestow.
They assumed that their return home would be a celebration.
They expected parades.
They expected respect.
But the Soviet Union was a harsh mother.
When the victory parade was organized in Moscow, a massive spectacle to show off the power of the Red Army to the world, the order came down from the high command.
The night witches were excluded.
The reason given was brutal in its pettiness.
The generals decided that the potu biplanes were too ugly to be shown in the parade.
They looked like toys compared to the sleek new jet fighters and massive tanks.
And the women themselves, the officers said they couldn’t march well enough.
They had spent the war flying, not drilling on a parade deck.
Their boots were scuffed.
Their uniforms were worn.
They didn’t look like the polished, poster perfect soldiers the propaganda machine wanted to show.
So while the tanks rolled through Red Square and the crowds cheered, the women who had terrorized the German army sat on the sidelines, they were disbanded almost immediately.
The regiment was dissolved in October of 1945.
The women were given a small demobilization bonus and told to go home.
The message was clear.
The war is over.
Go back to being women.
Go have babies.
Forget about the flying.
It was a final stinging slap in the face.
They had done the impossible and their reward was eraser.
Nage Deova went back to Ukraine.
She was 23 years old, a decorated killer with a chest full of metals, and she had to figure out how to live a normal life.
It wasn’t easy.
The adrenaline withdrawal was physically painful.
The silence of the night kept her awake.
She missed the sound of the engine.
She missed the girls.
For years, she didn’t talk about the war.
The Soviet history books focused on the male pilots, the tank commanders, the generals.
The Night Witches became a footnote, a quirky story about girls in crop dusters that people told over vodka but didn’t take seriously.
But you cannot hide a legacy that loud forever.
The story refused to die.
It survived in the memories of the German soldiers who still woke up sweating, listening for the sound of the wind in the wires.
It survived in the diaries of the women who kept their flight goggles hidden in their knitting drawers.
Slowly over the decades, the truth started to come out.
Historians began to look at the numbers.
They realized that this regiment wasn’t a publicity stunt.
It was one of the most effective bomber units in the entire war.
The sewing machines had flown more sordies per pilot than any other unit in the Soviet Air Force.
Pova lived a long life.
She became a flight instructor, passing on her skills to a new generation.
She married a fellow pilot she had met during the war, a man she had flirted with by buzzing his car with her potu.
She never lost that spark of rebellion.
In her old age, she would give interviews to journalists who asked her if she was afraid.
She would look at them with those steel gray eyes and smile.
Of course, I was afraid, she would say.
I’m not a stone, but I was more angry than I was afraid.
She died in 2013 at the age of 91.
By then, the world knew who she was.
The night witches had become legends.
There were books, movies, and songs written about them.
The ugly planes were now hanging in museums as icons of ingenuity.
The women who were told to go home and be quiet were now recognized as pioneers.
They proved that warfare isn’t just about who has the biggest gun or the fastest engine.
It’s about who has the guts to turn off the engine and glide into the dark.
We tell this story to make sure Nage Deova and her sisters don’t disappear into silence again.
We tell it because the manuals say you need a jet engine to be a fighter pilot, but history proves you just need a canvas kite and a heart made of iron.
We tell it to remind ourselves that when the experts say something is impossible and the mockers say it’s a joke, that is usually the exact moment when history is about to be made.
The night witches didn’t just break the German army, they broke the rules of what was possible.
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