The story of an amazing Russian and her WWII female comrades

July 21, 2025 • 10:45 am

While reading the NYT this morning, I came across a spellbinding story of a small (5-foot) Russian woman who was determined to fight the Germans during WWII. Along with a bunch of other women, she took to a clumsy wood-and-cloth biplane reserved for training and crop dusting, and carried out many missions bombing Germans (the plane could barely go 60 mph with a load of bombs).

The deadly effects of these determined women, and the silence of their tiny planes, led the Germans to call them the “night witches” (“Nachthexen”), and Polina Gelman, the hero of the story,

. . . .  became one of [the Night Witch’s] most celebrated members and the only Jewish woman who served in the war to earn a Hero of the Soviet Union medal, the U.S.S.R.’s highest commendation for military service, according to Arkadi Zeltser, a historian at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Israel.

(A long Wikipedia article on the Night Witches notes that 22 other women also won that medal.)

But her religion is mostly irrelevant in this story save for the pervasive Soviet bias against Jews. What is amazing is what Gelman and her fellow women flyers achieved, and you can read about it by clicking below, which I’ve linked to a free archived version of the story. The author is Alexander Nazaryan.

A short excerpt:

The planes, about 40 in all, came in succession, each making as many as 15 runs a night. “What they’re doing is keeping the Germans from sleeping, making these random attacks that can come out of nowhere,” Pennington said.

Gelman herself flew 869 combat missions, standing out not just for her stamina but also for her precision, her composure under fire and her deep sense of political purpose.

Her experiences were at once representative and unique. “It is possible to call Polina Gelman, with full confidence, the embodiment of the roiling, fighting, revolutionary 20th century,” the author V. Selunskaya wrote in a postscript to Gelman’s memoir.

9 thoughts on “The story of an amazing Russian and her WWII female comrades”

  2. From the Wikipedia article on Polina Gelman I draw the conclusion that she was very likely Ukrainian, not Russian. Especially these days, with the genocidal Russian war against Ukraina, one should be careful not to mix that up.

  3. Just FYI – the Swedish metal band Sabaton (who mostly covers historical topics in their songs) did a song called Night Witches about this group of Russian women pilots.

    They have an animated story video which gives you some more details on the Night Witches (along with the song itself)

    As regards the music itself, it is pretty standard power metal but they have managed to dig up all sorts of obscure facts and bring them to light. For me, discovering this band rekindled my interest in history and I ended up in reading a whole ton of books to get more information on the various topics they sing about.

    BTW – one of the most fascinating people that they sing about it Witold Pilecki, a Polish resistance fighter who volunteered to infiltrate Auschwitz. That ended up with me finding a biography of the man (“The Volunteer” by Jack Fairweather) which I would strongly recommend. Frankly, it boggles my mind that he isn’t more well known. I personally had never heard of the man before listening to the song. Here is the Sabaton’s history channel with a brief biography of the man

    And the song itself (which frankly is not one of their greatest)

    Raghu

  4. Kate Quinn was inspired by Gelman and die Nachthexen for a principal character in her book “The huntress”. A great read. Quinn is one of my favorite authors of historical fiction.

  5. There was a fairly good Russian TV drama about women pilots in the Soviet army during WWII. Can’t remember the name. The Russians used a lot of women in combat in WWII.

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