German soldiers on the Eastern Front described the sound as a witch's broom sweeping through the dark, and then the bombs fell with no warning. The aircraft were slow wooden Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes, the crews were entirely women, and the commander who made it work was Yevdokia Bershanskaya. This episode builds a biography of the woman behind the Night Witches, from her childhood as an orphan of the Russian Civil War to seven years as a flight instructor, squadron commander and Krasnodar city council deputy before the war even began.

We explain how Marina Raskova secured Stalin's approval for three all-female aviation regiments, why the 588th Night Bomber Regiment stayed 100 percent female from 1941 to 1945, and how Bershanskaya turned an obsolete crop duster into a weapon of terror by idling engines and gliding silently onto targets. We co ...