I am a story-teller. This week somebody said to me, that
reading a good book is like “heroine for the soul”, I’ve never tried heroine
(nor will I) but I imagine they can’t be wrong. The eagerness to flick through coffee-coloured
pages can prove to have some addictive qualities. What I love most in the world
(well, one of the things anyways), is when I stumble across a story that is entirely true. We’ve watched the movies
that have made our hearts throb and felt a prickle of glistening tears when we
see the final credit in big white letters say “based on a true story” and we
go, ‘wow’.
This week I stumbled across a true account of WW2 that was
very different to the ones I’d studied before. I’m willing to bet that 98% of
people reading this do not know who ‘The
Night Witches’ are, that’s okay, like I said, neither did I. However,
this is a story too remarkable not to share. The Night Witches were the 46th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment
for the Soviet Air Forces. Let me break that down for you, because that
title would go way over my head. Basically, they were pilots who bombed Germans
at night, for the Russian version of the RAF during WW2. They were also, a team
made up entirely of women.
Germany had invaded Russia and the majority of men had been sent
to fight on foreign fronts. Colonel Marina Raskova single-handedly bypassed her
committee and personally asked Stalin to allow her to train and form a regiment
made entirely from Russian women, who had previous aviation experience. The British refused to do it, the Americans
refused to do it, Germans refused to do it. The global guidelines on this was
pretty clear; woman and children must stay at home. Yet she made this
communist totalitarian dictator believe that doing so, would prove that Russia
was so confident that they would win this war, that they were not afraid to
send women to defend their motherland.
She was right.
The entire world laughed, including the Germans because of
course, there’s no way an entire female regiment could defeat a male one. What I
think Marina should have said to Stalin, was that the rest of the world should
be scared because Russia was sending
their women to war.
The regiment had little at their disposal. They flew
biplanes; a slow wooden plane used for crop dusting. They stripped them of all
communications, parachutes, extra fuel, even then they could only carry six
bombs and a single bullet (in case they were captured). They flew them low, at
night with no lights, often gliding to their target and then dropping the bombs
last minute. Germans claimed that they were like witches in the night and so
they were nicknamed ‘The Night Witches’.
They ‘flew over 23,000
sorties and are said to have dropped 3,000 tons of bombs. It was the most
highly-decorated female unit in the Soviet Air Force, each pilot having flown
over 800 missions by the end of the war and twenty-three having been awarded
the Hero of the Soviet Union title. Thirty of its members died in combat.’
Reading about these female pilots, made me feel a great
sense of pride. Pride to be a woman, pride that I don’t have to fight for my independence,
that these days it’s a given for me, pride to know that there are and were
females out there, completely kicking ass.
I’m not telling you this story because I’m an in-your-face feminist
because frankly I haven’t researched feminism nearly enough to understand where
I draw my line. I’m telling you because this was during a time when the world
was screaming at a group of people that ‘they weren’t good enough’. And they
(in this case the Russians) did it anyways. And they rocked. Perhaps it was
sheer desperation on the Russians side, regardless, Marina saw an opportunity
to help her country, to prove others wrong, and literally fly the flag not just
for Russia but for women worldwide who have dreams bigger than their husbands. Dont ever let anyone tell you can't do something, go out and do it and do it better than anyone has before you.
