A year into the war with Germany, the German 6th Army surrounding Stalingrad, millions dead and countless more dying of starvation and disease. Supplies and equipment were running low and the need for people to throw into combat was soaring. These were the conditions that gave rise to some of the most daring and impressive pilots ever, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, nicknamed the Night Witches by the German forces. The name alone pretty much conveys how ridiculously amazing these women were, but let’s go into a bit more detail.
Formed in October of 1941, the Night Witches were an all female bomber regiment tasked with precision bombing1 runs against German military targets. The formation of the group took some time, as the move to recruit female combat pilots had initially been rejected, with one recruiting officer quoted as saying “Things may be bad but we’re not so desperate that we’re going to put little girls like you up in the skies. Go home and help your mother.” This in spite of the fact that many young Russian women had more piloting experience than the pilots of the front line fighter regiments thanks to the Osoaviakhim, a paramilitary flying club that provided free training to Soviet boys and girls in the 1920s and 30s.
Soviet military officials then, as US military officials now, questioned whether it was strategically or morally appropriate to send women into combat. But the Night Witches proved to themselves and a skeptical country that their gender made no difference in the defense of one’s home.
– Phyllis-Anne Duncan
The heavy casualties of the war brought about a quick change to this attitude, and three regiments were formed, commanded by the famous aviatrix Major Marina Raskova (left)2. The selection process for the 588th (and its companion squads, the 586th Fighters and the 587th Dive Bombers) was gruelling, the young women going through two years’ worth of training in just six months. Up to fourteen hours a day were spent in the air, including night flights and simulated dogfights. By June 1942, they were ready to fight against the formidable might of the German invasion.
The Night Witches were not a well equipped regiment. Wearing hand-me-down uniforms from male pilots (boots were reportedly stuffed with paper and fabric to make them fit), they flew in aging Polikarpov PO-2 biplanes. The PO-2s were about as basic as a plane could get and still technically qualify as a plane. First built in 1928, they consisted of fabric strung over a wooden frame, and lacked any but the most rudimentary of instrumentation. There was no radio to communicate with ground control, and navigation was done with a stopwatch and a map – just a normal map, not even a flight chart. The planes carried no guns and only had enough weight allowance to take two bombs up on a flight, forcing the Night Witches to make multiple sorties in a single night, returning to base each time to collect more bombs.
The one thing the PO-2 had going for it, and which the Night Witches used to full effect, was its remarkable maneuverability. With a top speed of around 95mph, the plane was slower than the slowest speed a German fighter could maintain (its stall speed), allowing them to pull tight, evasive circles that the faster German craft couldn’t match. Combine this with the impressive nap-of-the-earth piloting skills that allowed the Night Witches to get closer to the ground than the planes of the Luftwaffe could manage, and shooting down a PO-2 from the air became a challenging prospect. There was, supposedly, a promise to award an Iron Cross to any Luftwaffe pilot who actually managed to bring down a Night Witch.
Whilst the German fighters struggled to bring down the Night Witches (who included Evgeniya Rudneva, left), the ground defences proved rather more formidable. 6th Army encampments were protected by what was known as the ‘circus of flak’ – concentric rings of up to two dozen flak cannons and searchlights. The traditional tactic for dealing with this had been to fly directly towards the target and hope to get your bombs away before the flak could blast you out of the air. It wasn’t the most successful tactic. The Night Witches developed a far more effective method for getting past the circus of flak: flying in groups of three, two planes would approach the target and wait for the searchlights to pick them up. These two would then split apart and manoeuvre around the target, drawing the attention of the cannons. The third plane, having waited behind, would cut their engines and glide in to deliver the bombs. This was repeated until each of the three planes had made a bombing run. The mind boggles at the sheer level of stone-cold bravery needed to repeatedly offer yourself as a distraction to dozens of flak cannons, protected only by a flimsy frame of wood and fabric, and to keep doing that night after night.
At its largest the Night Witches’ regiment consisted of 80 flying crew, plus ground support. By the end of the war they had collectively flown over 23,000 bombing runs. The surviving pilots had all flown around 1,000 missions each by 1945 (for sake of comparison, Colonel Don Blakelee, who had more missions for the USAF than anyone else in WW2, completed 500). Thirty of them had died in combat, and over a quarter of the pilots had been awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
Examples of extreme courage were almost the rule for them.
– Valerie Moolman, Women Aloft
The best English language source of further information on the 588th Bomber Regiment is probably Bruce Myles’ Night Witches: Untold Story of Soviet Women in Combat. There’s also Women in Air War: The Eastern Front of World War II by Kazmeira Jean Cottam.
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- Precision bombing differs from strategic bombing in that the bombs are aimed for individual targets as opposed to mass releasing them over an area, resulting in less collateral damage. It’s hard to do in the best of conditions, let alone an ageing biplane at night.
In 1938 Rakova had taken part in a record breaking non-stop flight across Russia. Somewhere over Siberia, the plane began to ice up and lose altitude, forcing the three-woman crew to jettison everything they could to lose weight and gain height. Eventually Rakova herself parachuted out of the plane to allow her two co-pilots to complete the trip. Jumping out of a plane over Siberia at night is the aviation equivalent of Lawrence Oates’ “I’m going outside, I may be some time.”
DETERMINED STARE OF AWESOME, 1943
Flying is for many people an utterly terrifying prospect. The loss of control, the unshakable awareness of all that distance between you and the ground, the realisation that you’re strapped into a thin metal tube hurtling along at hundreds of miles an hour, and the knowledge that if something does go wrong you almost certainly won’t walk away from it. It’s no wonder a lot of people have a fear of flying.
Jacqueline Cochran, on the other hand, quite distinctly did not have any fears when it came to taking to the air. Even today, a full thirty years after her death, she still holds more aviation records and firsts than any other pilot, ever.
Born some time in the early 20th century (the details of her birth are somewhat unclear – she was raised by a foster family and didn’t know her own date of birth), Cochran lived at a time when aviation was vastly more dangerous than it is now. Radios? Safety precautions? Reliable engineering? Stuff and nonsense. Those were just the far-flung dreams of futurists. To illustrate the perils of early aviation, consider the first US Air Mail service, which during the first couple of years of operation, saw the death of fully half its 40 pilots.
Combine the expense and danger of flying with growing up in poverty and having minimal education, and it seems Jackie Cochran had little or no chance of ever taking to the air. This, however, is failing to account for her quite remarkable levels of determination, and refusal to take any nonsense from anyone. In one interview she recounts an experience working in a textile mill, aged perhaps 10 or 11.
I didn’t see him coming, but a foreman was suddenly over me and pinching me in a way that no little girl should ever be pinched. My reaction was immediate and not surprising. My fist flew up and I hit him squarely on the nose. Hard. He jumped back and then rushed away, shocked. He never touched me again.
– Jackie Cochran
Climbing out of her plane at the 1938 Bendix Air Race
Cochran applied this same attitude to her flying lessons. Having been told that learning to fly would take two to three months, she accepted a wager from her future husband, Floyd Odlum, that she couldn’t complete it in just six weeks. Three weeks later she finished flight school and got her wings. Within months she was entering some of the world’s most prestigious air races.
A decade later she took this same determination into the US military. Having previously worked with the British Air Transport Auxiliary and been the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic, Cochran proceeded to gather evidence to back her claim that female pilots were more than capable of filling all the domestic flight roles left empty during the war. With her experience training women to fly for the ATA, and drive to see them made a part of the Army Air Corps, Cochran eventually oversaw the creation of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a group of just over a thousand pilots who collectively would cover 60,000,000 miles in every kind of military aircraft.
Following the war, Cochran upgraded to piloting jet engined aircraft and set one of her many records, becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier. Flying a modified Canadian jet up to over 45,000 feet, she made a dive towards the ground, not quite managing to break the barrier on her first attempt. When asked when she’d like to make a second attempt, Cochran reportedly responded “Let’s go right now!” The second attempt did the trick, a sonic boom echoing over the landscape as Cochran accelerated her jet towards the ground and passed Mach 1. Consider for a moment just how nerve-wracking an experience it has to be, accelerating a thin metal tube towards the ground from 45,000 feet, trying to get up faster than almost anyone had ever gone. Then consider just how badass you have to be to do that twice in one day, because the first time just wasn’t quite fast enough.
What other records and achievements did Cochran manage? Alongside a list of speed and altitude records long enough to keep us here for several days, she was also the first pilot to ever make a ‘blind’ landing using only instruments, and the first pilot to fly above 20,000 feet with an oxygen mask. She was the first woman to enter the prestigious Bendix Trans-continental Air Race, and the first to win it, along with many other famously difficult air races throughout her career. Perhaps her most especially daring records were set during her flights of the F-104 Starfighter, in which she set no less than three speed records in the space of a month.
The F-104 was a staggeringly dangerous craft to fly. In the first 18 months of its use the German Air Force had 85 fatal incidents involving them, earning it the nickname ‘The Widowmaker’. When a plane is killing off pilots at a rate of almost two a week you have to be exceptionally brave to climb into the cockpit even once, and exceedingly skillful to survive the experience often enough to set a handful of world records. Jackie Cochran was both.
In addition to her contributions to aviation Cochran maintained a successful cosmetics business (indeed, it was to promote her ‘Wings’ line of cosmetics that she initially learned to fly). Following the war she poured a lot of her time and money into charitable causes, particularly those providing education and opportunity for those coming from impoverished backgrounds. Whilst she never gained the fame or attention of Amelia Earhart (whose organisation of female pilots, The Ninety-Nines, Cochran presided over between 1941 and 1943), Cochran left a legacy as a successful businesswoman and one of the most daring and important pilots to have lived.
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Too much badass to fit in the camera frame: Jackie (centre) and a load of trainee WASPs
Rob Mulligan blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes.