Blair Ellis

Nightwitches

For those not in the know, night witches were russian lady bombers who bombed the shit out of german lines in WW2. Thing is though, they had the oldest, noisiest, crappest planes in the entire world. The engines used to conk out halfway through their missions, so they had to climb out on the wings mid flight to restart the props. to stop germans from hearing them coming and starting up their anti aircraft guns, they’d climb up to a certain height, coast down to german positions, drop their bombs, restart their engines in midair, and get the fuck out of dodge.

their leader flew over 200 missions and was never captured.

I think that a lot of our current military industrial complex comes from idealizing those who fought Nazi’s in germany because it’s pretty easy to not think very hard about the motivations of people killing nazi’s (even though most of the people fighting didn’t know most of what was going on) and it is pretty easy to paint WWII as Good Verses Evil so we don’t look at it complexly…. but what ever these ladies sound pretty bad ass…

(Source: sovietico, via banditodan)