The Night Witches

[BombTaxi]

Granted, there was an ideological side to the battle - but when wasnt there on the Eastern Front?! I would have to say that had the city fallen (ie had the Germans crossed the river), the encirclement would have been much harder, if not impossible. Having the far bank under thier control made it a lot easier for the Russians to assemble thier forces

 

[Udet]

Remark:

When i did say some of the technical descriptions made in the opening post of this thread are correct, i was referring to the stall speed of the planes involved.

Of course the ancient biplane could not carry that much bombs. 23,000 tons of bombs dropped from those biplanes only? Flat and plain bullshit.
The bombload was very limited, just as the biplanes in service were.

Furthermore, the soviets have been trying to "prove" they kept extremely detailed records of all of their operations. I seriously doubt any detailed archives of the units of which the Night Witches were partof numbers of sorties flown and tonnage of bombs dropped were ever kept.

I have seen photos of the air-bases from which the night witches operated: the conditions were as primitive and basic as you can imagine.

Bomb-taxi: the brutality of the soviet regime of Stalin was very very real and measurable. You have to believe that. Brutality in the russian ranks followed the chain of command down to batallion levels.

Over-rated? Well, it might depend on what over-rated means to you!

Aleksandr Novikov, the VVS general credited with conducting a "profound reform" in the organization and performance of the soviet military air force has been accordingly overinflated.

That they improved a bit is true; that they produced some very capable planes is also true: yet something of course they are never going to admit is the fact thousands and thousands of new pilots got sent to the front lines only with a crash course as training.

Soviets mass produced their fighters along with pilots; do not forget the russians were fighting a brutal war in their own soil. Time was something the soviets did not have to create a masterfully trained breed of pilots.

Their losses in 1945 ALONE: +/- 11,000 combat planes lost to all causes speaks all by itself.

As someone said here, as late as in 1944, parachutes were not issued to most units in the VVS, with the exception of some ace pilots and other officers.

The night witches might have been very brave, but their losses were frightful and the material damage they inflicted was minimum. I stick to my original idea: their job was more of pushing the nerves of a few groups of German troops to the limits.

 

[P38 Vet]

Regarding night witches their story is a fantastic tale of brave women pilots flying open cockpit airplanes and attacking and bombing German installations against overwhelming odds. A great story!

 

[swampyankee]

Yes they had some great tactitions and leaders, But there were battles that lives were spent for nothing, Stalingrad is the best example(proberly 1 of the only ones).

It was probably an even bigger example of Germany's leadership willingness to throw away the lives of its troops. After all, the Germans lost an army.

I've done a quick search for the number of Soviet military dead, and the best way to describe these is "wildly variable": they range from about 5 million (the current estimate is that 8.7 million is the lower bound; 5 million is far too conservative) to about 15 million (note that the estimate of the numbers of Soviet PoWs who died in captivity are about 2.6 to 3 million) Germany's were about 4.3 to 5.5 million (, which is, as a percentage of the national population(USSR about 170 million, Germany + Austria about 76 million), comparable to the USSR's. For comparison, the number of Commonwealth military casualties was about 602,000

 

[61fury]

Of course I don't have a source other than "a book", but the author claimed that after their early disasters, the casualty rates for the Soviet army were not disproportionately high. And then you have Chuikov and Zhukov and Stalin got smart enough not to micromanage, unlike Hitler. I'd heard about the Night Witches and I have great respect for the contributions of Soviet women made in the war, from the snipers to the pilots