It was the spring of 1943, at the height of World War II. Two pilots, members of the Soviet Air Force, flew their planes – Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes, constructed mainly of plywood and canvas – over a Soviet railway junction. Their passage was about to become a routine patrol... until the pilots found themselves confronted by a group of German bombers. Forty-two of them. The pilots did what anyone flying a plywood plane would do when confronted with enemy craft and enemy fire: they ducked. They sent their planes into a dive, returning fire directly into the center of the German formation. The fragility of the small planes was something of an advantage: their maximum speed was lower than the stall speed of Nazi planes, which meant that the pilots could maneuver their craft with much more agility than their attackers. The outnumbered Soviets shot down two Nazi planes before one of their own lost its wing to enemy fire. The pilot jumped and eventually landed in a field. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the Original EssayThe people on the ground, who had witnessed the skirmish, rushed to help the stranded pilot. They offered alcohol. But the offer was refused. As the pilot later recalled, "No one could understand why the brave boy who had flown into a Nazi squadron didn't drink vodka." It turned out that the good boy had refused the vodka because he wasn't a boy at all. She was Tamara Pamyatnykh, one of the members of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Force. The 588th was that force's most decorated female unit, flying 30,000 missions in four years and dropping a total of 23,000 tons of bombs on the invading German armies. Its members, aged 17 to 26, flew mainly at night, making do with planes that were – due to their plywood and canvas construction – generally reserved for training and crop dusting. They often operated in stealth mode, idling their engines as they approached their targets and then heading toward their bomb drop points. As a result, their planes made little more than faint "whistling" noises as they flew past them. These noises apparently reminded the Germans of the sound of a witch's broom. So the Nazis began calling female fighter pilots Nachthexen: “night witches.” They were hated. And they were feared. Any German pilot who shot down a “witch” automatically received an Iron Cross. If they were hit by tracer bullets, their craft would burst into flames like the paper airplanes they resembled. Which was no easy feat: “Almost every time,” Popova remembers, “we had to go through a wall of enemy fire. » Their missions were dangerous; they were also, as a secondary challenge, unpleasant. Each night, typically, 40 planes – each with two women, a pilot and a navigator – would fly eight or more missions. Popova herself stole 18 in one night. (The multiple night sorties were necessary because the modified spreaders were only capable of carrying two bombs at a time.) The women's uniforms were male pilots' clothing. And their planes had open cockpits, letting women's faces freeze in the cold night air. “When the wind was strong, the plane was thrown,” Popova noted. "In winter, when you looked to see your target better, you got frostbite,.