Night Witches

The Night Witches are a Soviet women’s air squadron, introduced over Město through the persistent nighttime presence of a small aircraft that circles the city, drops flares, and brings explosions to the ground. Their arrival is at once a military threat and a startling spectacle: as German defenses prepare for the approaching Red Army, the possibility that the aircraft is piloted and maintained by women draws laughter, admiration, and fear from the men who hear about it.

Appearance over Město

The squadron first enters the account indirectly, as sound and light over a sleeping city. In the night, inhabitants are woken by a small aircraft buzzing above the centre of Město. It scatters flares across the black sky, whose sudden brightness exposes Špilas fortress, church spires, and the roofs of the old town. Gunfire from the castle hill is desultory; the aircraft carries on, weaving back and forth and sometimes bringing explosions down to the ground. The flares drift away on the wind, trailing pale smoke.

The episode does not end with a single raid. The same aircraft returns on each of the next two nights, moving through the darkness as though it can come and go at will. Its rounds over the city and repeated flares make the attack feel almost playful, even as it causes destruction. People call the visitor Ivánek, little Ivan. The nickname gives the unseen machine a familiar, diminutive presence; the impression that the approaching army has a sense of humour sits uneasily beside the explosions below.

Identity and explanation

The aircraft’s identity reaches the men in a pub through Novotný, who appears to know about it, as he seems to know everything. He reports that the Germans call the pilots the Night Witches and says that they are all women. The men respond with astonishment and disbelief, asking whether he is joking. His answer expands the claim beyond the pilots: the mechanics are women too, and the whole squadron consists of women.

Novotný presents this as proof of the Soviet woman’s heroic struggle for freedom and of perfect equality between the sexes in the Soviet Union. His declaration carries the sound of official political language, and the men’s joking response about their wives punctures its certainty without erasing the force of the news. In the scene, the squadron’s gender is not a minor detail attached to an otherwise ordinary air raid: it is the disclosure that changes how the men understand the aircraft and the enemy’s capacity to fight.

Reception and significance

Laughter is only the surface of the men’s reaction. Beneath it, the narrative identifies admiration and fear. The Red Army has already been imagined through vast quantities of materiel and manpower—tens of thousands of tanks, thousands of aircraft, millions of soldiers. The report that Soviet women are flying and maintaining the aircraft adds another dimension to that scale. The men are confronted not only by an approaching force but by women’s participation in its machinery of war.

The squadron’s portrayal holds spectacle and danger together. The aircraft’s circling, the flares’ almost lunar light, and the recurring explosions give its sorties an uncanny, teasing quality; the account does not turn that strangeness into a supernatural mystery, but grounds it in the report of a real military unit. Nor does the scene detach the women’s presence from the politics voiced around it: Novotný makes it an argument about Soviet equality, while the men’s mixed response reveals that the claim is being heard through their own gendered assumptions. The Night Witches thus mark a change in the scale and character of the coming battle: the city is already exposed from above, and even the category of who can wage war has been unsettled.