The Night Witches were largely unique among the female combatants - and even the female flyers-of World War II. Any German pilot who downed a "witch" was automatically awarded an Iron Cross. So the Nazis began calling the female fighter pilots Nachthexen: "night witches." They were loathed. Those noises reminded the Germans, apparently, of the sound of a witch's broomstick. As a result, their planes made little more than soft "whooshing" noises as they flew by. They often operated in stealth mode, idling their engines as they neared their targets and then gliding their way to their bomb release points.
Its members, who ranged in age from 17 to 26, flew primarily at night, making do with planes that were-per their plywood-and-canvas construction-generally reserved for training and crop-dusting. The 588th was the most highly decorated female unit in that force, flying 30,000 missions over the course of four years-and dropping, in total, 23,000 tons of bombs on invading German armies. It was Tamara Pamyatnykh, one of the members of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Forces. The brave lad had refused the vodka, it turned out, because the brave lad was not a lad at all. As the pilot would later recall, "Nobody could understand why the brave lad who had taken on a Nazi squadron wouldn't drink vodka." The people on the ground, who had witnessed the skirmish, rushed over to help the stranded pilot. The pilot bailed out, landing, finally, in a field. The outnumbered Soviets downed two Nazi planes before one of their own lost its wing to enemy fire. The tiny planes' flimsiness was in some ways an asset: their maximum speed was lower than the stall speed of the Nazi planes, meaning that the pilots could maneuver their craft with much more agility than their attackers. They sent their planes into dives, returning fire directly into the center of the German formation. The pilots did what anyone piloting a plane made of plywood would do when confronted with enemy craft and enemy fire: they ducked. until the pilots found themselves confronted by a collection of German bombers. Their passage was on its way to being a routine patrol. Two pilots, members of the Soviet Air Force, were flying their planes- Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes, built mainly of plywood and canvas-over a Soviet railway junction. It was the spring of 1943, at the height of World War II.
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