ITC 74: The Night Witches

In The Crease (ITC) is where history, mystery, and the human condition collide. Hosted by J E DOUBLE F, each episode blends storytelling, analysis, and dark humor to explore the strange, the forgotten, and the unsettlingly relevant.

🎧 New episodes release bi-weekly.
📅 Current Season: ITC Season 4 (Episodes 61–80).

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:20):
The streshold opens, step through past, present, future.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
We are not alone in time and times.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yes, I am je double f and tonight we are
riding with Witches. They flew without radios, without armor, and
without fear. Wooden wings, cloth uniforms, nerves stronger than steel.

(02:44):
When the sun went down over the Eastern Front, the
air itself changed. German soldiers whispered the name like a curse,
Nactexan the Night Witches. The sound that haunted them wasn't
a scream or an explosion. It was the hut of
their PO two, gliding on dead engines, a soft sigh

(03:05):
that meant bombs were already falling. Excuse me, I had
to cough for a moment. The five eighty eighth Night
Bomber Regiment didn't just fight the Nazis. They fought gravity,
They fought disbelief, and they fought the idea that women

(03:27):
couldn't bring hell from the heavens. So tonight we followed
their story from the classroom to the cockpit, from laughter
and the barracks to silence above the Front, A tale
of courage, exhaustion, superstition, and the eerie music of wings
in the dark. This is episode seventy four, The Night Witches.

(03:52):
It began in nineteen forty one, when the map of
Europe looked like a bruise spreading eastward. Hitler's armies rolled
through the Soviet frontier in a storm of armor and arrogance,
and by July the Red Air Force was a little
more than smoke, and every town the same pattern played out, sirens, shadows,

(04:12):
and the cold realization that daylight now belonged to the enemy.
So the Soviet answer was simple and yet almost poetic.
If the day is lost, we fight at night.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
Now.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
The woman who turned that idea in the policy was
Marino Rashkova, navigator Record Breyer and poster child of Soviet
aviation before the war. Her face had gray stamps and
propaganda posters. She was there Amelia Earhart, the celebrity pilot
who proved socialism could fly. She had already crossed Siberia

(04:53):
and a single engine aircraft, survived the crash and walked
out of the wilderness with frostbitten hands and a grin.
She knew exactly how to use fame, and she knew
what Stalin liked most. Victory that photographed well, So she
went to the Kremlin with a proposal that made the
generals choke on their tea. Let women fly, not as nurses,

(05:19):
not as couriers, as combat pilots. The Red Army Air
Force had run out of men, and more importantly, how
to luck. Stalin approved the experiment in late nineteen forty one,
partly from ideology, mostly from desperation. Three regiments were born
on paper that day, one for fighters, one for day bombers,

(05:40):
and the one that would stalk the dark, the five
eighty eighth Night Bomber Regiment. Their commander and I apologize
because I'm going to butcher a lot of these names.
I may not finish, but I struggle with Russian and
yes there is a difference. The commander was Major ye
de Kaya Aryshnikaia. Yeah. She was calm, precise, in the

(06:05):
kind of leader who could make a hangarful of teenagers
stand taller just by adjusting her cap. Recruits came from
flight clubs and technical schools across the the Union. The
youngest was seventeen. Most were still writing home about exams
when the war started. They arrived at the Air Force

(06:27):
base on the Voga with secondhand uniforms, oversized boots, and
a grim optimism of people who hadn't yet been told
that they couldn't do it. The base looked like the
back end of the world, cold barracks, mud for pavement
engines that froze before breakfast. They were going to be

(06:47):
flying the PO two by planes, built mostly of wood
and covered in fabric that, oh probably smelled more of
glue than anything else, tough speed one hundred miles per hour. Downward,
there was no armor, no radio, no heater, and no

(07:08):
illusion of any safety onsoever in structures. Instructors caught it
the sewing machine because the engine rattled like one The witches, however,
would end up making it sing. Training was merciless. They
learned to navigate by starlight, to feel the compass drift
through their fingertips, to land without flares on airstrips that were, well,

(07:30):
you'd call more of a suggestion than surface. They learned
to rebuild engines with numb hands, and patch bullet holes
with canvas and varnish, for every mistake had weight. When
one trainee overshot the runaway and broke a wheel strut, well,
they made the crew repair it themselves. Kind of a

(07:51):
lesson delivered in grease and silence. Of course, the male
pilots came to watch the novelty women, women in cockpits.
Some jokes huh, Some flirted, of course, some offered advice
no one asked for. But the laughter died fast when
the women started flying longer hours and landing cleaner. Respect

(08:13):
in a war zone isn't given, it's timed. The PO
two turned out to be both punishment and gift. It
was too slow for radar, too late to trigger proximity fuses.
It could fly so low that tracer fire overshot. The
weakness had become a tactic waiting for discovery, as the

(08:36):
first women were terrified of night flight. Imagine it, open cockpit,
when cutting through your scarf, black horizons following every landmark
he memorized. In daylight. The only lights were from artillery
flashes in the phosphorent glow of instruments that sometimes would
lie to them. But repetition does strange things. But began

(08:58):
as fear hardened into ritual, engine check, altimeter, compass breathe,
a pilot whispered, quote, we fily like ghosts because we
already looked like them unquote. By spring nineteen forty two,
the regiment was declared combat ready, when in Soviet terms,

(09:18):
meant we've ran out of excuses. Guys, we kind of
have to do this. The first employment placed them near
the Don River, flying from gas strips cut out of
farm land. The runway lights were lanterns covered with rags
the air. The air was wafted with a smell of

(09:40):
fuel and mud and purpose. The order came at dusk
test rade on a supply depot across the line. Two
planes up, two bombs each and a prayer. No one
admitted out loud. They took off in a wind sharp
enough to draw blood from your teeth. When plane kept

(10:00):
its engine roaring, drawing every searchlight, the other killed power
and simply glided. No radio chatter, no heroic's, just a
sound of air sliding over wood. The navigator counted seconds
to target, mouthed the numbers against chattering teeth, then pressed
the release. Two dull thumps, but they pause long enough

(10:25):
to doubt. Then the ground bloomed a magnificent orange. Back
at base, the landing gear touched earth with the softness
of disbelief. They've done it. The depot was now gone,
and for the first time since the invasion began. A

(10:46):
Savie air raid had arrived without warning. The Germans never
heard the engines. They heard something worse, the whisper that
comes before fire, and they would call it Knachexen or
night witches. The name was meant to be an insult,

(11:06):
it ended up becoming a metal. Within weeks, the regiment
was flying multiple sorties at night, two bombs each time,
then back for fuel, then out again. Eight trips between
dusk and dawn wasn't unusual. They navigated by rivers glinting
faintly in the moonlight, by the smell of forest fires,
and well by instinct built from the repetition of practice.

(11:29):
The five to eighty eighth turned darkness into geometry. The
mass to carried were fragile things. The memory of terrain
was thirtier. The male units from nearby fields began calling
them the bats. Commanders were calling them efficient, and the
Germans were calling them something I would probably only describe

(11:49):
on an episode of the Vincent Charles Project. If you
caught your earlier show, you know what kind of salty
language I was using. The witches called themselves tired. The
PO two demanded intimacy. It shivered at altitudes, souked in crosswinds,

(12:11):
and well leaked oil like gossip, but it did forgive
gentle hands. One pilot swore she could tell when hers
was angry by the pitch of the propeller, another claim
she hummed to calm it. By their second month in combat,
the regiment treated each aircraft like a living partner, temperamental, loyal,

(12:32):
and sometimes occasionally suicidal. Lost came early and stayed late.
Canvas and wood burned too fast for rescue. When it
plane didn't return, there was no search party, only a
mark on the roster and a job that still needed
to be done. They buried what they could at dawn

(12:53):
and flew again at dusk. Grief had to be rationed
like fuel, enough to function, but not enough to drown.
But every mission refined their craft. They learned to approach
targets from different angles, to cut engines at the last moment,
to release bombs by instinct when the instruments would be frozen.

(13:16):
When a German unit relocated its camp deeper into the woods,
the witches followed by smell the faint sweetness of gasoline
that carried in the wind. They hid it three nights
in a row, until nothing was left to burn. Reports
from German officers began showing up in Soviet intelligent files.

(13:36):
One read quote, they came like ghosts. Another one said
their planes aren't visible to search lights. But the third,
the third simply said, we do not sleep. Fear had
become an equation. Two women, one plane, an entire battalion

(13:58):
awake at midnight inside the regiment, routine had become armour.
Each dawn they logged results. Cleaned engines meant that fabricans gold.
Jokes on the mess tent wall. One said, what is temporary,
reputation is permanent another and a bit of joke and

(14:19):
a bit of truth. If the men can't hear us coming,
they can't tell us to stop. Rusian sky drilled discipline
like oxygen accuracy, bef you're barrato. Record shows her field
briefings rarely exceeded ten sentences. Everything else was simply implied,

(14:43):
you know your job, do it again, and that they
would night after night, the same ritual of courage disguised
as procedure. And it was the po two silence that
made them impossible to predict. Radar was missing them, anti
aircraft gunners overshot them. Sometimes even the wind itself seemed complicit.

(15:09):
When the moon was too bright, they tied scarves around
the engine cowlings to dim the glare, and when the
air grew thin, they trimmed lift. By instinct, each mission
was a conversation with physics that well usually never ended politely.
By the end of nineteen forty two, the five to
eighty eighth had flown more than a thousand sorties. Their

(15:33):
total bomb load barely matched a single night from a
heavy bomber wing, but their impact was strategic. They were
destroying and distrupting supply lines, destroyed fuel depos in more importantly,
broke the illusion that the Germans controlled the dark. You
can armor tanks and forty five bunkers, but you can't

(15:56):
reinforce sleep. It was kind of amazing. The night witches
became folklore in real time. Soviet newspapers, of course, printed
cautious praise. The propaganda ministry preferred heroes that could photograph,
and these women were hard to catch. Standing still, German

(16:16):
rumor turns superstition into survival device. Don't light cigarettes after midnight,
don't whistle in the trenches, and don't look up when
the wind changes, because sometimes that wind was carrying witches inside.
The end of the legend was less glamorous. They smelled
like fuel. They slept in ships measured more in minutes

(16:39):
than hours. They cut their hair short because frost turned
braids into ropes of ice. They would still write home,
usually the same sentence, I'm fine, sometimes true, most often not.
The regiment developed its own folklore, too, touch the wings
before takeoff and you'll come back. Don't count sorties. They

(17:03):
hate bookkeeping. And if your compass simply spins, trust your gut,
and if your gut spins, trust your navigator. One dry
humor favorite survived the archives. Quote imagine climbing into what
is basically a flying door, turning off the only thing
keeping you airborne, and calling it strategy. That's us unquote.

(17:30):
By now, even Soviet command had learned not to argue
with results. The Witches hit what they aimed for. They
cost less to fly than a single yak one fighter,
and let's face it, they terrified the enemy for free.
And when winter came again, the regiment kept flying. Snow

(17:51):
would cover the airfield and they'd shovel it themselves. Oil
well with thickens and cold they thinned it with whatever
alcohol in the mechanic could spare. Sometimes the engines weuld
refuse to start, but they would curse them in the compliance.
The war had become personal. Every destroyed fuel depot was

(18:11):
payback or a city lost, every sleepless German interests on
a national debt of suffering. Somewhere between those take offs
and landings, the witches stopped wondering if they belonged. They
knew the night was theirs. Now they had turned the
weakest plane in the inventory into the most unnerving sound

(18:31):
on the front, a whisper. They called it flight by moonlight.
The Germans called it something else, entirely inevitable, and as
nineteen forty three approach, the whisper of wings would become louder,
more confident, far far deadlier. So yes, they flew with

(19:00):
out head lights, without armor, without margin. They turned everything
that was missing into a strategy. In each night, it
was the same maths unfolded across the table, lit by
a very weak lantern. Targets were circled in red pencil

(19:20):
once again. Supply depots, sometime ammunition trains, sometimes just crossroads
pulsing with enemy traffic. The wind, altitude, fuel, each detail
calculated by women who could do trigonometry faster than most
officers could even spell it. There was no mysticism to
their work, only math, muscle memory, and willingness to stare

(19:41):
the odds down until the odds it would blink. But
it was after dark that the field would come alive.
Engines cause mechanics shouted, and the witches climbed into open cockpits.
They were wearing layers upon layers of but it was

(20:01):
the resolve that kept the warmest navigators in front pilots behind.
Two bombs under the wing, one for each heartbeat they'd
ignore on the way in their flight passed bent with
the wind tracing invisible corridors across the enemy lines. One
plane kept its engines growling they'd delivered the decoy. The

(20:24):
other would cut its power and slipped in the glide
the propeller. Still, the world reduced to wind and instinct.
Now from the ground, the approach was nightmare physics. You
didn't hear them until the bombs released, Then the air cracked,
and then the night folded back upon itself. Some German

(20:48):
soldiers described it as the whisper before death, and of
course superstition would end up taking hold when logic failed.
If you heard that sigh, you were already living on
borrowed seconds, and inside the cockpits the reality was less poetic.
Cold ate at fingers until they lost their sensation breath

(21:12):
ended up freezing on scarves. The altimeter fogged over, basically
forcing navigators to estimate height by the rhythm of tracer
fire below. But when the bombs fell, pilots pulled up
just enough to clear the blast and prayed. The engine
remembered how to start again. Sometimes sometimes it didn't. Mechanics

(21:36):
could tell the difference when a plane returned. A healthy
engine purred a damage when coughed and whimpered. They would
work through the rest of the night and into the morning,
stretching canvas, swapping spark plugs, tightening bolts by feel. Sleep
at this point was optional when you could get it.

(22:00):
The five eighty eighth did learn early that the invisibility
was definitely better than any armor they carried. Because once again,
radar couldn't see wood, and searchlights often overshot their altitude.
The witches found a way to stay beneath technologies notice
and inside its blind spot. It was a brilliant design.

(22:23):
Every SORTI was a masterclass in calculated humility. Fly low,
fly slow, stay alive. By mid nineteen forty three, the
regiment was feared enough to distort German planning. Whole battalions
relocated to escape their range. Officers would rate up sleepless

(22:46):
troops and frayed nerves and ammunition dumps me further from
the front, stretching supply lines even thinner. One captured report
admitted that quote the effect on morale is disproportionate to
the material damage. Translation. The math didn't matter anymore, the

(23:07):
myth did.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
Now.

Speaker 3 (23:12):
Bershefskaya understood that better than anyone. She ran a regiment
like a clock that would refuse to lose a second cruise,
rotating three storties with machine precision, but fuel was still
rationed to the leader. Maintenance recorded to the minute enter ten.
Every mission map was later with transparent overlays showing progress,

(23:37):
but it was fatigue that became the invisible enemy. Each
pilot flew until exhaustion blurred edges, then flew once or
twice more. Anyway, the joke on base was that adrenaline
had replaced coffee let Her homes were growing shorter and
sentences simpler, Still here, still flying, tell them the moon

(24:02):
is smaller than it looks. And when weather grounded the
heavy bombers, the witches kept going. They flew in snow
and sleet, and through fogs so thick their horizon vanished.
They flew when bearings froze, when the wind gusted hard
enough to tilt the plane's sideways. One pilot described the

(24:25):
experience as fighting the atmosphere with furniture. Another said, if
if the wind wants me dead, it will have to
file the paperwork. And it was the regiment's accuracy that
would become legendary as well. They didn't carpet bomb. They
threaded needles. Two bombs, two hits, depots, bridges, supply trains,

(24:50):
Each struck precisely where it hurt. They began marking targets
with flares for other units, turning the P two into
an airborne scalpel. Commanders who once mocked the girl pilots
were now requesting them by name. One mission report survives

(25:12):
in full date of July nineteen forty three. Target ammunition
dump near Novoriskisk. Two crews, four bombs, total result detonation
visible fifteen kilometers away enemy casualties unknown, Soviet casualties none
comment from Bershinskaya. Repeat method, and they did, night after

(25:38):
night after night. Now the Luftwaff that tried to adapt.
They set traps with overlapping searchlights, created bait fires to
draw attention, and even deployed fast climbing night fighters. None
of it would work reliably. The witches were just simply
too small, too slow, and too disciplined. Philas reported the

(26:00):
frustration of chasing gnats with a hammer, and the hammer
kept missing. Still, the cost was real. Anti aircraft gunners
eventually learned the rhythm of glides and climbed with their shots.
Planes disappeared in the fire without leaving wreckage large enough
to identify. Funerals were held at dawn. Short and wordless

(26:22):
mechanics painted over the lost aircraft numbers and patched the
line back into continuity, but the mission board never stayed blank.
There were heroes among them, though most would refuse that word.
Nashida Popova, who flew more than eight hundred sorties. Irena Sabrova,

(26:50):
who reached one thousand. You have the Kaya Nosel who
died at the controls but landed her navigators safely. They
didn't talk about courage. They talked about maintenance schedules and
altitude drip. The legend would come later. For now, they
had work to do, and work didn't care if they

(27:14):
were tired. It demanded another flight plan, another bomb loaded,
another hour of darkness to fill. One night over the
Kuban River, a PO two took a hit from plaque
and caught fire mid glide. The pilot banks sharply, jettison
bombs and crash landed on the Soviets side, with one
wing left and one nerve unbroken. When mechanics arrived, she

(27:36):
was still sitting in the cockpit, smoke curling from her gloves.
Asked what happened. She said, the Germans missed, so we
came home. And that line spread through the regiment faster
than any order for a week. It was their unofficial slogan.
So in Fact one was about learning to fly, and

(27:58):
Act two was about learning well, learning to endure. Every
SORTI was a duel between fatigue and function. Somewhere, no
Smolensky German officer coined a phrase that found its way
in the Soviet propaganda leaflets, de hemagehut dn hexen the
sky belongs to the witches. It was meant as a despair,

(28:21):
it read as an endorsement. The leafless made the rounds
at angles, carefully clipped and pinned to the mess tent wall.
Like trophies. The witches had developed a rhythm that bordered
on superstition and probably a bit of OCD. They flew
in sets of three, one to distract, one to strike,
and one to confirm the hit. They counted seconds and

(28:45):
glide by heartbeat, measured descent by the feel of the
wind on their cheeks. And they learned that nothing, absolutely nothing,
sounded as beautiful as an engine catching on the first
try after the drop. Now German diary found after the
war described their effort affecting one sentence quote. They arrived

(29:07):
without warning, vanished without trace, and make the dark itself
an accomplice. By the autumn of forty three, the Witches
were flying from forward bases carved out of mud, barely
twenty kilometers from the front. They slept in trenches, refueled
by lantern light, and ate whatever rations weren't frozen. They

(29:27):
lost aircraft faster than Moscow could replace them, but not pilots.
They recycled parts, not people, When fabric tore, they sowed it.
When morale tor they laughed out loud. That winter was brutal,
Engines froze, solid mechanics thalled them with bonfires under the wings,

(29:52):
and by early forty four, the five eighty eighth had
earned full Guard status, the highest honor of the Soviet
Air Force could grant. It meant recognition, perhaps more important,
better equipment, and then a new number, the forty six
Guards Night Bomber Regiment. The women accepted the title, kept
the nickname, and went back to work. The Witches didn't

(30:14):
need medals to know their worth. They started receiving them anyway.
Twenty three would eventually earn the Gold Star, a hero
of the Soviet Union. The regiment, once laughed off as
a stunt, had become their Air Force's most decorated units,

(30:36):
and all of it built on that single tactic cut
the engine trust to glide drop the hammer, and by
mid forty four even hardened veterans began to romanticize the Witches.
Commanders who had once measured them and bomb tunnies now
spoke of them with awe. Pilots from other regiments created
badges for signed photo souvenirs from legends still very much alive.

(31:01):
When asked how they endured, one navigator just simply would shrug.
It's easier to be brave when you're too tired to
remember the alternatives. And there's a truth hiding in that line.
Bravery isn't a feeling, it's muscle memory that forgot to quit.
And so the five eighty eight kept writing its story

(31:23):
and smoke in silence, page after page, right after raid,
until the whisper became a language the whole front.

Speaker 4 (31:32):
Understood using the black.

Speaker 5 (32:25):
Shows, let blocks, reading rose and sciences.

Speaker 3 (32:32):
We didn't a shot by ride.

Speaker 5 (32:38):
Since he's on the way, and I do spend reading
to the finding Lovegain the Sky's a Lady, He's a blue.

Speaker 1 (33:33):
And the General the movie three.

Speaker 6 (33:36):
He sat five or three arts of saber deficiency, though,
and as we read, ride them, which is on the star,
on the scene in a Heart and a Rest.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
Through the High scares r the When they reached the.

Speaker 3 (33:59):
Story welcome back, hopefully you were able to get a

(34:55):
nice drink or a snack, or just stand up and
curse the wind or snack in my case. By nineteen
forty four, winter had become their oldest enemy in closest ally,
just as the finish, the German line was retreating west,

(35:19):
burning everything it left behind. The Red Army was moving
faster than its own supplies, and the night Witches were
somewhere in between, following the front like a shadow. I
just would refuse to thaw. It's kind of funny. Their
airfields were now nothing more than frozen rectangles carved out
of ice and mud. Engines had to be lit with

(35:44):
the campfires. Mechanics were building the small blazes under the
cowing to warm the oil. The women would joke that
if the wind shifted wrong, they'd all go hook together.
That bit of laughter helped keep their hands steadier. Every

(36:06):
part of the forty six guards night bomber regimen as
they were now creaked from over use. Fiver cracked propellers, splintered,
fuel lines, froze, and they still still relied on a
schedule that demanded eight flights a night in a weird

(36:27):
since they had become a living metronome for the Soviet
advance bombs and rhythm, courage and sequence, but supplies were scarce.
They slept in dugouts wrapped in parachute silk because blankets
were for civilians. Rations came late and often left early.

(36:49):
When the bread was frozen solid, they would use it
to hammer tent steaks. And when the vodka ran out,
oh not the vodka. When the vodka did ran out,
they drank anti freeze cut with tea. Statistically speaking, it's
a bad idea to do that. I do not recommend
that or condone it. But statistically they probably shouldn't have

(37:14):
been alive anyway, So they went the what the fuck route?
Did it?

Speaker 1 (37:19):
Anyway?

Speaker 3 (37:21):
Their new mission profile was relentless harass, retreating columns, straight railheads,
hit river crossings, keep the vier mocked awake until it
hated its own heart beat, and once again the po two.
It couldn't carry heavy payloads, so they compensated with precision.

(37:44):
The Witches had flown enough sorties to understand fatigue as
a physical presence. It rode in a third seat behind
the pilot like an uninvited passenger. It whispered to them
when the engine was cut, Hey drop the bomb now,
it told it told them to, you know, lie about

(38:06):
being fine. It never paid rent, but it also never
left and the mechanics, well, let's give a hat to
the mechanics because they worked miracles with nothing. They used
bootlaces for wiring, canvas from tents to patch the wings,

(38:28):
and shoe polish to water proof fabric. They called it
Soviet engineering, which roughly translates to hope plus a whole
bunch of duct tape. One mechanic claims she could rebuild
a carburetor with a spoon. Nobody doubted her, because, well,
there's more than a fifty to fifty chance she probably

(38:49):
already had done it. A common souvenir among the regiment
was frostbite. Fingers would turn white, then purple, and well.
More philosophical than practical, hilots learned engage the temperature by
how long it took for breath to freeze on their goggles.

(39:13):
At minus twenty, it formed crystals before you could blink.
At minus thirty, it didn't bother for tend to be pretty.
Even so, morales stayed high, and well stayed higher than
even physics could predict. They'd earned their guards, title, their respect,
and a grudging envy from the men they fall beside.

(39:33):
Mail well, it arrived once in a while, bundled letters
from home, smelling faintly of smoke and longing, and once again,
the replies were often very very short. We're still here,
still flying. Tell mom not to worry. I have plenty
of sky. By now, death had lost its novelty. They

(39:59):
named the the planes for the ones who didn't come back.
Catchia Zoya, the hummingbird, Comrade Luck. Every fesh coat of
paint was both memorial and motivation. The living carried the
dead on their wings. Combat reports became more and more clinical.

(40:20):
Target destroyed, returned, one point thirty two navigator wounded, aircraft serviceable.
The distance between lie items was the distance between life
and meeting gershanz Kai. I've read everyone initial them all,
but never changed her tone to her Her pilots didn't
need comfort, they needed consistency, and frontline soldiers began recognizing

(40:46):
the pattern of the raids. When the witches came, the
sky whispered first, then you'd hear the artillery, and but
Trumen would learn to cheer at the soundless sound, the
glide that mintell was about to rise and start to help.
Once again, not everyone survived it. On January twenty seven,

(41:07):
nineteen forty four, during a night raid near Orsha, a
pair of PO twos flew into a blizzard thick enough
to erase the horizon. Only one return, the second pilot
by naughty Apopova friend and roommate, was found days later
in a field of snow and silence. It would bury
her under the wing that hadn't burned. Pafava led and

(41:32):
flew again that night. Anyway, She locked three stordies and
wrote in her diary, I did not want to dis
disappoint her absence, and that had become the tone of
the regiment, grief as propulsion. Every loss was recycled with

(41:52):
in the motion, every survivor carried a fraction of the
fallen's courage, like a little bit of extra ballast, And
by spraying the front had moved in the pole, and
the regiment followed the frogging from one makeshift stripped to
the next. Each re relocation meant new soil to flat,
new trenches the dig and probably ten or twelve new

(42:14):
words to curse at the weather, and the po twos
looked increasingly out of place among the newer, faster aircraft
that was dominating the sky. Yet, when dawn broke and
the bigger bombers limped home with half their missions aboard it,
the witches were already cleaning frost off the next set
of wings, the Luftwaffs night fighters tried some ambush tactics

(42:39):
waiting for the glide, but they failed more than they succeeded.
The PO two staw speed was so low that chasing
planes overshot and just lost visual contact. Another German pilot
later would admit it was like trying to swat a
mosquito with a sword. That line also made it in
the Soviet briefings, because if you can't can't outgun an enemy,

(43:03):
you can at least out quote him. Engines started giving
out mid sortie fabric was tearing at the seams and bones.
All the bones followed. Sweet, Well, let's face it. I
could give you a bunch of statistics about all of this,
but it only tells half the story. The other half

(43:29):
lives in the quiet between missions, with the smell of
kerosene on gloves, the taste of cold tea, the sound
that distant artillery is sinking with your pause. Some nights,
the sky was too clear, the moon too bright, search
lights reached higher. Black gunners got luckier, planes didn't come back.
The raids never stopped. Soviet press began writing featured stories,

(43:57):
cleaned up, of course for morale, and censored. The pilots
began posing reluctantly for photographs with windburn faces, half smiles,
and almost all of them with grease and worse under
than nails. They didn't see heroes in the mirror. They
saw maintenance schedule still waiting for them to get done,

(44:19):
and they were just being but behind.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
Now.

Speaker 3 (44:24):
If you actually complained that Moscow journalists made them sound glamorous,
as one pilot would say, if you want glamour, comfrees
with us and call it fashion. When an engine mispired
on take off, the pilot shoutlet he just needs a
little bit more encouragement and would kick the dashboard. When

(44:46):
a mechanic was promoted, someone painted Madam Engineer on her
tool chest and lipstick, because even in exhaustion, you still
needed to laugh at least a little. Through the fall
of forty four and in the forty five, the Witches
flew almost without pause. They followed their front through Belarus,

(45:07):
across the Vistula and in the Germany itself, once again,
hitting convoys, depots, airfields, and rail lines. They also dropped
propaganda leaflets alongside bombs. A dual payload if you will,
of fear and inevitability. One leaflet actually read you can't fight,

(45:29):
but you can't hear psychological warfare courtesy of women who
had mastered both silence and precision. Winter came again, the
last one of the war. They had been fighting for
nearly four years. Many of the original members were gone.

(45:51):
Those who remained carried faces carved by wind and years.
No one cared about their makeup. They cared about engine
compression ratio. No one cared about haircuts. They were more
concern learned about altitude drift. Every heartbeat was in equation
and fuel and frost. The German defenses around Celesia was desperate, paranoid,

(46:12):
and half starved. The witches would exploit that they dropped
bombs on empty fields just to keep soldiers awake. A
bit of sonic torture disguised the strategy, and it worked.
Sleep deprivation can do what artillery cannot. It dismantles certainty.

(46:32):
The archives hold one dispatch from a captured German courier
written in pencil, dated February and nineteen forty five, at
reads we fear the night, the women come and the
world disappears that historians later agreed was the purest summary
of the regiment's legacy ever recorded. By March, they were
within reach of Berlin's outskirts. The war's end was visible,

(46:56):
but none of them trusted visibility anymore. Let's face it
to them, Visibility got you killed. They kept flying as
though the sky would end if they stopped. Habit was
their identity. In the final weeks, they hit targets so
close to Soviet infantry lines that friendly fire became a
bigger risk than German flack. Their coordination turned chaotic, but

(47:20):
the Witches adapted like they always had, through a routine precision.
In that uncanny silence, their missions no longer changed the war.
They just confirmed its outcome. April nineteen forty five spring again,

(47:41):
the airfields thawed, the rivers broke with ice, and Berlin
burned on the horizon for the first time in years.
The Witches flew towards a dawn that didn't promise more
of the same. They didn't know yet, but their next
sorady would be among their last. They bombed the darkness
in the submission. What remained was silence in the question

(48:02):
of who they'd be once that noise was gone. They
caught it flames in the snow, the way light looked
from above when the bomb strikes would hit frozen ground,
fire being reflected on ice, destruction, painting beauty without permission.

(48:22):
They would never forget that view. Even decades later, the
veterans could describe it perfectly, the way snow glowed for
a few seconds then went dark. That image became the
story symbol, the paradox of creation inside destruction, lights inside cold,
and life inside danger, and it's white his story and

(48:42):
still talk about them, not as an anomaly, but as
proof that endurance is its own form of genius. The
world would soon wake up for that one last winter,
the sky was theirs. By May of forty five, the

(49:07):
war in Europe was ending in the same way had begun,
with fire and disbelief. Berlin was in ruin, the Reich
was collapsing. The armies of the Soviet Union were closing
the circle. For the forty six Guards Night Bomber Regiment.
The end came without any ceremony. One night there were missions,
the next none. They had been airborne when the radio

(49:33):
crackled with the message cease operations. Germany as capitulated, no trumpet,
no flypass, Its words carried through static. They circled once more,
out of habit dropped their unused bombs on an empty
field and turned for home. When the wheels would touch down,

(49:57):
the silence spell heavier than any landing before. There were
no more checklists, no targets, no engine to shout over.
For four years, night had been their clock. Now the
hands stopped moving the airfield it was just mud. Now
mechanics still moved like ghosts with tools and unable to

(50:17):
admit the rhythm had broken. Someone opened a bottle of
anti freeze and mock celebration. Someone else stole the cork
for luck, but that laughter sounded more borrowed than real.
Officially they were now hear heroes of the Soviet Union.
Officially they were now unemployed witches, but nowhere to fly.

(50:44):
Their numbers ended up being quite staggering. Over thirty thousand
sorties flown, more than twenty three thousand tons of bombs, dropped,
hundreds of bridges, depots, railheads destroyed, with twenty three of
them receiving the Gold Star, the highest honor their country
could give. And yet in a weird way, it wasn't

(51:08):
enough yet, but it was something. It was something to
pin over some of the scars, and once again they
post for photographs squinting into the sun they had basically
ignored for years. When the men from Moscow won, it
smiles the witches obliged. They stood beside the same wooden
plans that had carried them through every possible version of fear.

(51:30):
From the outside, it looked triumphant. Inside it felt like
a conversation had ended mid sentence. War can change the body,
but it totally and completely rewires the soul. The silence
after victory is rarely peaceful. It's just now unfamiliar. For

(51:53):
the women who had measured their lives by takeoffs and landings,
peace felt like a bit of altitude loss. They packed
up their gear, rolled the PO twos back into the hangars,
and waited for new orders, which never came. The Soviet
Air Force had no use for night bombers anymore, and
even less use for female ones. The war had needed them,

(52:17):
now I preferred to forget them. Bureaucracy rewrote the miracle
into a footnote. The PO twos were reassigned to training
schools or just dismantled for parts. Their wooden wings would
become furniture, their engines melted in the scrap their aircraft

(52:38):
had that basically terrified Europe went quietly, plank by plank.
The witches would return home in batches, some to Moscow,
other to villages that had lost more than half their men.
They're once mostly proper fitting uniforms hung loose on their
smaller frames. Their medals looked too large for daily life.

(53:05):
Civilians stared at them like curiosities, women who had done
impossible things and were now expected to cueue for bread again.
One pilot later said, after the war, they told us
to take the sky out of our heads. I tried
it kept coming back, and I gotta admit that might

(53:27):
be the truest description of post war life ever written.
Of course, they were offered clerical jobs, teaching posts, and
of course sewing work. Imagine telling a woman who had
Bomberlin in a wooden plane that her next assignment involved
a typewriter. Some, of course, would take the offer, Some didn't.

(53:51):
Some married, quietly, had children, and spoke of the war
only when the knights were too calm to trust. History, ever, impatient,
moved on. Now the Cold War had begun, rockets replaced wings.
PO two was a relic even so during the war,

(54:12):
and now so were its pilots. In official parades, the
jets thundered overhead while the night Witches stood below, clapping
POLEI polightly at the Progress. No one mentioned that Progress
was flying on the same lift equations they had mastered
by starlight. Ironically, their story resurfaced only when historians went

(54:35):
looking for stasistics that didn't add up how a handful
of obsolete biplanes had produced disproportionate chaos. That answer was
simple and human. They didn't win because of the machine.
They won because repetition, when fueled by belief, becomes strategy,
and strategy repeat it long enough can become legend. The

(54:57):
old airfields at Angles were eventually paid over. There is
a monument that stands there now, two stylized wing, a
silhouette of a woman, and a trail of stars taurusts
posed beneath it, without honestly quite knowing who she is,
and the plaque reads simply to the women who gave
the Night its courage. It's a bit sentimental, you know,

(55:21):
but sentiment is the only currency that spreads in memory
and interviews decade late later, survivors spoke with the same
calm they used into the cockpit. They remembered frost more
vividly than fear, engines more fondly than metals. When asked
what courage felt like, one would reply cold and louder
than it looks. Another would say, we didn't feel brave,

(55:45):
we felt necessary. Necessity is the quiet twin of heroism.
But it's that part that doesn't usually make the posters.
I said, their humor, well, it never really dulled. Asked
if she was ever scared, hope Aba laughed, of course,

(56:05):
But it was our turn to scare them, then she
had it. Besides, the wind never complained. By the nineteen eighties,
time had done what the Luffwaffe couldn't, age grounded the

(56:26):
last of them. Some would die at obscurity. A few
would live long enough to be rediscovered by journalists looking
for forgotten legends. They would find the women in small apartments,
metal tucked and drawers, photo albums filled with black and
white proof that courage once wore wool in Greece, and

(56:51):
without fail, almost every story ended the same way, with
a simple shrug and a smile and a quote it
was our job. The last operational PO two took flight
in a museum demonstration in nineteen eighty eight. The pilot,
a veteran mechanic, said afterward that the smell of oil
made her twenty again. She kept her goggles on after landing,

(57:16):
pretending it was for dust. The crowd cheered, The plane
coughed and sputtered and went still. Somewhere the sound of
silence felt familiar again, and yet the echoes still linger.
Every air force in the world now trains night operations.

(57:38):
Every pilot who glides without power over her target inherits
their ghost. The physics remained unchanged, only the altitude varies.
History has a habit of calling miracles inevitable once they're done,
but inevitability is just courage. Scene from the Fares of Success.

(58:02):
In nineteen forty one, the idea of women flying combat
missions was fantasy, and forty five it was fact, and
by twenty twenty five it's precedent. The Witches turned ridicule
in the doctrine and doctrine into history that still glows
faintly at the edges, and there's an irony in how

(58:22):
the story survives. The Germans gave them. The name witch
is out of fear. The Soviets gave them metals out
of duty. But the truth is quieter than either. They
were women who refused to wait for permission. And that's
the kind of magic reality never completely explains. And I'm

(58:45):
sure on the Russian and German front, if you listen
closely on certain cold nights, the windstill slides low crossed
open fields, you can probably still hear it, the whispers
with wings wood against air, a ghost of velocity older
than peace. It isn't superstition, it's legacy, the sound of
courage doing what it always does when the world forgets

(59:09):
taking off again. This has been in the crease. I
am jeble F. And the next time we turn from
the skies to the altar where justice was put on trial.
Literally in two weeks, the year will be eight ninety

(59:30):
seven and a dead pope is about to face the
court of the living. Join me for ITC Episode seventy five,
The Cadavers a nood and you won't believe who wins
this one