The German army has invaded deep into Mother Russia, and Stalingrad itself is a battlefield. Young Valentina desperately wants to use her flying skills to defend her city, joining her sister Tatiana in the skies, but her mother forbids her. She is young, much too young to fight — but this is a time of horrors, when children murder children on the altar of the state. When her mother falls to a sniper’s bullet, Valentina makes her way through the ruined city to find her sister and join in the fray. Night Witches is a captivating coming of age story in which a young orphan defies doubts about her age and skills to demonstrate not only her technical skill, but her determination — to find her sister, to defy evil, and to prove what she is capable of.

Although I was slightly aware of the role of that female pilots played in Russia’s resistance to Germany in World War 2, I had no idea how young they could be. The characters here are almost all teenagers, their mentors and captains just having breached the age of 20. This may be intended to be a YA novel, though the themes are not juvenile. Death and terror are frequent, from Valentina creeping through a sniper-filled city, to her realization that the old woman who nursed her back to health after her plane crashed is associated with a Ukrainian militia with Nazi sympathies — and that if the commissars ever learn this, Valentina will be tainted by association as a collaborator despite the dozens of Nazis she’s personally dispatched. Valentina lives up to her name, with its ancient meaning of bravery and strength: she ascends into the inky black to bomb Nazis night after night, but is also willing to stand up to Stalin’s goonie boys in the NKVD. The novel takes its name from the all-female squadrons of light bombers who took advantage of their planes’ build to fly lower than German aircraft could, capable silently descending on German bases like an owl on prey — dropping bombs instead of snatching mice. They were quite effective at destroying supplies, infrastructure, and German morale without the high costs of daytime raids.

Night Witches is a short but wholly absorbing novel about a young woman coming of age in an unenviable time, surrounded by death but doggedly fighting for those whom she loved. I found it in the library bookstore some years ago and am sorry I’m only now getting around to it.

Related:
Marian’s review of The Unwomanly Face of War, an oral history of Soviet female combatants, often young
Fly Girls, Keith O’Brien. On female air pioneers in the US.
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, Anthony Beevor