Night Witches a.k.a. Nightmare of the Nazis

Marina Raskova acquired the status of a national legend during the Second World War. Known to a wider public as "Soviet Amelia Earhart," her experience and importance became a trigger for women to become more than just "equal" to men in participating in military operations in the sky; she led to the emergence of all-female combat units in the Red Army air force. The 588th Night Bomber Regiment became significant as the group marks the Eastern Front, especially embodying the strength of the spirit of the women who fought against the Nazi "cancer," which was stretching its tentacles to almost all corners of the world. The soldiers of the Reich feared them like fire, calling them "Night Witches."

Members of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, nicknamed the “Night Witches,” lined up and receiving orders for a bombing mission taking place later that evening. (Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images)

After receiving permission from Stalin in 1941, Marina founded two gender-mixed and one all-women's air force regiments. They were so successful that even the outdated biplanes that they used in battle did not reduce the effectiveness of destroying the enemy. They got rid of the aircraft's engines while in the sky, which allowed them to silently "sneak up" on the enemy before bombing. Even though the work was tedious and dangerous, they successfully completed more than 23,000 sorties, which was accompanied by high-precision tactics (Pennington and Erickson, 2001).

Despite the bravery of these strong women, they also encountered systematic sexism from their male colleagues. Even after women were granted permission to serve in June 1941, the Red Army carried on to be "a site of the masculine values of national defense" at the time of World War II (JUG, 2013). The stories of the life and military prowess of the glorious "Night Witches" have long been covered in the dust of the broader rhetoric of general Soviet participation in World War II, thus becoming open to public not so long ago thanks to the efforts of academics and the dissemination of information by the descendants of the heroines.

(NBC News Learn, 2020)

Raskova received full military honors at the first state funeral of the war, after she tragically died in a plane crash in 1943. She remains a significant figure in Russian military history but is often used for propaganda purposes, and her biography is sanitized in order for her to fit a certain political line.

The Night Witches are an explicit example of how the military needs to erase gender prejudice, but the return to post-war realities and the restoration of patriarchal norms, and the USSR undertaking financial incentives and legislative constraints which encouraged motherhood shortly after the war ended (PERI, 2018), highlight the hypocrisy of this process and the fragility of equality.

Bibliography:

1. UIG via Getty Images and Sovfoto. Members of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, nicknamed the ‘Night Witches,’ lined up and receiving orders for a bombing mission taking place later that evening. [Film] Available at: https://images.app.goo.gl/Vpvkg5Uc68cpXVrx9 [Accessed 27 Mar. 2025].

2. Pennington, R. and Erickson, J. (2001). Wings, women, and war : Soviet airwomen in World War II combat. Lawrence: University Press Of Kansas.

3. JUG, S.G. (2013). ALL STALIN’S MEN? SOLDIERLY MASCULINITIES IN THE SOVIET WAR EFFORT, 1938-1945. [online] p.258. Available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/19529991.pdf [Accessed 22 Mar. 2025].

4. NBC News Learn (2020). Chronicles of Courage: Night Witches. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmUZgCGCO8Y.

5. PERI, A. (2018). New ‘Soviet Woman’: The PostWorld War II Feminine Ideal at Home and Abroad. The Russian Review, [online] 77(4), pp.621–644. doi:https://doi.org/10.2307/45097389.