The Night Witches
Broomsticks.
Not the mundane sweep-the-floor kind but the magical fly-into-the-sky kind. Ever wondered if such objects existed?
If you are acquainted with Harry Potter (which you are for sure) then this wistful thought about his flying non-machine must have crossed your mind at least once. How wonderful it would be if we could all hop on broomsticks and fly away into the horizon. Awww.
Some did.
Years before the Harry Potter Series was conceived The Night Witches zipped through the German skies wreaking havoc everywhere they passed. Fasten your seat belt. A bumpy roller coaster ride ahead.
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Marina Raskova inspected the all-woman line-up. When Joseph Stalin had given permission to set up a female combat force she hadn’t imagined this would be the result. But here she was inspecting another bunch of forty female soldiers before they took off on one more of their nightly missions. This daily drill had been going on since 28 June 1942 when the first sortie of the 588th Night Bombardier Regiment took flight.
‘Navigators to the front,’ she called out and twenty women stepped forward. Giving a cryptic nod, ‘Ruler,’ she called out. Each of the women who were to be navigators that night held one up. ‘Stopwatch,’ she said next and each one held out their respective stopwatches.
Jarring alarms went off in the background accompanied by hoots and laughter.
At the other end of the hanger, male crew members were prepping the Soviet Air Force’s fighter planes for that night’s bombing. Those planes had parachutes, radar, guns and radios unlike the machines these women were about to take off in. All the men at the airbase found the dire state of affairs of the 588th funny and they jeered at the women at every opportunity.
Raskova and team ignored them.
‘Flashlight,’ she shouted above the lewd calls and the women waved their flashlights. Pencils, maps, compasses and the like were also crossed off the checklist. Dire or not, these items could make or break missions and Raskova made sure that every plane leaving the base on her watch had all of them on board.
Within an hour, twenty planes would take off with a pilot and navigator on board for the first of eight sorties to be completed that night. The sun had set but daylight hadn’t faded. The armament team had already loaded twenty trolleys with two bombs each. That was the only support the women received at the base.
‘Mount the bombs,’ Raskova commanded. The women took the trolleys in pairs and proceeded to the tarmac where they had already towed 20 Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes. These plywood two-seater aircrafts weren’t designed for combat. Each could carry two bombs at a time and the women busied themselves in mounting the bombs.
These forty were among hundreds of soviet women who had undergone a crash course in flying planes; aircraft maintenance and air combat manoeuvres, a training their male colleagues took years to complete. Once the bombs were secured, they pulled the canvas canopy in place, ready to secure once seated inside the cockpit.
Then it was time to review the flight plan. The pilots came forward for this round of the briefing. Each woman took turns in being the pilot and navigator and they all doubled up as aircraft maintenance engineers.
Their uniforms were hand-me-downs chosen from those discarded by their uncivil male counterparts. When they walked, the oversized boots stuffed with portions of bedding to make them fit, gave them a lopsided gait. This made the men laugh even more.
The women ignored them. Nobody laughed when their bombs destroyed one enemy target after another.
‘All set,’ Raskova called and her team scattered into the waiting biplanes, ready to take off for the night. Soon the canvas canopies of each airplane was latched and slowly one after another, the machines became airborne.
The chill hit them first. Under the flight jumpsuits, their bones shriveled in the icy Siberian draft but their shivering gloved hands gripped the plane’s controls unwavering. The planes split into five groups of four each with one leading the way in each group. If they returned, they would meet the other groups, otherwise, this was goodbye for good.
The first plane gained altitude slowly. The three on its tail, did likewise. The Air Traffic Control never cleared them. They didn’t have radios for such an exercise. The navigator in the first plane peered at the map and then at the compass and checked the flight-speed to determine their location. With the dark sky outside offering little light, the humble flashlight was the only means to see inside the freezing cockpit.
The pilot wiggled her toes and fingers every minute to keep the blood flowing. Frost covered her goggles ever so often, she lost count of the number of times her numb hands had wiped them clean. From her position, she could see the land below. If it had been day, even the enemy could have spotted them, but the darkness hid them from view. Their low altitude ensured that none of the enemy’s radars captured them either.
‘Ten more minutes, I think’ the navigator informed form behind. The pilot doubled her efforts to identify landmarks. The enemy was prepared. If there were buildings below, she couldn’t see them. With all the lights off on the ground and black skies above, everywhere she looked shadowy blackness loomed. In between her search, she remembered to flex her fingers and toes and shift in her seat lest she became an icicle herself.
‘We should be here,’ the navigator said.
The black expanse below hadn’t changed. No lights, smoke, shapes of buildings, nothing!
Then a faint blip appeared, not on the ground but ahead in the sky. The women waited in anticipation. If the blip grew bigger… it did. And more spots came into view.
‘They are coming,’ the pilot muttered. The navigator turned out the flashlight, but they could still be heard. The lights drew nearer and soon the sound of the planes they were mounted on also became audible. The three planes on their tail scattered.
The pilot of the first plane stayed on course. The approaching enemy’s flight radar would have already seen them. Were they expecting a dogfight? The women wren’t. Their plane didn’t have any defensive weapons or equipment. They didn’t even have parachutes for bailing out. If hit, they crashed, but perhaps the enemy didn’t know that.
The enemy could see their plane now. The women counted three attackers.
The leader of the enemy formation flew past, all guns blazing. The women dived. The enemy missed but his compatriot dived in tow. Unfortunately for him, his speed was too high for the low altitude duck towards the ground and before he could reduce the speed, he was out of airspace and possibly out of ideas. The metal hit the ground and a ball of fire lit up the area.
‘We are here,’ the navigator announced in a calm voice, using the light from the crash to identify landmarks. The pilot was too busy gaining height to look down.
The remaining two planes were ready and waiting. They didn’t make the mistake of diving towards the biplane. They circled the area and as the women slowly gained height, the width of their circles reduced with each rotation. The hyenas are circling their prey, the pilot mused as she kept her plane’s nose upward.
Seeing that she was at a comfortable height, her pursuers stalled their planes and fired at her. She flipped her ride sending the canvas canopy flapping dangerously close to becoming undone. A surge of frost sucked into the cockpit making it colder than it already had been. Upside down and chilled to the bone, she let her plane plummet.
Then sliding back the right side up, she dived. Above her, the planes fired a few more rounds before breaking away. Their stall speed was greater than her plane’s fastest and they couldn’t hold momentum long enough to strike her.
The danger was averted, for now.
Her navigator immediately barked off directions to reach their target. She had seen the landmark and as per instructions, their target was less than twenty miles away. The pilot did as instructed. When they reached the designated location, she sent the plane into a gentle dive.
As the plane whooshed down close to the ground, the guards at the site heard something that sounded like a giant broom sweeping the skies. From the pitch blackness in the ground warning shouts echoed in German, ‘The night witches are here.’
From different corners of the location, weapons launched retaliatory fire in the general direction of the whooshing noises. Nobody could see the witches who were sweeping the skies but their reputation preceded them and the entire area was on high alert.
The pilot launched two flares and scampered out of earshot and sight. The flares lit up the target site that had been pitch black until seconds before. Now the fliers could see the exact positions where they had to drop their bombs. The firing from the ground intensified but since the ghosts had already scooted, the ammo was aimed in the general direction of the ‘whoosh.’
One minute later, the whooshing sound magnified manifold and descended on the site again. This time, it appeared to be coming from all the sides of the site. The ambush caught the men by surprise. They swung their artillery in different directions in the hope of hitting the target.
While they were busy with this, the first plane swooped down, dropped the first bomb and sped away. As the explosion rocked the site’s entrance, another bomb from one of the three planes that had been the first one’s tail, coming into the site from the opposite side, destroyed the rear exit of the location. Each of the four planes descended on the site from different directions in quick succession, offloaded their bombs one at a time until they had used up all eight they had brought along and disappeared from view.
They departed with a final whoosh but nobody was left alive on the ground to hear their parting goodbye. The Night witches had once again lived up to their reputation and caused massive destruction even while flying on something not much better than a broomstick.
Before the night was out, they would do seven more such sorties.
***
In case you were wondering, the Night Witches were real fighter pilots who bolstered the Soviet combat strength during the World War II. How strange it is then that even today, 75 years after the World War II, nations cannot envision women as fighter pilots. Ponder on that.
It’s a wrap.Until next time,
Happy Reading
Want more stories by Rani Ramakrishnan?
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The Murder Suspect | Twice Blessed | Treacherous Bloodline | Here to Hear | Lethal Acoustics