Quote:What was one the most horrifying sounds a German soldier on the Russian front could hear in the dead of night – a sound that would turn his heart to jelly? The soft “whooshing” of the wind off the struts of a “Night Witch” jerry-rigged biplane bomber; described as the eerie sound of a witch’s broom as it quietly glided in to drop its payload of bombs.

Who were these Night Witches? They were the all-women pilots of Russia’s 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment. In World War II, American women such as the WASPs supported the war by ferrying and testing planes.  But the Night Witches were the first women military pilots in the 20th century to directly engage an enemy in combat. The pilots weren’t the only women in the 588th. All the members of the 588th were women, including the navigators, ground crews, and support staff.

The Night Witches were organized by Major Marina Raskova, who was essentially Russia’s equivalent to our Amelia Earhart. Women pilots, though, weren’t unusual in the Soviet Union. Flying was popular in the 1930s and thousands of women belonged to flying clubs. But when Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Russian women weren’t allowed in the Soviet Air Force even though they were allowed on the front lines in the army. Raskova received a slew of letters from women protesting the prohibition. After all, if women were allowed to fight alongside men on the ground, why not in the air too?

Joseph Stalin was one of Raskova’s admirers. She showed him the letters and convinced him to have the Soviet Air Force accept women as combat pilots. Women rushed to enlist. Some were integrated into regiments to fight alongside male pilots.

Stalin also authorized the creation of three all-women fighting groups:

    586th Fighter Aviation Regiment
    587th Bomber Aviation Regiment
    588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment

Thousands of women enlisted. Around 400 were accepted for each regiment. Most were university students in their late teens to mid-twenties. They spent an intensive year training, learning not just how to fly, but to navigate and maintain the aircraft too – training that normally took several years to complete.

Quote:The site, which is known by both archive.today, archive.is, or any number of other mirrors, started in the early 2010s but rose to prominence during the GamerGate movement.

Very little is known about the person or people who work on archive.today, though there have been numerous attempts to identify the webmasters. The most interesting is this article on a site called Gyrovague, whose crawling through various archive.today blogs and web presences suggests “it’s a one-person labor of love, operated by a Russian of considerable talent and access to Europe.”

A FAQ page, which has not been updated since 2013, states the site “is privately funded; there are no complex finances behind it.” A post on the site’s blog from 2021 says “it is doomed to die at any moment.” A post on the site’s blog from 2021 says “it is doomed to die at any moment.”