Irina Sorokina

Junior Sergeant Irina Sorokina served with the legendary 588th Night Bomber Regiment — the "Night Witches" — an all-female Soviet bomber unit. Flying obsolete Po-2 biplanes, the regiment conducted over 23,000 night bombing sorties against German positions. Sorokina was a navigator who completed over 200 combat missions. She was shot down twice but survived both crashes. The regiment was feared by the Germans, who called them the "Night Witches." After the war, Sorokina studied engineering in Leningrad and later moved to Bristol in the 1990s to live with her granddaughter, who had married a British engineer.