The Silent Wings of Night Witches
A Novel of the Soviet Women's Bomber Regiment

About this book:

They called them the Night Witches—the women who flew canvas-and-wood biplanes through the black skies over the Eastern Front, cutting their engines to glide silently toward German positions before dropping their bombs. But before they became legends, they were girls like Sofya Voronova: factory workers and students who lied about their ages, chopped off their braids, and squeezed into oversized boots to fight for a country that didn't believe they could. At Engels Airfield, under the iron gaze of aviatrix Marina Raskova, they mastered the impossible—navigation by starlight, combat in open cockpits at forty below, the art of turning a crop-duster into a weapon of terror.

*The Silent Wings of Night Witches* follows the 588th Night Bomber Regiment from the freezing mud of Saratov to the burning steppe of the Don, through the Caucasus and Crimea to the gates of Berlin. Here is the sisterhood forged in shared cold and terror: Sofya, whose steady hands find runways in zero visibility; Katya, mapping rivers by moonlight; Raisa, keeping ancient engines alive with tractor-mechanic ingenuity. They fly without radios, without parachutes, without armor—eight sorties a night, every night, until the war ends or they don't return.

Based on the true story of the only all-female combat aviation units in history, this novel brings to roaring life the women the Luftwaffe feared to name. They were daughters, sisters, lovers—and the most dangerous pilots in the Soviet sky.