The Night Witches was a name given to the pilots of the Soviet Union's all-woman 588th Night Bomber Regiment. They flew multiple missions every night to bomb German units on the Eastern Front, in tiny obsolete planes that flew low and almost silently. The pilots were young, fearless, and patriotic, like the kamikazes Japan deployed in the Pacific. The difference is that the Night Witches often survived their dangerous raids, while understanding that the odds against them were serious.
Their story, as brought to us by Weird History, begins as if the Soviet Union only joined the war in 1941. The part they left out was that the USSR had a pact with Germany to divide the nations of Eastern Europe between them, and the Soviets invaded some of those countries themselves. Once Germany double-crossed them, the Soviets joined the Allies, and only afterward did women aviators lobby to serve.
The funniest part of this video is the machine-generated captions. The algorithm has no idea what to do with Russian names, and cannot cope at all with the airplanes called Po-2s.
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