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The German sentries on the Eastern Front learned to fear a sound, and the sound wasn’t engines.

It was wind. A soft rushing whoosh in the dark overhead, like canvas tearing, like air over a blade. By the time they heard it, it was too late, because the sound meant a plywood biplane was already gliding down on them with its engine switched off, a bomb under each wing, and two women in the open cockpits. The engine would cough back to life only after the bombs were away.

The Germans said the whooshing sounded like witches’ broomsticks. They called the regiment Nachthexen. Night Witches.

The women kept the name. If the enemy wants to hand you the best punk band name in military history, you take it.

The 588th Night Bomber Regiment — later the 46th Taman Guards — was an all-women unit of the Soviet Air Force: pilots, navigators, mechanics, armorers, everyone, most of them between 17 and 26 years old. They flew Po-2 biplanes, crop dusters made of plywood and canvas, designed as trainers, with open cockpits, no radios, no guns for most of the war, and no parachutes (the planes flew too low for a chute to open, and the weight was better spent on bombs).

Navigation was maps, compasses, and stars. When it rained, the rain ran over the instruments. When it was winter, it was Russian winter, in an open cockpit, all night.

In those planes, over four years, they flew more than 23,000 combat sorties.

One of them was a jazz-mad village girl with a lucky beetle brooch who danced her plane through German searchlights 852 times and lived to bury everyone. The other was a solar astronomer who promised her first bomb to the men who shelled her university, flew 645 missions, and fell burning over Crimea at 22.

The Germans said they had to be witches. The truth was so much better.

A Wild Spirit

Nadia Popova was a railwayman’s daughter from a village near the Donetsk coal fields, and was a menace in the best way. The Economist, in her obituary, called her a wild spirit, easily bored, a girl who loved to tango and foxtrot and sing along to jazz. She thought about becoming an actress. Then a plane landed near her village when she was a teenager, and that was the end of that dream.

She joined a flying club at 15 without telling her parents.

Then in 1941 the Germans invaded. Her brother Leonid was killed at the front, and the Wehrmacht rolled through her hometown. When Moscow put out the call for women pilots, she went.

The call existed because of Marina Raskova, a celebrity navigator, the Soviet Amelia Earhart, famous for a record-setting 1938 flight that ended with her bailing out over the Siberian taiga and surviving alone for days. Marina used her fame and her direct line to Stalin to force the creation of three all-women air regiments in October 1941.

The 588th got the crop dusters, the night shift, and the unglamorous missions: fly to the German lines in the dark, low, again and again, and deny the enemy sleep, fuel dumps, supply depots, and peace.

The uniforms came in men’s sizes, down to the boots. Popova took hers in with darts and a cinched waist, kept a tortoiseshell mirror to fix her hair between sorties, pinned a beetle brooch to her uniform as a lucky charm, and kept a white silk blouse and a long blue silk scarf beside her cot — which was sometimes in a cowshed — in case, she said, she needed to make a really feminine impression. She flew up to a dozen missions a night dressed to the nines.

The tactics were pure nerve. The Po-2’s top speed was so slow that German fighters stalled trying to stay behind one, which made the little planes maddeningly hard to shoot down and did nothing about the anti-aircraft guns and searchlights. So the women flew in teams.

Popova’s specialty was the decoy run. Dive full-throttle into the searchlight beams and dance, swerving, rolling, dragging every gun and light onto herself, while her partner glided in silent behind the beams and dropped. Then they’d swap, and she’d make her own run through what she later called a wall of enemy fire.

The Germans, unable to accept what was happening, spread a rumor that the women had been injected with experimental chemicals that let them see in the dark. A story also ran through both armies that any German pilot who downed a Night Witch earned an automatic Iron Cross.

In August 1942, forced down near Cherkessk during the retreat, Popova fell in with a column of wounded and met a fighter pilot named Semyon Kharlamov, shot through the face, half his head bandaged, reading a novel and grinning at her with his eyes. They wrote to each other through the whole war and scribbled each other’s names on the Reichstag in 1945.

She married him. He ended up a colonel general.

She ended up a squadron commander with 852 combat sorties. One night over Poland in 1944, she and her navigator Yekaterina Ryabova flew 18 of them between dusk and dawn. Eighteen takeoffs. Eighteen runs through the guns. Eighteen landings on a dirt strip in the dark, rearming with frozen fingers each time. It became her personal record and made her famous across the Soviet Union.

The Solar Department

Zhenya Rudneva was the other kind of witch.

She was a telegrapher’s daughter from Berdyansk on the Black Sea, an only child, quiet where Popova sparkled. Her love was the sky in the other sense: by her third year in the mechanics and mathematics faculty at Moscow State University she was a working astronomer, head of the Solar Department of the Moscow branch of the Astronomical-Geodesical Society. She studied the sun for a living. She was 20.

In her diary, before the war reached her, she wrote that science was her life, but if it came to it, she would forget astronomy for a while and become a fighter.

In October 1941 it came to it. She volunteered, trained as a navigator, and joined the 588th. In 1942 she wrote a letter to her old professor, the head of astrometry at Moscow State, and told him the Germans had bombed the university building where she’d studied, and that she had promised her first bomb to them for that.

She was defending, she wrote, the honor of the university.

An astronomer turned out to be exactly what a night regiment needed. Navigation was by stars, and Rudneva knew the stars. She rose to chief navigator of the entire regiment, and instead of keeping the safest seat, she made a habit of flying with new, untested pilots on their first combat runs; the most dangerous seat in the unit, because a rookie’s first night over the guns went better with the regiment’s best navigator talking her through it.

She flew 645 missions that way.

On the night of April 8, 1944, over the Kerch peninsula in Crimea, Rudneva went up with a young pilot named Panna Prokopyeva on a run against a target north of the city. The flak found them. The plane caught fire. They held course and put their bombs on the target anyway, burning, before the aircraft went down.

Zhenya Rudneva was 22. The regiment saw the plane fall and knew. But the crash site was behind the lines, and the two women buried near Kerch stayed nameless in the ground for 20 years before anyone confirmed who they were.

And the regiment flew on.

Of its roughly 261 women, 30 were killed in the war. Popova herself was forced down or shot up several times and once counted 42 bullet holes in her plane after a single mission. By the end, the Night Witches had flown their 23,000 sorties, 23 of them had been named Hero of the Soviet Union, and the unit had fought from the Caucasus to Berlin.

And through all of it, the Soviet command never had to make the argument for women in combat again. The witches had settled it.

The Sewing Machines

The Germans had a second nickname, not for the women but for the plane. They called the Po-2 the Nähmaschine, the sewing machine, for the puttering clatter of its little engine. A housework name. A joke about something domestic and harmless rattling along where the real machines flew.

The Soviet Union was the only nation in the Second World War to send women into air combat at all. It raised three women’s regiments in 1941, and the men’s air force greeted them with the oldest aircraft in inventory, the least glamorous shift, and open skepticism from commanders who assumed the little sisters would wash out by spring.

The 588th got trainers built of plywood, the night hours, and targets nobody would make a newsreel about; supply dumps, river crossings, rail junctions, the enemy’s sleep itself.

Night after night for three years: more than 23,000 sorties, thousands of tons of bombs armed and loaded by hand, by women armorers hauling ordnance through the dark between landings, mechanics turning planes around in minutes on unlit fields.

The regiment refused male replacements the entire war, and of the three women’s regiments, it was the only one that stayed all-women from first flight to last. It finished as one of the most decorated units, of any kind, in Soviet aviation. Twenty-three Heroes of the Soviet Union out of roughly 261 women, and a Guards title earned over the Taman peninsula. Thirty of them died doing it.

And the crews were all, in one way or another, Popova and Rudneva. Every cockpit held a pair like them, a wild one and a careful one, a dancer up front and a scholar behind, a girl who took her uniform in with darts and a girl who could read the whole sky.

They were students, teachers, factory workers, an astronomer. The oldest were barely 26 years old. The Reich, unable to process it, decided it must be witchcraft and injection serums, because the true explanation was unbearable to the Nazi mind: the sewing machines were flown by exactly the young women they told vile jokes about.

And it feels all the more satisfying that the flying contraptions and the women who flew them, who they laughed about in the daylight, filled them with terror in the dark.

When the war ended, the Soviet Union demobilized its women quickly, and most of the regiment’s veterans went home to a country that preferred its war story with the women edited out. Many put the medals in drawers and didn’t speak of it for decades. Popova, decorated and married to a general, became one of the exceptions, and to her credit she used the microphone and the cameras for all of them, telling the story of the cowsheds and the searchlights until she died.

The regiment’s memory survives to a real degree because the dancer outlived everyone and refused to shut up. Hell yeah.

1907 Rudneva

Popova got the ending Rudneva didn’t. Hero of the Soviet Union in February 1945. The hero’s welcome home, the marching band, the flowers on the car. The marriage to the man with the bandaged grin. A son, a long career, an old age full of medals and interviews.

She died in Moscow on July 8, 2013, at 91, and the world’s newspapers ran her obituary with the tortoiseshell mirror and the beetle brooch in it. Near the end of her life she told an interviewer that she sometimes stared into the darkness, closed her eyes, and asked herself, “Nadia, how did you do it?”

She did it 852 times.

But Rudneva got an ending too, eventually. In September 1972, at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, a Soviet astronomer discovered a minor planet, 11 kilometers of rock in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. It was named 1907 Rudneva, for the head of the Solar Department of the Moscow Astronomical-Geodesical Society, killed on her 645th combat mission.

The student who set down her telescope and promised her first bomb to the men who shelled her university. The navigator who took the rookie seat every time. The girl who lay unnamed in the ground at Kerch for 20 years. There is an object in the solar system that will carry her name for as long as there’s a solar system, and it was found from the ground she died defending, by the science she loved with her whole heart.

She wrote that she would forget astronomy for a while. But astronomy didn’t forget her.

There was no serum, no sorcery, just badass women in plywood planes with no parachutes, coming back 18 times a night. The determination, the passion, and the drive to keep going, to fight the evil that was creeping over the world. Despite being given the male regiment’s leftovers, the missions no one wanted, they struck fear into the hearts of Nazis for years.

Nadezhda Popova. Yevgeniya Rudneva. The dancer and the astronomer. Punk AF.

Now it’s our job to never forget them.

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