The 588th’s first mission, on June 28, 1942, took aim-successfully-at the headquarters of the invading Nazi forces. By the fall the Germans were pressing on Moscow, Leningrad was under siege and the Red Army was struggling. Adolf Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa, his massive invasion of the Soviet Union, in June 1941. While women had been previously barred from combat, the pressure of an encroaching enemy gave Soviet leaders a reason to rethink the policy. Using female bombardiers wasn’t a first choice. Women pilots of the “Night Witches” receiving orders for an up-coming raid. “They never used radios, so radio locators couldn’t pick them up either. The planes were too small to show up on radar… on infrared locators,” said Steve Prowse, author of the screenplay The Night Witches, a nonfiction account of the little-known female squadron. “This sound was the only warning the Germans had. The Germans nicknamed them the Nachthexen, or “night witches,” because the whooshing noise their wooden planes made resembled that of a sweeping broom. And in doing so, they became a crucial Soviet asset in winning World War II. They were feared and hated so much by the Nazis that any German airman who downed one was automatically awarded the prestigious Iron Cross medal.Īll told, the pioneering all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment dropped more than 23,000 tons of bombs on Nazi targets. They braved bullets and frostbite in the air, while battling skepticism and sexual harassment on the ground. They flew under the cover of darkness in bare-bones plywood biplanes.
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