Night Witches

earning them

the nickname the Night Witches.

And this name did not arrive entirely because of the time during which they chose to make these bomb runs.

It also came about because of their approach.

So each of these planes had a pilot and a navigator, all female.

Let's talk a little bit about how they came to be.

So June of 2019 marks the 77th anniversary of the beginning of the Night Witches.

And there's a lot of context that pours into this because in June of 1941, Axis powers pushed into the USSR, using the largest invading force in the history of war.

Having successfully halted the German assault, the Soviet 4th Air Army pressed its advantage by turning to bombard the German river crossing site directly, sinking several ferries in the process.

That same night, the famous 588th Night Bomber Regiment, better known to friend and foe alike as the Night Witches, succeeded in damaging the German pontoon bridge across the Terek.

I'd like to note that a very long time ago, before I was even the Pacific War channel, I was known as a channel called NBS History.

I actually did an episode on female Soviet soldiers and the Night Witches.

It's a very interesting part of history.

If you'd like to see me brutally mispronounce Russian even worse than I do in this podcast, please go check out that old episode.

I've got to give a shout out because I was talking to Joe Prince about this.

We played a game of Night Witches.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And it

You threaded the needle and it's now, now we can't touch these dice again because they will betray us if we ever play this game again.

Yeah, but what's super funny to me is the cultural touchstone for all of us around the table is a TV show called The World at War with Lance Olivier, so Larry Olivier narrates about World War II and there's an episode about the Soviet Union and there's an episode about the Eastern Front And on it they have survivors on the Eastern Front.

You know, and you sort of think, oh, are these Night Witches that have survived this game? Wow.

Like, they've only turned up in a documentary on BBC Two in, like, 30 years' time.

Somewhere on the steppe, east of the Don River, summer of 1942, three in the morning, a German soldier in a forward trench hears a small engine somewhere up in the dark, and then the engine cuts out, silence, just the faintest whisper, wind through wires and fabric somewhere up in the black sky above him, and then the bombs, by the time the searchlights found anything, whatever it was had already turned and was heading back east.

The soldiers started calling them the Nocthexen, the night witches.

I'm Tail Dragger.

You're on The Hangar on Radio Hangar.

The PO-2 could carry about 300 kilograms of bombs, roughly 660 pounds, two ordnance units under the lower wing.

For comparison, a B-17 Flying Fortress could carry up to 8,000 pounds.

The Night Witches were delivering less than 10% of that per sortie, so they flew multiple sorties per night.

On warm summer nights, when darkness only lasted a few hours, a crew might fly eight missions.

I was very surprised when I saw that the pilots of these old bangers were women, and what's more, they were beautiful.

The Germans gave them the nickname Night Witches.

That evening, passing above our ground, they threw out a woolen puppet that they had knitted in French colors.

It touched me in the same way as a goodbye kiss.

The German soldiers call them Nachtexen.

The Night Witches, I'm TailDrager, you're listening to The Hangar on Radio Hangar, and tonight we're going deep into one of the most remarkable combat records in the history of military aviation.

Not just women in aviation, not just World War II, All of it.

Before I get into it, a word from the folks who are keeping this show flying.

The Soviet military was reeling in a way that is hard to fully describe unless you look at the maps from those first months.

The front line was moving east at a speed nobody had planned for.

Into this situation came a woman named Marina Raskova, and I want to take a minute on her before we talk about the regiment she built, because you cannot understand the Night Witches without understanding who opened the door for them.

Raskova was 30 years old in 1941.

Yeah, and another third game that I'm not even sure I'm interested in, it's called...

I'm not sure if I talked about it last time, but it's called Night Witches.

And it's from Liz Davidson and David Thompson, I think.

David Thompson has some very cool solo games, more in the war style that I don't really know.

But I've tried recently, just played last day their Queen of Spies game.

and it's really early but seems really good and i'm interested and these night witches sounds really cool looks cool and the theme of the game is actually related to the topic we're going to talk about today because it's about a bit of history and it's about a group of misfit woman soldier that during world war ii were just doing night raids on the nazis and and killing them or dropping bombs i don't know the specifics but yeah it's about that very specific part of World War II that you generally don't see anywhere.

And I was not really aware there was a whole squadron of women called the Night Witches that would be a terror to the Nazis.

Yeah, that's another one that sounds good.

We are looking at how a group of fiercely determined, completely underestimated Soviet women in 1941 took a fleet of obsolete wooden crop dusters and forged them into one of the most terrifying psychological weapons of the entire Second World War.

The Night Witches.

Yes.

A regiment that earned a name whispered in absolute dread by German soldiers.

German soldiers reported that the acoustic signature was deeply unsettling.

The soft, sweeping sound reminded them of the folk tales of a witch's broomstick sweeping across the night sky.

That terrifying acoustic phenomenon is what birthed the name Noctexan, the night witches.

The German command intended it as a slur, a way to demonize a foe they could not easily defeat.

The Germans heard that sound, that whisper, over and over, night after night.

They started calling them Nakteksen, night witches.

The regiment flew in pairs, a lead aircraft and a decoy.

The decoy came in first and drew the searchlights.

After the war, most of that story disappeared.

The Soviet military demobilized its female combat pilots and directed them back towards civilian life.

The records were classified, the Night Witches were not widely known outside the Soviet Union for decades.

Some of that was deliberate suppression, some of it was simply that nobody in the West was looking for the story.