German soldiers on the eastern front described a particular noise that came at night.
It was not an engine. It was a soft rushing sound, like wind through wires, and it arrived from nowhere with no warning, and a few seconds after you heard it the bombs landed.
They called the people making it the Nachthexen, which means night witches.
The witches were women, most of them between eighteen and twenty-two, flying aircraft made of plywood and fabric that were already obsolete when the war began.
In nineteen forty one, the Soviet Union was losing catastrophically and needed everybody, and thousands of women applied to fly and were refused.
The person who changed that was Marina Raskova, who was the most famous aviator in the country. She had set long-distance records in the nineteen thirties, and in one of them the aircraft crash-landed in Siberia and she had bailed out and walked for ten days through forest to find the others, which had made her a national figure.
She used that fame. She wrote to Stalin directly and asked for permission to form women's air regiments, and in October nineteen forty one she got it.
Three regiments were created: a fighter regiment, a dive bomber regiment and a night bomber regiment. The night bomber regiment, the 588th, was the only one that remained entirely female from beginning to end. The pilots, the navigators, the mechanics, the armourers and the commanders were all women.
Two thousand applied. Four hundred were taken. They were given a training course compressed into a few months that normally took several years, and they were issued men's uniforms and boots several sizes too large, and they tore up spare bedding to stuff the toes.
They were given the Polikarpov Po-2, and it is important to understand what this aircraft was.
It was a biplane designed in nineteen twenty eight as a basic trainer and crop duster. It was made of wood and fabric. It had two open cockpits, a top speed of a little over ninety miles an hour, and no radio.
It had no guns. For the first two years, the crews were not issued parachutes either, on the grounds that the weight was better spent on bombs, and the crews agreed with this reasoning at the time, which tells you a good deal about them.
It could carry two bombs at a time, occasionally more, which meant that doing any useful damage required going back again and again.
And yet it had two advantages that mattered enormously. It could take off and land almost anywhere, including a field or a road, so the regiment could operate from close behind the front. And it was so slow that it was very difficult to shoot down with a fighter.
That second point is genuinely counterintuitive. A modern fighter of that period had a stalling speed higher than the Po-2's cruising speed, which meant that a fighter attacking one had to fly past it, and could not slow down enough to stay behind it and aim.
The tactic they developed was simple and required extremely steady nerves.
They flew in groups of three, at night, at low altitude. Two aircraft would fly ahead and deliberately attract the searchlights and the anti-aircraft fire, weaving and drawing everything toward themselves.
The third would meanwhile cut its engine, and glide.
A gliding Po-2 makes no engine noise at all. The only sound is the air over the wings and the bracing wires, which is the rushing sound the German troops described. It would glide in, release its bombs, and only then restart the engine, at which point it was already leaving.
Then the three would rotate roles and do it again.
A crew flew between eight and eighteen sorties in a single night, landing each time to be rearmed by the ground crews, who loaded the bombs by hand, in the dark, in the cold, and who were also women, and who are almost never mentioned.
The regiment flew something over twenty-three thousand sorties in three years.
Navigation was done with a map, a stopwatch and a pencil, by a woman sitting in an open cockpit behind the pilot in temperatures that froze the ink. There were no instruments worth the name and no way to ask anybody anything, because there was no radio in the aircraft at all.
The purpose was not really destruction. Two small bombs do limited damage.
The purpose was to prevent sleep. A regiment attacking all night, every night, in a place that could not be predicted, meant that troops in the line did not rest, and exhausted troops fight badly. It was a war of attrition conducted against the enemy's ability to close his eyes.
The cost was real. Thirty-two women of the regiment were killed. A fabric aircraft carrying bombs, hit by tracer, burns instantly, and for the first two years there was nothing to jump with.
Nadezhda Popova, who became one of the best known of them, flew eight hundred and fifty-two missions. She described being shot down, walking back to her own lines through a retreating column, and flying again.
Twenty-three members of the regiment were made Heroes of the Soviet Union, which is the highest award the country had.
Marina Raskova, who had created all of it, was killed in January nineteen forty three, ferrying an aircraft in bad weather. She was given the first state funeral of the war and her ashes were placed in the Kremlin wall.
The regiment was disbanded in October nineteen forty five.
There is a detail about the end of it that people find harder to take than any of the combat. When the victory parade was held in Moscow, the 588th did not take part. The reason given was that their aircraft were too slow to fly in the formation.
The women went home. Most of them were told, in one way or another, that the war was over now and that they should get on with ordinary life. A number of them found that their flying experience counted for nothing in the civilian world, and that employers were not interested.
Some kept flying as instructors. Popova became a flight instructor and lived until twenty thirteen.
In interviews given in old age, several of them said the same thing when asked whether they had been frightened. They said of course, constantly, and that everybody was, and that the interviewer was asking the wrong question. The right question, one of them said, was what you did next.
The name was given to them by the enemy, and they liked it and adopted it, which is a thing that happens often enough in this war to be worth noticing. The Dunkirk spirit and the Blitz both work the same way, taking a word for something bad and turning it into a word for holding on.
The Soviet Union used women in front-line combat roles on a scale nothing else in the war came close to. Around eight hundred thousand women served in the Soviet armed forces, including as snipers, tank crew and pilots. It was born of desperation rather than principle, and after the war the country was in a considerable hurry to forget about it.
There is a small human detail that comes up in nearly every account. The regulation uniform did not fit and there was no such thing as women's flying kit, so they altered everything themselves, and several of them mention using the silk from an unusable parachute to make scarves, because a scarf stops the collar rubbing your neck raw when you spend all night looking behind you.
Here is something to think about tonight. Their aircraft was slow, unarmed and made of wood, and it was chosen because there was nothing else. They turned every one of those weaknesses into part of a tactic. Can you think of something you are bad at that could be used as an advantage if you set the problem up differently?