Girls Who Rocked the World

The Night Witches

1941–1945 FIGHTER PILOTS RUSSIA

Even if it were possible to gather and place at your feet all the flowers on earth, this would not constitute sufficient tribute to your valor.

—FRENCH WWII PILOTS, PRAISING THE NIGHT WITCHES

Marina looked out the plane’s window and could see the dark forest below her. They were dropping fast, and there was no place to land. The snowstorm raged around them, weighting their wings down with heavy ice and dragging them closer and closer to death.

“Lighten the plane!” yelled Valentina, who was struggling to maintain their altitude. Marina and Polina opened the hatch in the floor and threw out anything that wasn’t bolted down. But it was no use—the plane kept plunging toward the trees. When they had set out to beat a flight record, they never imagined they’d be fighting for their lives.

Suddenly, the snowstorm was inside the plane as well as outside. Valentina and Polina turned to see Marina standing above the open hatch, with a fierce look on her face. She was wearing a parachute. “Don’t do it, Marina! We’ll never find you again in this wilderness!” they yelled. But it was too late—Marina threw herself out into the cold, dark night.

With the lighter load, they managed to keep the plane aloft until they found a clearing to land in, close to a village. Marina’s remarkable courage had saved their lives. But after days of searching, they couldn’t find her. She must have died alone in the woods, they figured. Ten days later, long after they and the Russian public had given up hope, a surprised hunter stumbled across Marina, freezing and half-starved, in the desolate forest.

The Winged Sisters received a heroes’ welcome when they returned to Moscow. Tens of thousands of fans lined the streets to cheer the winners of the women’s world record for a distance flight after their dangerous six-thousand-kilometer journey across Russia. Each pilot was awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union Gold Star—the first women to earn such an honor. But the crowds really came to see Captain Marina Raskova, the brave young woman who risked her life to save their mission.

Marina was just nineteen when she began flying and was the first woman in Russia to pass the navigator exam. She inspired thousands of girls, factory workers and even housewives, to earn their wings after her heroic 1938 flight. She was the Amelia Earhart of Russia. Local flying clubs were set up by the government to train girls as young as seventeen, free of charge. Marina encouraged an entire generation of Russian girls to push themselves, to see what they could do . . . girls who would soon be called on to help save their homeland from the coming war.

In June 1941 Adolf Hitler surprised Russia and the world when he launched Operation Barbarossa, a sneak attack against the Soviet air force. German bombers destroyed squadrons of Soviet planes as they sat parked on their airfields. The unprovoked airstrikes not only threw the Soviet Union into chaos but also gave the Germans complete air superiority. Much of the Soviet Union’s air force was destroyed in the attack; the country was in trouble.

The Soviet people were eager to defend themselves against this attack on their Rodina (Mother Russia). Recruits poured in, including thousands of teenage girls who had plenty of flying experience and wanted to get to the front. At first, these girl pilots were rejected. One official’s response to a girl’s application was: “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.”25

But it wasn’t long before Russian officials changed their tune; there simply weren’t enough male pilots and crews left in Russia to challenge the Germans.

Again, it was Marina Raskova to the rescue. Promoted to major in the Soviet Air Force, she convinced the high command to let her recruit and train all female combat units. On Radio Moscow, Marina asked for female volunteers to fight on the front lines with the men. The response was overwhelming—who wouldn’t want to serve under their hero? Bags of applications arrived every day, and Marina personally interviewed thousands of hopefuls. In the end more than a thousand of the best candidates were chosen. Some got to be fighter pilots, others navigators, and the rest mechanics and support personnel. Most of the young women chosen for the elite units were still teenagers!

From the very beginning, these girls faced different obstacles than their male counterparts. The government didn’t even bother to make women’s uniforms and instead gave them the same uniforms as the men. One female fighter remembered, “They were gigantic . . . vests dangled down below the knee, trousers hitched up almost to the chin . . . coats spilled onto the floor like . . . bridal trains.” Another said, “God knows what the Germans would have thought.” And since the battle against the Germans was already underway, their training was accelerated, to say the least. The young women had to cram nearly three years of flying experience into just three months!

The most serious difficulty they faced, however, was the sexism of their male comrades. Many male pilots refused to fly with women “wingmen” or to go up in airplanes that had been repaired by women mechanics. Many believed that women weren’t as skilled or as brave as men and had no place in the war.

The female fighters didn’t let these attitudes stop them, however. The Germans had invaded their country too, and they knew they had the skills to fight back. It didn’t take long for the women to prove themselves. Like male pilots, they battled in countless aerial dogfights, bombed bridges and ammunition depots, cleared safe paths for advancing Russian soldiers, and protected Soviet military installations.

They were particularly successful in their night bombing attacks on advancing German troops. Sleep was critical for exhausted soldiers on the front lines, so the all-night terror of the Night Witches’ attacks was devastating to the enemy. A German commander described the effect of their raids: “We simply couldn’t grasp that the Soviet airmen that caused us the greatest trouble were in fact WOMEN. These women feared nothing. They came night after night . . . and . . . wouldn’t give us any sleep at all.”26 In one evening, the pilots attacked eighteen times! The Germans were so afraid of the raids, they dubbed the pilots Night Witches.

The night attacks were almost as terrifying for the pilots as well. They flew in biplanes that were normally used just for training, since they were very slow and could be seen and heard from a great distance. They were easy targets for the enemy. One female pilot tells of a particularly terrifying mission:

The antiaircraft guns fired at us fiercely from all directions, and suddenly I felt our aircraft hit. My left foot slipped down into an empty space below me; the bottom of the cockpit had been shot away. I felt something hot streaming down my left arm and leg—I was wounded. Blinded by the searchlights . . . I was completely disoriented: the sky and earth were indistinguishable to my vision . . .27

The flimsy planes were made of canvas, so if shot they often went up in flames. This meant almost certain death for the crew, since there were no parachutes on board! Even if they managed to land the plane, they had to be careful to land on the Russian side of the battle lines, so they would not to be taken prisoner by the enemy.

The Night Witches devised risky tactics to make up for their planes. In one maneuver, a brave pilot would fly alone over the enemy camp, attracting their floodlights and machine gun fire. As the Germans shot at the lone plane, two more pilots would glide in with their engines off and drop their bombs. Before the Germans knew what had happened, all three planes were gone. If a much faster German plane came after them, their only escape was to outmaneuver it. They often did this by flying so low to the ground so that their planes were hidden by trees! Night Witches were so difficult to catch, in fact, that German pilots were promised an Iron Cross (the German medal of highest honor) for shooting one down.

These courageous female pilots saw at least as much action as the men: in just one all-female unit, the pilots flew in over twenty-four thousand combat assaults during the war! They won thousands of medals and honors. In fact, twenty-nine female pilots won the prestigious Hero of the Soviet Union award; twenty-three of those awards went to Night Witches!

One daredevil pilot, in particular, became quite famous to the Russian public, and infamous to her German enemies—Lilya Litvak. When she was just fifteen, Lily, as she was known, tried to join her local flying club, but was told that she would have to wait two more years like everyone else. But Lily was determined and read every aviation book she could get her hands on. She pestered instructors, displaying her incredible knowledge, until they gave in and let her enroll early, at age sixteen. Lily was a natural flier, and learned much faster than other students. Soon this teenager was so good she, too, became an instructor.

When Marina made her radio announcement for female pilots, Lily was one of the first girls to sign up for the all-female units. She was quickly promoted to fight in the dangerous battles over Stalingrad with an all-male unit. Although Lily was extremely beautiful, she didn’t let that distract her male comrades from their mission. When one young fighter confessed his love for Lily, she replied, “Let’s get the fighting over first, darling—then maybe we can talk about love, eh?”

Lily quickly earned the respect of her male squad. In less than a year of combat, she flew 168 successful missions and shot down an astounding twelve enemy planes. In recognition of her bravery, she was awarded the prestigious Order of the Red Banner and was promoted to senior lieutenant. She painted a large white rose on each side of her cockpit, plus a row of twelve smaller roses along the nose for each plane she shot down, earning her the name the White Rose of Stalingrad. When German fighters saw the White Rose coming, they would usually turn and flee rather than fight. Over the radio, the Soviets could hear German pilots call warnings to each other as she approached, “Achtung, Litvak!”

Once Lily shot down a German plane, and the pilot parachuted out and was captured by Russian troops. When they questioned the highly decorated Nazi, he asked to meet the pilot who had shot him down. He was surprised and angry when Lily walked in, and he demanded an explanation for this Russian joke. But his anger turned to humiliation when Lily began describing their dogfight in detail, explaining exactly how she had beaten him. The German could not even look at her. “Her eyes were flashing like a tiger. She was enjoying herself,” said a friend who was there.

Sadly, in August 1943, Lily’s luck ran out. While scouting the front lines for enemy bombers, a group of German fighters distracted the other Russian planes as eight fighters ganged up on Lily. They had seen the White Rose and weren’t about to let her escape again. She fought back with all she had, and it took all eight German planes to hit her, but the White Rose of Stalingrad finally went down in flames. Lily was just twenty-two years old when she died.

Marina Raskova also died before the end of the war. In 1943, while leading two planes through a blinding snowstorm, Marina became disoriented and flew too low. She crashed into the steep bank of the Volga River and died. The female fighter pilots had seen many of their friends killed in battle, but losing their inspiration, their hero, was almost more than they could bear. One pilot described the reaction to Marina’s death: “There was a moment or two of complete silence. . . . Then it seemed that everyone was crying together. . . . All around was the sound of the most anguished sobbing.”28

Although many of Russia’s greatest war heroines didn’t live to see their country defeat the German invaders, their courage and contributions are still celebrated. After the war, a monument was built near where Lily’s plane went down to honor her as a war hero. And in 1990 Lily was still remembered by the Russian people when she finally received the Hero of the Soviet Union award from then-prime minister Mikhail Gorbachev. Marina and Lily would’ve been proud of their women comrades. The female combat units took part in some of the heaviest, most dangerous air combat in history. They refused to back down, and they helped fight off the German invasion and win the war.

HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?

I want to create a stunt for planes. I will perform the stunt, along with risky turns and maneuvers, better than any other pilot. I also want to be the first pilot to test out new jets. I think flying is the best thing in the world and that’s how I plan to rock it.

LEIGH DELAHANTY AGE 12