Group portrait of the heroine airwomen of the 46th Guards Taman Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, Order of the Red Banner and Order of Suvorov, by the artist Sergey Bocharov, 1985

​​Group portrait of the heroine airwomen of the 46th Guards Taman Night Bomber Aviation Regiment, Order of the Red Banner and Order of Suvorov, by the artist Sergey Bocharov, 1985. The painting was acquired by the Central House of Aviation and Cosmonautics of DOSAAF, where it remains on display to this day.

The portrait shows the legendary Night Witches, the Soviet airwomen who flew 23,672 combat sorties in the Caucasus, the Kuban, the Crimea, Belarus, Poland and Germany. The young women dropped 3 thousand tonnes of bombs and 26 thousand incendiary shells on the enemy, and destroyed or damaged 17 river crossings, 9 railway trains, 2 railway stations, 26 depots, 12 fuel tankers, 176 motor vehicles, 86 firing points and 11 searchlights. This is the most heroic regiment in the history of the Great Patriotic War: between them the Night Witches hold 23 Gold Stars of Hero of the Soviet Union, 2 Gold Stars of Hero of Russia and 1 Star of Hero of Kazakhstan.

Every year, on 2 May and 8 November, the former comrades-in-arms met in the gardens of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow; their children and friends named their club accordingly, “2 May”. In 2017 the last of the Night Witches died: Yevdokia Borisovna Pasko, born in 1919. The memory of these women is preserved in numerous memoirs, books, publications and films. Of the famous regiment, I have found one survivor: the aircraft technician Alexandra Grigoryevna Osmantseva, born in 1921.