Description
The Soviet Night Witches flew 30,000 missions in canvas biplanes. They cut their engines on final approach and glided silent over German positions in the dark. The Germans couldn’t hear them coming until it was already over.
It is 1943. Nadezhda “Nadya” Kozlova—a pilot with the all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment — is shot down behind enemy lines on a routine sortie. She survives. She does not make it back.
Instead, Nadya surfaces inside a Soviet partisan cell with a single objective: infiltrate and sabotage a German weapons facility before it becomes operational. The mission is coordinated with the Night Witches still flying overhead—the very regiment she can no longer reach.
On the ground, Nadya must navigate forced labor camps, a German defector whose loyalties she cannot verify, and a chain of command that has never accounted for a downed pilot who refuses to stop fighting. In the air, her regiment flies on without her, sortie after sortie, not knowing whether she is alive.
Operation Nachthexen is built from primary research—aircraft specifications, mission records, named pilots, documented raids. The history is not backdrop. It is the engine. This is war as the women who fought it actually experienced it: without ceremony, without rescue, and without the option of standing down.
Format: ePub · Delivery: Immediate download · No DRM. Yours to keep.
About the Author
Astrid Cartesian writes historical fiction for readers who want history of brave women at the forefront—high stakes, strong heroines, and the past treated as action rather than academia. Her work is grounded in primary research and driven by the women history has repeatedly failed to center.
She publishes deep research, pilot histories, and essays on the 588th Night Bomber Regiment through her Substack newsletter, The Nachthexen—where the world of the novel lives between chapters.