About three-quarters of the Germans killed in World War II were done in by Soviets. Some of those Soviets were women. Some of those women flew airplanes and dropped explodey death from above. The Germans called them Nachthexen—the “Night Witches,” and they were fucking terrified of them.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 12, 1942--
They made up the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. During the war they flew approximately 23,000 sorties, dropping about 3,000 tons of bombs along with many thousands of those shells that set shit on fire, at night, using outdated wooden biplanes. They played an important role and were valued and respected by the Red Army. Jk. Men are elbow-skinned cocklobsters and the Night Witches were subject to skepticism and sexual harassment.
The fucking Nazis called them witches because their planes made a “whooshing” noise that reminded them of a witch’s broomstick or some bullshit, I don’t know. Those kind of witches don’t exist but that didn’t stop men from calling them that and murdering them for it across the ages. Angry tangent over. The Nazis hated them so much that any Luftwaffe pilot who shot one down automatically got the Iron Cross, a prestigious German medal for valor.
The Soviet Union wasn’t exactly a bastion of feminism, and women had been barred from combat. But with Nazi shitwaffles knocking on the gates of Moscow they were like yeah I guess we better let the women fight too. So they gave them old crop-dusting planes and said do what you can. Their first mission was on June 12, 1942, in a bombing raid on the Southern front.
The Night Witches didn’t use radios and therefore couldn’t be easily tracked. The only warning you got that you were about to be blown into Nazi bits was that telltale whoosh before the kaboom. They were all volunteers, mostly in their teens and early ‘20s. They wore hand-me-down uniforms and flew highly flammable planes with no parachutes and no guns. Their faces often froze flying in open cockpits through the Russian winter.
Carrying a bomb under each wing, each night 40 two-person crews flew as many as 18 missions a night. One of the Night Witches, Nadezhda Popova, who lived to be 91 and flew 852 missions in the war, said, “Almost every time we had to sail through a wall of enemy fire.” They effectively used distraction tactics. Flying in groups of three, two would draw the attention of spotlights and twist and turn and say haha fucker you can’t get me while the third dropped its bombs, then they’d switch up and the next would do a bombing run while the others played decoy.
Thirty of the 261 Night Witches were killed in action and 23 were awarded Hero of the Soviet Union. Alas, they were disbanded shortly after the war, and not included in Moscow’s victory day parade despite being the most decorated unit in the Soviet Air Force. Until recently, they were largely forgotten by history. Because men were envious of their success, I guess.
NOTE: This piece was researched and written by a human, not some bullshit "ai" plagiarism software.
Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN at JamesFell.com/books.
