Las Brujas de la Noche (Night Witches) fue un escuadrón de 80 mujeres piloto que realizaron unas 30.000 misiones de bombardeo nocturno contra las tropas alemanas que invadieron Rusia durante la SGM.
Volaban en aviones que, originalmente, servían para fumigar y entrenar nuevos pilotos, por eso solo cargaban dos bombas en cada misión, por lo que tenían que realizar varias misiones cada noche.
Sus aviones eran ruidosos y lentos, por lo que, para evitar las defensas antiaéreas, subían a gran altura en la noche, apagaban el motor y planeaban hasta su objetivo. Cuando soltaban las dos bombas, encendían de nuevo el motor y volvían a la base para repetir.
Para quitarle peso a su avión, volaban sin paracaídas.
This is a group photo of the Night Witches, a Russian, all female bomber squad during World War 2.
They consisted of 80 women who flew a total of 30,000 sorties and dropped 23 tons of bombs on German invaders in a span of four years.
Consisting of mostly teenagers and early 20-year-old volunteers, the Night Witches earned their nicknames because they would fly over enemy territories and then shut off their engines, allowing their planes to glide over their targets and drop their bombs silently.
The woman standing in the photo and looking at the camera is Nadezhda Popova. She was initially rejected when she tried to sign up as a pilot at the beginning of the war. “No one in the armed services wanted to give women the freedom to die,” she said. However, in 1941, orders came from Moscow to establish a few regiments consisting of female pilots.
Popova became one of the first female volunteers to join the war effort. Her main motivation was to avenge her brother who was killed in action fighting the invading Germans. She personally flew 852 missions. “Almost every time we had to sail through a wall of enemy fire,” she said.
Popova survived the war and worked as a flight instructor in Moscow. Before passing away at age 91 in 2013, she did an interview in which she said:
“I sometimes stare into the blackness and close my eyes. I can still imagine myself as a young girl, up there in my little bomber. And I ask myself, ‘Nadia, how did you do it?’ ”
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