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The Night Witches and Other Warrior Women of World War II

Khalid Elhassan December 8, 2019 31 min

Lyudmila Pavlichenko - World War II — WWII Red Army snipers. Pintrest

36. The Virtues of Obsolescence

The Night Witches’ planes were seriously outmatched by those of the enemy, both in speed and in maximum altitude. Wikimedia

The Polikarpov Po-2 was slow and obsolete, but that very obsolescence came with silver linings. For one, it was highly maneuverable. In the hands of a capable pilot, a Po-2 could perform jinks and dips and turns within a small radius, that the faster and more modern German airplanes sent to shoot them down – assuming they could find them in the first place at night – simply could not match.

Night Witches of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. War History Online

The Po-2’s slow speed also had its advantages: its maximum speed was less than the stall speed of the Messerschmitt Me Bf 109 and Focke-Wulf FW 190 fighters. Between that, the dark cloak of night, and the aforementioned maneuverability, German fighters had an extremely difficult shooting down the women of the 588^th.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.