In the Nazi-occupied Soviet Union, German soldiers had a very real fear of witches.

Namely, the “Night Witches,” an all-female squadron of bomber pilots who ran thousands of daring bombing raids with little more than wooden planes and the cover of night—and should be as celebrated as their male counterparts.

This month marks the 73rd anniversary of the start of their pioneering service. In June of 1941, the Axis powers pushed into the Soviet Union using the largest invading force in the history of warfare. The infamous Operation Barbarossa saw about four million troops wade into Russia from the west, establishing a line that threatened to overtake Moscow itself. The offensive was one of the most violent and terrible military actions in World War II, with countless atrocities committed against the Russian people. The battle-hardened male soldiers of the Soviet Union held the front lines against the Axis forces, keeping the invasion from overtaking the capital.

From the start of the war, Colonel Marina Raskova, a Soviet pilot who was known as the “Russian Amelia Earhart,” began receiving letters from women across Russia wanting to join the war effort in any way they could. Many women served support roles at the time, but it was difficult to make it to the front. Raskova lobbied to finds ways for women to take a more active role in the war, and was highly successful in her efforts, leading to women being eligible for the draft and even convincing the military to establish all-female units.

In October of 1941 the order came down from Joseph Stalin that Raskova was to establish a trio of all-female air squads. The only one reported to have remained exclusively female was the team of night bombers, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, where everyone from the pilots, to the commanders, to the mechanics were women.

Courtesy of Toys World.

The regiment began filling out in 1942, with young women ranging in age from 17 to 26 transferring to the small town of Engels to begin flight training. The future pilots were greeted by Raskova herself with a no-nonsense, military manner. The women were issued size 42 boots, outfitted with ill-fitting military uniforms made for bulkier male soldiers. Their hair was cut short. As one of the pilots would recall in a later interview, “We didn’t recognize ourselves in the mirror—we saw boys there.”

The women faced significant obstacles even before they began engaging in combat—namely, with the equipment. They had to fly Polikarpov Po-2 aircraft—two-seated, open-cockpit biplanes that were obsolete even by the standards of the day. Made of plywood frames with canvas stretched over them, the craft were light, slow, and provided absolutely no armor. The benefit of the planes was that they had a slower stall speed than the standard German fighters, making them hard to target, and they could take off and land just about anywhere. However, this came as literal cold comfort to the aviators who had to fly the ships through walls of enemy fire in the dead of night, with the freezing wind whipping around and through the exposed cockpits, often giving the pilots frostbite.