When Russia was attacked by Germany in 1941, many young girls signed up to fly military missions.  Russia, unlike the United States, had sponsored flying schools for girls as well as boys. Volunteers from those flight schools enlisted in the military and became all-female combat units; three regiments fought Germany for survival of their country, under the command of Soviet Heroine Marina Raskova.  (Raskova and Valentina Grizodubova, flying a Yak-12, set a world record in 1937 for long distance, non-stop flight; at 26, Raskova was awarded the Gold Star of Hero of the Soviet Union.)

Some of the female pilots were assigned to a fighter regiment; one group was assigned to the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, flying obsolete two-seater planes with no weapons (Polikarpov PO-2 biplanes). This regiment of women night bombers was given Russia’s highest honors for flying courageous missions at night under extremely dangerous conditions. The pilots had no parachutes, radios or guns, navigated with a map and stopwatch.

German officer Hauptmann Johannes Steinhoff: “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 in their very slow biplanes, and for some periods they wouldn’t give us any sleep at all.”

Note: Thirty of the night pilots were killed.  Some lived to tell their stories, shared in a book by Bruce Myles, Night Witches; the Amazing Story of Russia’s Women Pilots in WWII.