It was the spring of 1943, at the height of World War II. Two pilots, members of the Soviet Air Force, were flying their planes - Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes, built mainly of plywood and canvas - over a Soviet railway junction. Their passage was about to become a routine patrol... until the pilots found themselves faced with a group of German bombers. Forty-two of them. The pilots did what anyone flying a plane made of plywood would do if faced with enemy aircraft and enemy fire: they ducked. They sent their planes into a dive, returning fire directly at the center of the German formation. The fragility of the small planes was in a sense an advantage: their maximum speed was lower than the stall speed of the Nazi planes, which meant that the pilots could maneuver their aircraft with much more agility than their attackers. The Soviets, outnumbered, shot down two Nazi planes before one of their own lost its wing to enemy fire. The pilot took off, landing, finally, in a field. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The people on the ground, who had witnessed the skirmish, rushed to help the stranded pilot. They offered alcohol. But the offer was rejected. As the pilot later recalled, "No one could understand why the brave boy who had faced a Nazi squadron did not drink vodka." All. She was Tamara Pamyatnykh, one of the members of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Force. The 588th was the most decorated female unit in that force, flying 30,000 missions over the course of four years and dropping, in total, 23,000 tons of bombs on the invading German armies. Its members, aged 17 to 26, flew mostly at night, making do with planes that, due to their plywood and canvas construction, were generally reserved for training and crop dusting. They often operated in stealth mode, idling their engines as they approached targets and then gliding toward bomb release points. As a result, their planes made little more than slight "whooshing" noises as they flew. Those noises apparently reminded the Germans of the sound of a witch's broomstick. So the Nazis began calling women fighter pilots Nachthexen: “night witches.” They were hated. And they were feared. Any German pilot who shot down a "witch" was automatically awarded an Iron Cross. If hit by tracer bullets, their aircraft would catch fire like the paper airplanes they resembled. Which was no small concern: “Almost every time,” Popova once recalled, “we had to navigate through a wall of enemy fire.” they were also, as a secondary challenge, unpleasant. Each night, overall, 40 planes – each crewed by two women, a pilot and a navigator – flew eight or more missions. Popova herself once flew 18 in a single night. (The multiple night sorties were necessary because the modified dusters were only capable of carrying two bombs at a time.) The women's uniforms were passed down from the male pilots. And their planes had open cockpits, leaving the women's faces freezing in the cold night air. “When the wind was strong he would launch the plane,” Popova noted. “In the winter, when you looked out to get a better look at your target, we froze, our feet froze in our boots, but we kept flying.” Once, after a successful flight, that is, a flight that she survived: Popova counted 42 bullet holes in her small plane. Keep in mind:.