WITCHES WITH COJONES

You will recall that the courage of British pilot John Moffit, who used his outdated fabric-covered Fairey Swordfish biplane to lob a torpedo into the rudder mechanism of the German battleship Bismarck, making it a sitting duck for the British fleet. Soviet air navigator Marina Roskova also apparently thought that it would be cool to fight World War II with World War I primitive technology. She formed a cadre of female aviators in the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. The Germans had a different name for them -- "Nachthexen" or, in English, "Night Witches."

Like John Moffit, a Night Witch used a primitive and old-fashioned fabric-covered two-person biplane, the Polikarpov Po-2, to ply her trade. The 588th was designated a night bomber regiment because, duh, it dropped bombs at night. To operate in daylight would have been certain death. The Night Witch would approach her target at a low altitude, cut off the engine, and then glide in to release her ordnance. Because each plane could only carry six bombs, a crew would usually have to fly multiple sorties per night. Because of weight limitations and the necessity to fly close to the ground, a Night Witch usually eschewed the carrying of a parachute.

The slow speed of the aircraft as well as its extreme maneuverability were the best protection against German fighter planes. The typical German fighter would stall out if it attempted to match the velocity of the Po-2. 

The NIght Witches flew over 23,000 sorties and dropped 3,000 tons of bombs by the end of the war. Thirty members died in combat; the surviving pilots flew over 800 missions apiece. Twenty-three of them were awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. 

The Germans did not like the NIght Witches. They dreaded the sound of a gliding Po-2 -- a sound similar to a swishing broom. Any German pilot who downed a Night Witch automatically received the Iron Cross.

To learn more about these courageous sorceresses, please click here.

By Douzeff (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
 or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
 via Wikimedia Commons