The Night Witches of Stalingrad

The Night Witches was the nickname the Germans gave to the Soviet Air Forces 588th Night Bomber Regiment, later called the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, a women-only combat regiment formed at the instigation of Marina Raskova and led by Major Yevdokia Bershanskaya.

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The regiment flew harassment bombing and precision bombing missions from 1942 to the end of the war. At its largest size, it had 40 two-person crews. It flew over 23,000 sorties and is said to have dropped 3,000 tons of bombs. It was the most highly-decorated unit in the Soviet Air Force, each pilot having flown over 1,000 missions by the end of the war and twenty-three having been awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union title. Thirty-one of its members died in combat.

“Known by the Germans as the "night witches" because they cut their engines and glided in to attack their targets, thereby outfoxing air defences, with "a whooshing sound, like a witch's broomstick in the night. They would fly night missions through the streets of stalingrad often at treetop level to bomb tactical targets".

The regiment flew in wood and canvas Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes , a 1928 design intended for use as training aircraft and for crop-dusting. The planes could carry only two bombs at a time, so multiple missions in a night were necessary. Although the aircraft were obsolete and slow, the pilots made daring use of their exceptional maneuverability; they had the advantage of having a maximum speed that was lower than the stall speed of both the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190, as a result, the German pilots found them very difficult to shoot down.

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Searchlights, however presented a big problem. The Germans at Stalingrad developed what the Russians called a "flak circus". They would arrange flak guns and searchlights (hidden during the day) in concentric circles around probable targets. Planes flying in pairs in a straight-line flight path across the perimeter were often ripped to shreds by the flak guns. So the Night Witches of the 588th developed their own technique to deal with the problem. They flew in groups of three. Two would go in and deliberately attract the attention of the Germans. When all the searchlights were pointed at them, the two pilots would suddenly separate, flying in opposite directions and maneuvering wildly to shake off the searchlight operators who were trying to follow them. In the meantime the third pilot would fly in through the dark path cleared by her two teammates and hit the target virtually unopposed. She would then get out, rejoin the other two, and they would switch places until all three had delivered their payloads. As Nadya Popova noted, it took nerves of steel to be a decoy and willingly attract enemy fire, but it worked very well.

Links

1). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/08/02/bobel128.xml
2). http://pratt.edu/~rsilva/witches.htm
3). http://www.samolet.co.uk/femalefaces.html
4). http://www.flyandrive.com/nightwitches2.htm
5). http://www.seizethesky.com/nwitches/nitewtch.html

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