Tomorrow, 8th March, the world celebrates International Women’s Day. But long before the marches, the milestones, and the movements, women were already fighting — literally — in some of the most dangerous combat roles in modern warfare. Most of their stories were buried. Some were classified. Others were simply never told.
The Night Witches: Women Who Made the Germans Tremble in the Dark
In the summer of 1942, German soldiers on the Eastern Front began dreading a sound they couldn’t explain: a faint, eerie whoosh cutting through the night sky. No engine noise. No radar signal. Just the whisper of wind across canvas wings—and then the bombs.
They called them Die Nachthexen—the Night Witches. The all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Forces flew over 24,000 missions across four years of war, dropping over 23,000 tons of bombs on German targets.
Their planes were an insult: ancient Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes, made of plywood and canvas, originally used for crop dusting. They flew without radar, without machine guns, without parachutes. Eight to eighteen missions a night, every night.
The Germans were so unnerved that they automatically awarded the Iron Cross to any German airman who could shoot one down. They spread rumors that the Soviets had given the women experimental night-vision drugs to explain how they could fly in total darkness.
They hadn’t. The women had simply learned to cut their engines near the target, glide silently toward it, drop their bombs, and disappear back into the dark.
By the end of the war, many of them had been awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union—the highest military honor in the USSR. Then the regiment was disbanded, excluded from the victory parade in Moscow because their planes were “too slow,” and largely forgotten for decades.
‘Lady Death’: The Deadliest Female Sniper in History
While the Night Witches ruled the skies, a 25-year-old history student from Kyiv was quietly becoming the most lethal female sniper in recorded history.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko had 309 confirmed kills by the time the Soviet High Command pulled her from the front line—including 36 enemy snipers she hunted down in counter-sniper duels. The Germans nicknamed her “Lady Death.” They tried to bribe her over loudspeakers: “Come to our side. We’ll give you chocolate and make you a German officer.” When that failed, the threats started: “If we catch you, we’ll tear you into 309 pieces.”
In 1942, the Soviets sent her on a publicity tour of the United States. She became the first Soviet citizen received by an American president when Franklin D. Roosevelt welcomed her to the White House. Eleanor Roosevelt was so struck by her that she personally accompanied Pavlichenko on a national speaking tour.
American journalists asked her about her uniform and her makeup. She stared at them, asking, “…who had the time to think of her shiny nose when a battle is going on?”
Noor Inayat Khan: The Spy Who Said Only One Word Before She Died
Noor Inayat Khan was a children’s book author, a trained harpist, and a devoted pacifist. She was also the first female wireless operator dropped into German-occupied France by Britain’s Special Operations Executive.
Noor spoke fluent French and had lived in Paris before the war. When the Germans took France, she joined the fight. The SOE sent her in under the codename “Madeleine.”
Within weeks, almost every other agent in her network had been arrested. She was alone, hunted, the only British intelligence contact left in Paris. She could have fled. The SOE told her to. She refused.
For three months, she moved from safe house to safe house, transmitting intelligence back to London, helping coordinate arms drops to the French Resistance and safe passages for downed Allied airmen. Where the average wireless operator survived six weeks in the field, Noor survived four months.
She was eventually betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo. For ten months, she was held in solitary confinement, shackled at the wrists and ankles. She never gave up a single name.
On September 13, 1944, she was executed at Dachau concentration camp alongside three other female SOE agents. Her last word, witnesses later reported, was “Liberté.”
She was posthumously awarded the George Cross—Britain’s highest civilian honor— and the French Croix de Guerre.
Their Stories Were Never in the Textbooks
The Night Witches flew 24,000 missions and were left out of the victory parade. Lady Death killed 309 Germans and was asked about her skirt length. Noor Inayat Khan held German-occupied Paris together with her bare hands and died with a single word on her lips.
Tomorrow, on International Women’s Day, remember that women have always fought. History just didn’t always feel like writing it down.