The Night Witches

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 46^th 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.