March 9, 2015 • 29 mins
The Night Witches were an all-female bombing regiment in the Soviet Air Force. Flying biplanes meant for dusting crops and training new recruits, they dropped 23,000 tons of bombs on German forces in WWII. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from hot
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. Hell, I'm Holly Frying. Today's episode is
probably the most requested one in Holly's in my time
(00:22):
on the show. It's possible, it's possible we've said this
about some other episode and at this point where liars
this time, we mean it. It has far superseded anything
else we might have said that about. So our first
request for it actually became before we even started hosting
the show. It was from a listener named Alison, and
(00:44):
it was one of the last listener emails that Sarah
answered before she passed the reins over to us, and
she copied us on her answer. Uh. Since then, just
from our email that I still have lying around, we
got requests from Mallory, Zoe, Jen, Erica Ford, Aaron, Suzie,
and Jeannette. And there are many, many, many, many many
(01:07):
other requests that have come in by a via Facebook
and Twitter and even tumbler, but those are all way
less searchable than like the archive email locks. So I finally,
I am Holly, and in all capital letters said okay,
we're doing one on the Night Witches, and I think
I said, yeah, yeah, we weren't avoiding them before we were.
We just had other things going on. Well. And part
(01:28):
of it too is that, you know, we try to
avoid sort of cultural redundancy, so through being talked about
a lot on other sites, but you're getting play and so.
And there have been a few times in the last
couple of years where they have sort of there's suddenly
been a lot of buzz about them. Uh like when
when there have been deaths amongst the women that remain,
you know, those kind of pop up. So at that
(01:50):
point it seems extraneous for us to then add to
the pile, and like it's just gonna get lost. But yeah,
especially because our production timeline means that we are like
two weeks behind and that so instead of feeling like,
here's this thing that's awesome to learn about, it's more like,
here we are just a little late to the party.
(02:10):
So a little bit of background on this. Flying was
actually a popular hobby in the Soviet Union in the
years leading up to World War Two, and at that point,
paramilitary flying clubs were training people to become pilots. There
were about a hundred and fifty of these clubs, and
about a quarter of their members were actually women. This
(02:30):
was in part because of Marina Raskova. She had become
an idol to teenage girls and young women after she
set a record for women's NonStop distance flying in ninety eight,
and she was twenty six at that time. Raskova had
set this record along with two other women, after flying
a twin engine plane about six thousand kilometers which is
(02:51):
roughly thirty seven dred miles, and that was from Moscow
to Komsomolsk on Amoor, which is in the Russian Far East.
During the flight, the plane started to ice over and
the three women started to jettison everything that they could
in an effort to lighten their load and gain altitude.
But it wasn't enough, but they were going to crash,
and so finally Raskova took a compass heading, she marked
(03:14):
the destination on a map, and then she jettisoned herself.
She bailed out and survived in the forest for ten
days before a hunter found her, and then she made
her way back to Moscow, where she was greeted by
a cheering throng of supporters. This attempt to set a
record and Rascova's consequent disappearance got widespread coverage on the
radio and people were absolutely glued to it. All three
(03:36):
of the women became heroes. They became known as the
Winged Sisters. They were all named heroes of the Soviet Union,
but Raskova was particularly beloved. People often make comparisons uh
to the United States love for Amelia Earhart when they
talk about Rascova. So thanks to all this interest in flying,
when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in nineteen forty one,
(03:58):
there were lots and law of Soviet pilots with lots
and lots of airtime who all came to volunteer for service,
and a lot of them were teenage girls and young women.
Roughly a third of the trained Soviet pilots at this
point were women. But when it came to combat, at
first all the female applicants were rejected and sent home,
(04:19):
but that change thanks to Marina Riskova. It was then
Major Riskova who put out the call for women to
volunteer to become combat pilots. They would be placed into
all female regiments. Anyone interested was instructed to write directly
to her, and she got about two thousand volunteers, a
pool of candidates that she personally sifted through, narrowed down,
(04:41):
and she interviewed them herself. And it wasn't just the
pilots they would need frequently the mechanics and other support
personnelities regiments. Regiments would be women as well. The volunteers
traveled to Moscow from some of the most remote parts
of the Soviet Union starting in the fall of ninety one,
and after god Ring in Moscow, they moved to an
(05:01):
airfield at Angles to train, and they came with basically
whatever they thought they were going to need for as
long as they would be out there if they made
the cut. Because they had they were pretty sure that
anybody who did make it in was not going to
get to go home again before they left. Larissa Rassanova
was one of the women who made it to the
interview stage. She had actually packed one of her favorite
(05:22):
dolls before leaving home, but her mother saw it in
her suitcase and said, Darling, you can't take that with
you to the war. You're eighteen years old now and
I love that story. I do too, but I'm like,
take the doll, It's fine. Larissa Rosanova and Popova, who
went by Nadia were Raskova's first two recruits to be
(05:43):
officially selected. When they started their official training in October
of ninety one, the female recruits formed the hundred and
twenty second Composite Air Group and eventually they would be
sorted into three all female regiments, which were the five
six Fighter Regiment, the five eight seventh Bomber Regiment, and
the five eight eight Night Bomber Regiment. Each of them
(06:05):
had about four hundred women, and most of them were
between the ages of seventeen and twenty six. And we're
going to get into the details on these regiments and
how they were trained, but first, should we have a
little word from a sponsor. We should do that stupendous
So to return to the night, which is there have
been a number of news articles about them that have
(06:26):
circulated in recent years, a lot of them, as we
alluded to you at the top of the show, followed
Nadia Popova's death. In a lot of them imply that
the entire Soviet military command saw these women recruits as
a giant joke, and that's not really accurate. The Soviet
military definitely was not prepared for a bunch of women
(06:47):
training training for combat. They had never done that before
at this kind of scale, And there were of course
people who were opposed to the idea of women serving
in combat all through their ranks. But a lot of
the things that modern coverage reads as a huge insult
to the women was just It was really a byproduct
of that being the first time that women, a large
(07:07):
group of women had been recruited into the armed forces
in the Soviet Union, and the fact that this happened
during wartime, so things were by necessity tight. So, for example,
there was no women's barracks at the airfield where they trained,
so they had to be housed in a nearby school,
And there were also no women's uniforms. They had to
make do with men's uniforms. These were generally too big
(07:30):
for them, although and I love this, since many of
the women knew how to sow, they could alter those
uniforms so that they fit more properly. The boots were
much bigger issues since they couldn't be altered. The women
would stuff the toes with magazine pages to kind of
fill them out so their foot wasn't sliding around. Yeah,
the the women who were the best at tailoring wound
(07:50):
up with uniforms that really looked quite smart on them.
And I told Tracy, as we were looking at pictures
getting ready for this episode, that I want to be
the Night, which is for how Owen. Yeah. And then
we could get everybody to be Night, which is for Halloween. Yeah.
And then I said step one, start with men's uniforms.
That's my dad's uniform. Yes. So these recruits went through
(08:14):
a highly compressed six month training period, and although all
of them knew how to fly already, most of them
had absolutely no real military experience at all, so it
really was not unusual for their classroom and flight training
plus basic military instruction to stretch beyond fourteen hours a day.
They were definitely immersed in what was widely regarded as
(08:36):
a world for men, which made it very important to
many of them that they maintained their femininity. Many had
brought one pretty outfit with them when they reported for training,
and they decorated their planes with flowers. They dyed their
silk under helmets in really pretty colors, and they called
one another by their first names, trying to remember to
use surnames and official ranks when the men were about
(08:58):
But they kind of developed this more casual camaraderie amongst
just the women. The women were assigned into their regiments
in April of ninety two, and from there they finished
their training with the actual planes that they would be flying,
so they had to get familiar with the controls and
the handling of those specific aircraft. The five eighty six
(09:20):
Fighting Regiment flew Yakov Love yak ones, which were the
best Soviet fighters in the first years of the war.
Although the way they were constructed made it a little
hard for the more petite women who both reached the
pedals and handled the controls, they got used to it,
though they were all extremely adaptable. The fighter pilots also
had to get used to working as a team while
flying in airplanes by themselves. The yak Ones were single
(09:43):
seat planes, unlike the bombers and the train the planes
that they have been training on. The five hundred and
eighty seven Day Bombing Regiment flew Pola Karpov PE two's,
which were armored bombers with a bubble protected machine gun station.
In both cases, their actual aircraft were a complete depart
ture from what they had been training on. Not so
(10:03):
for the night Witches. Their planes were Paula Karpov PO
two's originally known as You two's, and these were the
same planes they had already been training on. They were
never actually meant to be bombers. These were slow flying
wooden canvas biplanes with open cockpits that were mostly used
for training and for crop dusting, and they were so
(10:23):
slow that they could only fight fly missions to targets
that were relatively nearby, Otherwise they would waste way too
much time getting there and getting back, So the planes
had to be moved from one location to another during
the day to give the women access to their targets
at night. Because these were training planes that have been
pressed in the military service, they had complete sets of
(10:44):
controls for both the front and back seats. They were
retrofitted with bomb racks and a small machine gun at
the rear seat. Those same news articles we referenced earlier
will often say that the PO two's could only carry
two bombs, but in fact some of them could carry
up to eight. So while there were three units, our
focus really here is on the night, which is so
we're going to talk just about their time in World
(11:06):
War two for a little bit. Although they became more
famous than either of the two women's regiments. They didn't
really get off to the greatest start. All of these
women were really capable pilots, but their military experience at
this point was frankly pretty minimal. While flying to the
front to report for duty, three fighters that had been
tasked with escorting the Night which Is dived through their formation,
(11:29):
and most of the women believed they were under attacked
by the Germans, and so they panicked and scattered. This
was basically a test, and they did not pass it.
They arrived safely at their destination, but most of the
women hadn't seen the fighters coming or recognized them as
Soviet planes. They panicked instead of maintaining their formation. When
(11:50):
they were inspected the next morning, their commander told them
that they were not ready for combat. So the Night
which Is spent another two weeks in training. To make
things worse, their first how ing at the front was
in a cow shed which was not currently sheltering any cows,
but it had done so recently enough that it's not
horrible no matter how much they cleaned it. Once their
command decided that they were in fact ready, the Night
(12:12):
which Is finally flew their first combat mission on June eight,
the three most experienced crews of two women each were
tasked with bombing the headquarters of a nearby German division.
On that first mission, they employed a practice that uh
would earn them the nickname that we've used several times now.
The PO two is a really, really noisy aircraft. It
(12:33):
makes a lot of popping noises as it flies, and
these pops are accompanied by visible flame in the engine
and the exhaust, and so it's extremely easy to hear
and extremely easy to spot. So as the pilots approached
their targets, they would cut their engines, glide the rest
of the way, and drop their bombs in comparative stealth
and silence. Apparently, the rush of air over the wings
(12:56):
reminded the Germans of the sound of a witch flying
on her brew. While that first mission was successful, sadly,
two of the women, Luba Olkovskaya and Vera Tarasova, were
killed in action after a navigational error steered them over
a heavily defended part of the front and they were
shot down. Recognizing that losing two of their own right
(13:19):
literally at the very very beginning of their time in combat,
was really threatening to shatter the rest of the regiments
morale and confidence. Regimental commander Major yev Dokia Barsinskaya made
a case to send the rest of the bombers out
that night on a mission at once. They were given
a relatively easy target, which was to bomb a railway
junction and an artillery battery, and the rest of the
(13:41):
remaining teams, having completed this mission, did return successfully. After
that uneasy start, the night, which is confidence and skill
really grew quite quickly. They flew multiple missions every night,
flying out to the target, returning for more fuel in bombs,
and then taking off again a night which plane took
off on a bombing run every three minutes from sunset
(14:03):
to sunrise. And this wasn't just about destroying German targets.
It was also about disrupting the sleep of any German
troops who were in the area and keeping them on
it on edge. German troops on the ground could hear
the night which is coming until they killed their engines.
And the women would also fly in pairs with one
of the planes leaving the engine on to serve as
(14:25):
a decoy so that the other one could proceed in
more silence, so anywhere the night Whiches were active. The
Germans on the ground were not getting any sleep. They
were constantly being awakened, wondering if they were the target,
and then being kept on high alert the whole time.
Purportedly because of this, the Night Whiches became so hated
that any German who shot one down was automatically awarded
(14:48):
the Iron Cross. I found lots of modern news sources
of this, not so much historical sources, so take that
with a grain of salt, but it's still a good story.
And the Night which is, as you probably know if
you have seen any of the coverage of them, became
very very good at their jobs. But what is sometimes
not always talked about as much is that they also
(15:08):
had their share of tragedy. And we are going to
delve into that after we have another word from a sponsor.
So to return to the Night, which is later time
in the war. Eight months into their combat duty, many
of the Night which is had just become household names
in the Soviet Union. They would get letters from home
that would include clippings of news stories talking about their missions,
(15:29):
as well as letters from friends and family who started
to talk about their friends as heroes. General Marki and
Popov visited the five hundred and eighty eight during the
early winter of ninety three. During that visit, he announced
that the five eight Women's Night Bomber Regiment would be
given the title forty six tam And Guards Bomber Regiment.
Guards units were elite units in the Soviet military. So
(15:52):
with this reorganization, the Night which is we're not only
in the same league with men, but they were in
the same league with the most skilled and honored of
the men. The Night which Is were the first regiment
in their division, in the first women's air regiment in
all of the Soviet military to earn this honor. While
they were doing really outstanding work in the air, it
was still clear that they were not experienced when it
(16:14):
came to general military protocol on the ground. After becoming
a Guards regiment, a major who was on a site
visit managed to steal maps and signal rockets from the
Night which is unguarded cockpits. He demanded that they demonstrate
their marksmanship skills after this happened, and because that wasn't
a skill that they were actually using that often, they
didn't do very well. So once again they were assigned
(16:35):
to remedial military basics while also maintaining their night bombing schedule,
and they also lost several of their own. On one
particularly catastrophic night on July three, nineteen forty three, the
German Army tried a new tactic against the night which is,
up until that point they had mostly relied on searchlights
(16:55):
and flat cannons. As long as those pilots stayed out
of the light, they were really difficult to hit. However,
on that particular night, the Germans shot tracers after them
and then deployed fighters. When the tracers hit the night
which is planes, they set the canvas coverings on fire,
and from that point there was virtually no hope for
the for escape for the women on board. The plane
(17:18):
itself would just go up like kindling, and the woman
who were flying had didn't have any parachutes. Some reports
say that this was because they flew so low during
their missions, but in reality parachutes and just weren't assigned
to them until the following year. Larissa Rosnova, who we
mentioned earlier as one of the first recruits, was one
of the pilots flying that night. She was the fourth
(17:39):
in line, and after watching in horror as the planes
ahead of her caught fire and crashed, she decided that
her only option was to go as low as possible
in the hope of evading the Germans night fighters. She
flew so low that she spoke to her navigator in
a whisper, afraid that the enemy troops on the ground
would be able to hear her, and from a height
of only a few hundred feet, she dropped her bombs.
(18:02):
The explosion threw her plane up into the air, but
she and her navigator made it back safely. The most
experienced pilots who were out that night took similar maneuvers,
but many of the less experienced ones who were there
when the tracers came out were hit, and the rest
of the regiment on the ground could see it all
happening from their position. Eight women were killed in that
(18:25):
one night. The Night which Is flew their last mission
in May of nine against some of the last resisting
German forces outside of Berlin. When they got the word
of victory against Germany, they staged their own fireworks display
with their flares and their signal rockets, and the end
The Night which Is were the only one of the
(18:46):
three regiments formed from their original air group to remain
entirely composed of women throughout the entire duration of the war.
They were more highly decorated than either of the other
two women's flying regiments. Twenty three of them were named
Heroes of the Soviet Union. Five of those awards came posthumously.
They flew roughly twenty four thousand combat missions between May
(19:08):
of nineteen forty two and May of nineteen forty five.
Thirty of their pilots died over the course of more
than a thousand nights of combat, and although they did
not really talk about it during the war, and it
may not have been entirely conscious even on their parts,
many of the women who had been part of the
Night Witches talked in their later years about how one
(19:28):
of the driving forces behind their time in combat was
actually the chauvinism that they faced from some of the
men in the military. They all pushed themselves really, really
hard to prove that they could work on equal footing
with men, and similarly, the other two women's regiments had
a lot of successes in the war as well. The
Seventh Day Bombing Regiment was commanded by Major Marina Riscova
(19:51):
until she was killed in action in nineteen forty three
and Night Like the Night, which is the Day bombers
were eventually named a guard's regiment, which was a credit
to of their work. The five hundred and eighty six
fighters mostly flew defensive missions. Lydia Litbiac, the most famous
of the fighter pilots, became known as the White Lily
of Stalingrad, which became the White Rows of Stalingrad in
(20:14):
English reports, so you'll see it both ways. She earned
the title of Flying Ace and she shot down twelve
German aircraft in a year of combat flying. This is
also sometimes reported with a different number. You'll see it
as eleven, sometimes thirteen. She was eventually transferred to a
men's regiment along with seven other women fighter pilots. She
was shot down in the summer of nineteen forty three
(20:35):
and presumably killed. Because this was the focus of so
many of the articles that have prompted people to ask
us to talk about the Night, which is we're going
to wrap up with a little bit on Nadia Popova. Specifically,
Popova flew eight hundred fifty two missions during her time
with the Night Witches. On August two of nineteen forty two,
she was reported missing after her fuel tank had caught
(20:58):
fire after it was hit by flat After landing, she
became separated from her navigator and witnessed a German air
strike against a convoy of Russian tanks, but the bombs
missed the tanks instead, mostly hitting a nearby column of
fleeing refugees. While trying to make her way back to
her unit, Popova meant Semyon Karlamov, an injured fighter pilot,
(21:20):
and they tried to keep in touch during the war.
He proposed the day the war was over, and the
two married soon thereafter. Nearly every article about the Night Witches,
and one of the books that I read ends with
a quote from Popova. In interview, she said, I sometimes
stare into the blackness and close my eyes. I still
imagine myself as a young girl up there in my
(21:41):
little bomber, and I asked myself, Nadia, how did you
do it? I think many of us probably have that question,
But even having done it, she still has that question.
They're also so so many more stories of heroism and
tragedy among these women, and among the two other Soviet
(22:02):
women's flying regiments as well, And if you are interested
in more of them. I recommend these two books which
I read for this episode. One is Night, which is
the untold story of Soviet women in combat by Bruce Miles,
and the other is a Dance with Death Soviet Air
Women in World War Two, which is compiled by Ann Noggle.
That one includes a lot of personal stories by the
women who were still surviving when you put the book together.
(22:24):
And there's also a tabletop game in the works. Uh.
This was funded through Kickstarter, very successfully, bringing almost ten
times as much as they asked for UH, and as
of this recording, that project was in the proofing stage.
I really love tabletop games, and so I want it
to be done and I want it to be good. Yay.
(22:47):
Do you also want to read some listener mail? I do,
and it is on a completely different track than than
this episode was. Uh. These are two different but related
closely to one another. Emails about our decent episodes on
Brown Versus Board of Education. The first is from Chris
and he says, hey, I just heard your Brown Versus
Board episodes. I lived for years in Clarendon County, South
(23:10):
Carolina and taught in a neighboring county. If you didn't
here don't recall that's one of the school systems that
was part of Brown versus Board. I can assure you
that schools in the area are probably the factor segregated.
All but the tiniest towns in South Carolina have private schools,
most of them from the mid sixties to early seventies
to circumvent integration. The private schools are almost totally white,
(23:33):
and the public schools are even more totally black. I
taught about a hundred and twenty five students grade six
through ten at a public charter school, and only one
was white. Because the tax base in these areas is
so small, the public schools are also criminally underfunded, although
the private private schools aren't much better. Segregation is alive
and well in South Carolina is small town schools. So
(23:54):
that was from Chris, and then I also have one
from Emily, and Emily says, I'm a senior in high
school who ironically first learned of Stuffyments and History Class
podcast from my ap U S history teacher. We had
several assignments and extra credit opportunities involving listening to, summarizing
and expanding expounding upon select episodes over the past year.
I've become an avid listener and listening listen to the
(24:15):
podcasts while working and driving. I drive to and from
my father's house in Springfield, Tennessee, where my fifteen year
old brother attends high school. The brief mention of lasting
segregation in the recent The Road to Brown Versus Board
episode brought to mind a current controversial issue in Robertson County, Tennessee.
After a Department of Justice investigation, the federal government determined
(24:36):
that Robertson County schools have yet to integrate Robertson County
in double A CP president is quoted as saying in
a November four issue of The Tennessee and what the
community needs to be concerned about is that sixty years
after the Brown Versus Board of Education decision and after
the law was put into effect, they still haven't made
any progress. The total community should be concerned about that.
(25:00):
In order to avoid litigation by the U. S Department
of Justice and the cessation of federal funding to these schools,
the county must resone school districts. Several members of the
community are up in arms over the rezoning because many
field their children would be forced to go to an
inferior school than that of which they currently attend. Many
of these complaints are from Green Briar parents whose children
(25:21):
attend the predominantly white schools who are rezoned to attend
Springfield schools. Greenbrier High School student population is percent white,
two percent Hispanic, and one percent black. Springfield High School
is sixty four percent white, eleven percent Hispanic and black.
The state averages are sixty seven percent white, seven percent Hispanic,
(25:43):
and twenty percent black. East Robertson High School is ninety
two percent white. Joe Burns High School is ninety five
percent white and white. House Heritage High School is ninety
two percent white. All data from Grade Schools dot Org.
This battle has been raging for months now over the rezoning,
and the Robertson County Board of Education has agreed to
adopt the elementary school attendance zones as proposed by the U.
(26:04):
S Department of Justice for the academic year, with the
promise to rezone middle and high school attendance zones for
the seventeen academic year, much to the chagrin of some
parents and to the delight of others. The minority student
populations should become more balanced across Robertson County schools to
still be fighting over segregation seems absurd to myself and
(26:24):
many students my age who have spoken with. Many students
are willing and ready to change schools if necessary. However,
the parents are at the root of the backlash. With
every passing generation, more progress is made towards racial equality,
and I and my peers are ready to usher and change,
though some of the older generation may not be. I
thought you would be interested in this current desegregation controversy
as it applies to Brown versus Board and the local
(26:46):
take on it. Thanks for the wonderful podcast, Emily. Those
are both great letters in that they give uh, sort
of a current perspective to to segregation and how as
we talked about in those to the episodes, it's still
a big struggle in a lot of places. Uh. But
they're not as good letters because of the same thing, Uh,
(27:08):
the fact that, as you know, as we've talked about
for a number of reasons, there are lots and lots
of school systems that are still basically segregated. And we
got letters and Facebook status is from other folks as
well who talked about other parts of the United states
that were outside of the South, and other racial and
ethnic groups besides African African Americans and and Caucasian students.
(27:30):
So we may read more of those in future episodes,
but for now, I wanted to start with these two,
um because they were so immediate to what we had
just talked about. Yeah, and there's so much sort of
hard data in them. That's I think sometimes it's hard
for people that maybe are in a more integrated place
to understand the level to which this is still a problem.
(27:53):
So when you have those hard numbers, it's a little
bit uh clearer, like what really is still the case
even in in school systems still figuring this out today. Yes,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other episode Where in History podcast that How
Stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook
(28:14):
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at that missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com. If
you'd like to learn a little more about what we
talked about today. You can come to our parent company's website,
(28:36):
that is how stuff works dot com. Put into the
search bar world War two women, and you will find
the article did women volunteer to serve in World War Two?
And that's mostly from an American perspective, so you're getting
kind of a look at what it what was like
in other places beside the Soviet Union. You can also
come to our website, which is missed in history dot com,
and you will find show notes for all of our episodes.
(28:57):
Will be sure to put in the names of the
books that I read off for more information on this uh.
We also have um all an archive of all of
the episodes that there are of this show. You can
do all of that and a whole lot more at
how stuff works dot com and myth than history dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(29:32):
Does it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Steph you missed in history class from hot
works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Tracy V. Wilson. Hell, I'm Holly Frying. Today's episode is
probably the most requested one in Holly's in my time
(00:22):
on the show. It's possible, it's possible we've said this
about some other episode and at this point where liars
this time, we mean it. It has far superseded anything
else we might have said that about. So our first
request for it actually became before we even started hosting
the show. It was from a listener named Alison, and
(00:44):
it was one of the last listener emails that Sarah
answered before she passed the reins over to us, and
she copied us on her answer. Uh. Since then, just
from our email that I still have lying around, we
got requests from Mallory, Zoe, Jen, Erica Ford, Aaron, Suzie,
and Jeannette. And there are many, many, many, many many
(01:07):
other requests that have come in by a via Facebook
and Twitter and even tumbler, but those are all way
less searchable than like the archive email locks. So I finally,
I am Holly, and in all capital letters said okay,
we're doing one on the Night Witches, and I think
I said, yeah, yeah, we weren't avoiding them before we were.
We just had other things going on. Well. And part
(01:28):
of it too is that, you know, we try to
avoid sort of cultural redundancy, so through being talked about
a lot on other sites, but you're getting play and so.
And there have been a few times in the last
couple of years where they have sort of there's suddenly
been a lot of buzz about them. Uh like when
when there have been deaths amongst the women that remain,
you know, those kind of pop up. So at that
(01:50):
point it seems extraneous for us to then add to
the pile, and like it's just gonna get lost. But yeah,
especially because our production timeline means that we are like
two weeks behind and that so instead of feeling like,
here's this thing that's awesome to learn about, it's more like,
here we are just a little late to the party.
(02:10):
So a little bit of background on this. Flying was
actually a popular hobby in the Soviet Union in the
years leading up to World War Two, and at that point,
paramilitary flying clubs were training people to become pilots. There
were about a hundred and fifty of these clubs, and
about a quarter of their members were actually women. This
(02:30):
was in part because of Marina Raskova. She had become
an idol to teenage girls and young women after she
set a record for women's NonStop distance flying in ninety eight,
and she was twenty six at that time. Raskova had
set this record along with two other women, after flying
a twin engine plane about six thousand kilometers which is
(02:51):
roughly thirty seven dred miles, and that was from Moscow
to Komsomolsk on Amoor, which is in the Russian Far East.
During the flight, the plane started to ice over and
the three women started to jettison everything that they could
in an effort to lighten their load and gain altitude.
But it wasn't enough, but they were going to crash,
and so finally Raskova took a compass heading, she marked
(03:14):
the destination on a map, and then she jettisoned herself.
She bailed out and survived in the forest for ten
days before a hunter found her, and then she made
her way back to Moscow, where she was greeted by
a cheering throng of supporters. This attempt to set a
record and Rascova's consequent disappearance got widespread coverage on the
radio and people were absolutely glued to it. All three
(03:36):
of the women became heroes. They became known as the
Winged Sisters. They were all named heroes of the Soviet Union,
but Raskova was particularly beloved. People often make comparisons uh
to the United States love for Amelia Earhart when they
talk about Rascova. So thanks to all this interest in flying,
when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in nineteen forty one,
(03:58):
there were lots and law of Soviet pilots with lots
and lots of airtime who all came to volunteer for service,
and a lot of them were teenage girls and young women.
Roughly a third of the trained Soviet pilots at this
point were women. But when it came to combat, at
first all the female applicants were rejected and sent home,
(04:19):
but that change thanks to Marina Riskova. It was then
Major Riskova who put out the call for women to
volunteer to become combat pilots. They would be placed into
all female regiments. Anyone interested was instructed to write directly
to her, and she got about two thousand volunteers, a
pool of candidates that she personally sifted through, narrowed down,
(04:41):
and she interviewed them herself. And it wasn't just the
pilots they would need frequently the mechanics and other support
personnelities regiments. Regiments would be women as well. The volunteers
traveled to Moscow from some of the most remote parts
of the Soviet Union starting in the fall of ninety one,
and after god Ring in Moscow, they moved to an
(05:01):
airfield at Angles to train, and they came with basically
whatever they thought they were going to need for as
long as they would be out there if they made
the cut. Because they had they were pretty sure that
anybody who did make it in was not going to
get to go home again before they left. Larissa Rassanova
was one of the women who made it to the
interview stage. She had actually packed one of her favorite
(05:22):
dolls before leaving home, but her mother saw it in
her suitcase and said, Darling, you can't take that with
you to the war. You're eighteen years old now and
I love that story. I do too, but I'm like,
take the doll, It's fine. Larissa Rosanova and Popova, who
went by Nadia were Raskova's first two recruits to be
(05:43):
officially selected. When they started their official training in October
of ninety one, the female recruits formed the hundred and
twenty second Composite Air Group and eventually they would be
sorted into three all female regiments, which were the five
six Fighter Regiment, the five eight seventh Bomber Regiment, and
the five eight eight Night Bomber Regiment. Each of them
(06:05):
had about four hundred women, and most of them were
between the ages of seventeen and twenty six. And we're
going to get into the details on these regiments and
how they were trained, but first, should we have a
little word from a sponsor. We should do that stupendous
So to return to the night, which is there have
been a number of news articles about them that have
(06:26):
circulated in recent years, a lot of them, as we
alluded to you at the top of the show, followed
Nadia Popova's death. In a lot of them imply that
the entire Soviet military command saw these women recruits as
a giant joke, and that's not really accurate. The Soviet
military definitely was not prepared for a bunch of women
(06:47):
training training for combat. They had never done that before
at this kind of scale, And there were of course
people who were opposed to the idea of women serving
in combat all through their ranks. But a lot of
the things that modern coverage reads as a huge insult
to the women was just It was really a byproduct
of that being the first time that women, a large
(07:07):
group of women had been recruited into the armed forces
in the Soviet Union, and the fact that this happened
during wartime, so things were by necessity tight. So, for example,
there was no women's barracks at the airfield where they trained,
so they had to be housed in a nearby school,
And there were also no women's uniforms. They had to
make do with men's uniforms. These were generally too big
(07:30):
for them, although and I love this, since many of
the women knew how to sow, they could alter those
uniforms so that they fit more properly. The boots were
much bigger issues since they couldn't be altered. The women
would stuff the toes with magazine pages to kind of
fill them out so their foot wasn't sliding around. Yeah,
the the women who were the best at tailoring wound
(07:50):
up with uniforms that really looked quite smart on them.
And I told Tracy, as we were looking at pictures
getting ready for this episode, that I want to be
the Night, which is for how Owen. Yeah. And then
we could get everybody to be Night, which is for Halloween. Yeah.
And then I said step one, start with men's uniforms.
That's my dad's uniform. Yes. So these recruits went through
(08:14):
a highly compressed six month training period, and although all
of them knew how to fly already, most of them
had absolutely no real military experience at all, so it
really was not unusual for their classroom and flight training
plus basic military instruction to stretch beyond fourteen hours a day.
They were definitely immersed in what was widely regarded as
(08:36):
a world for men, which made it very important to
many of them that they maintained their femininity. Many had
brought one pretty outfit with them when they reported for training,
and they decorated their planes with flowers. They dyed their
silk under helmets in really pretty colors, and they called
one another by their first names, trying to remember to
use surnames and official ranks when the men were about
(08:58):
But they kind of developed this more casual camaraderie amongst
just the women. The women were assigned into their regiments
in April of ninety two, and from there they finished
their training with the actual planes that they would be flying,
so they had to get familiar with the controls and
the handling of those specific aircraft. The five eighty six
(09:20):
Fighting Regiment flew Yakov Love yak ones, which were the
best Soviet fighters in the first years of the war.
Although the way they were constructed made it a little
hard for the more petite women who both reached the
pedals and handled the controls, they got used to it,
though they were all extremely adaptable. The fighter pilots also
had to get used to working as a team while
flying in airplanes by themselves. The yak Ones were single
(09:43):
seat planes, unlike the bombers and the train the planes
that they have been training on. The five hundred and
eighty seven Day Bombing Regiment flew Pola Karpov PE two's,
which were armored bombers with a bubble protected machine gun station.
In both cases, their actual aircraft were a complete depart
ture from what they had been training on. Not so
(10:03):
for the night Witches. Their planes were Paula Karpov PO
two's originally known as You two's, and these were the
same planes they had already been training on. They were
never actually meant to be bombers. These were slow flying
wooden canvas biplanes with open cockpits that were mostly used
for training and for crop dusting, and they were so
(10:23):
slow that they could only fight fly missions to targets
that were relatively nearby, Otherwise they would waste way too
much time getting there and getting back, So the planes
had to be moved from one location to another during
the day to give the women access to their targets
at night. Because these were training planes that have been
pressed in the military service, they had complete sets of
(10:44):
controls for both the front and back seats. They were
retrofitted with bomb racks and a small machine gun at
the rear seat. Those same news articles we referenced earlier
will often say that the PO two's could only carry
two bombs, but in fact some of them could carry
up to eight. So while there were three units, our
focus really here is on the night, which is so
we're going to talk just about their time in World
(11:06):
War two for a little bit. Although they became more
famous than either of the two women's regiments. They didn't
really get off to the greatest start. All of these
women were really capable pilots, but their military experience at
this point was frankly pretty minimal. While flying to the
front to report for duty, three fighters that had been
tasked with escorting the Night which Is dived through their formation,
(11:29):
and most of the women believed they were under attacked
by the Germans, and so they panicked and scattered. This
was basically a test, and they did not pass it.
They arrived safely at their destination, but most of the
women hadn't seen the fighters coming or recognized them as
Soviet planes. They panicked instead of maintaining their formation. When
(11:50):
they were inspected the next morning, their commander told them
that they were not ready for combat. So the Night
which Is spent another two weeks in training. To make
things worse, their first how ing at the front was
in a cow shed which was not currently sheltering any cows,
but it had done so recently enough that it's not
horrible no matter how much they cleaned it. Once their
command decided that they were in fact ready, the Night
(12:12):
which Is finally flew their first combat mission on June eight,
the three most experienced crews of two women each were
tasked with bombing the headquarters of a nearby German division.
On that first mission, they employed a practice that uh
would earn them the nickname that we've used several times now.
The PO two is a really, really noisy aircraft. It
(12:33):
makes a lot of popping noises as it flies, and
these pops are accompanied by visible flame in the engine
and the exhaust, and so it's extremely easy to hear
and extremely easy to spot. So as the pilots approached
their targets, they would cut their engines, glide the rest
of the way, and drop their bombs in comparative stealth
and silence. Apparently, the rush of air over the wings
(12:56):
reminded the Germans of the sound of a witch flying
on her brew. While that first mission was successful, sadly,
two of the women, Luba Olkovskaya and Vera Tarasova, were
killed in action after a navigational error steered them over
a heavily defended part of the front and they were
shot down. Recognizing that losing two of their own right
(13:19):
literally at the very very beginning of their time in combat,
was really threatening to shatter the rest of the regiments
morale and confidence. Regimental commander Major yev Dokia Barsinskaya made
a case to send the rest of the bombers out
that night on a mission at once. They were given
a relatively easy target, which was to bomb a railway
junction and an artillery battery, and the rest of the
(13:41):
remaining teams, having completed this mission, did return successfully. After
that uneasy start, the night, which is confidence and skill
really grew quite quickly. They flew multiple missions every night,
flying out to the target, returning for more fuel in bombs,
and then taking off again a night which plane took
off on a bombing run every three minutes from sunset
(14:03):
to sunrise. And this wasn't just about destroying German targets.
It was also about disrupting the sleep of any German
troops who were in the area and keeping them on
it on edge. German troops on the ground could hear
the night which is coming until they killed their engines.
And the women would also fly in pairs with one
of the planes leaving the engine on to serve as
(14:25):
a decoy so that the other one could proceed in
more silence, so anywhere the night Whiches were active. The
Germans on the ground were not getting any sleep. They
were constantly being awakened, wondering if they were the target,
and then being kept on high alert the whole time.
Purportedly because of this, the Night Whiches became so hated
that any German who shot one down was automatically awarded
(14:48):
the Iron Cross. I found lots of modern news sources
of this, not so much historical sources, so take that
with a grain of salt, but it's still a good story.
And the Night which is, as you probably know if
you have seen any of the coverage of them, became
very very good at their jobs. But what is sometimes
not always talked about as much is that they also
(15:08):
had their share of tragedy. And we are going to
delve into that after we have another word from a sponsor.
So to return to the Night, which is later time
in the war. Eight months into their combat duty, many
of the Night which is had just become household names
in the Soviet Union. They would get letters from home
that would include clippings of news stories talking about their missions,
(15:29):
as well as letters from friends and family who started
to talk about their friends as heroes. General Marki and
Popov visited the five hundred and eighty eight during the
early winter of ninety three. During that visit, he announced
that the five eight Women's Night Bomber Regiment would be
given the title forty six tam And Guards Bomber Regiment.
Guards units were elite units in the Soviet military. So
(15:52):
with this reorganization, the Night which is we're not only
in the same league with men, but they were in
the same league with the most skilled and honored of
the men. The Night which Is were the first regiment
in their division, in the first women's air regiment in
all of the Soviet military to earn this honor. While
they were doing really outstanding work in the air, it
was still clear that they were not experienced when it
(16:14):
came to general military protocol on the ground. After becoming
a Guards regiment, a major who was on a site
visit managed to steal maps and signal rockets from the
Night which is unguarded cockpits. He demanded that they demonstrate
their marksmanship skills after this happened, and because that wasn't
a skill that they were actually using that often, they
didn't do very well. So once again they were assigned
(16:35):
to remedial military basics while also maintaining their night bombing schedule,
and they also lost several of their own. On one
particularly catastrophic night on July three, nineteen forty three, the
German Army tried a new tactic against the night which is,
up until that point they had mostly relied on searchlights
(16:55):
and flat cannons. As long as those pilots stayed out
of the light, they were really difficult to hit. However,
on that particular night, the Germans shot tracers after them
and then deployed fighters. When the tracers hit the night
which is planes, they set the canvas coverings on fire,
and from that point there was virtually no hope for
the for escape for the women on board. The plane
(17:18):
itself would just go up like kindling, and the woman
who were flying had didn't have any parachutes. Some reports
say that this was because they flew so low during
their missions, but in reality parachutes and just weren't assigned
to them until the following year. Larissa Rosnova, who we
mentioned earlier as one of the first recruits, was one
of the pilots flying that night. She was the fourth
(17:39):
in line, and after watching in horror as the planes
ahead of her caught fire and crashed, she decided that
her only option was to go as low as possible
in the hope of evading the Germans night fighters. She
flew so low that she spoke to her navigator in
a whisper, afraid that the enemy troops on the ground
would be able to hear her, and from a height
of only a few hundred feet, she dropped her bombs.
(18:02):
The explosion threw her plane up into the air, but
she and her navigator made it back safely. The most
experienced pilots who were out that night took similar maneuvers,
but many of the less experienced ones who were there
when the tracers came out were hit, and the rest
of the regiment on the ground could see it all
happening from their position. Eight women were killed in that
(18:25):
one night. The Night which Is flew their last mission
in May of nine against some of the last resisting
German forces outside of Berlin. When they got the word
of victory against Germany, they staged their own fireworks display
with their flares and their signal rockets, and the end
The Night which Is were the only one of the
(18:46):
three regiments formed from their original air group to remain
entirely composed of women throughout the entire duration of the war.
They were more highly decorated than either of the other
two women's flying regiments. Twenty three of them were named
Heroes of the Soviet Union. Five of those awards came posthumously.
They flew roughly twenty four thousand combat missions between May
(19:08):
of nineteen forty two and May of nineteen forty five.
Thirty of their pilots died over the course of more
than a thousand nights of combat, and although they did
not really talk about it during the war, and it
may not have been entirely conscious even on their parts,
many of the women who had been part of the
Night Witches talked in their later years about how one
(19:28):
of the driving forces behind their time in combat was
actually the chauvinism that they faced from some of the
men in the military. They all pushed themselves really, really
hard to prove that they could work on equal footing
with men, and similarly, the other two women's regiments had
a lot of successes in the war as well. The
Seventh Day Bombing Regiment was commanded by Major Marina Riscova
(19:51):
until she was killed in action in nineteen forty three
and Night Like the Night, which is the Day bombers
were eventually named a guard's regiment, which was a credit
to of their work. The five hundred and eighty six
fighters mostly flew defensive missions. Lydia Litbiac, the most famous
of the fighter pilots, became known as the White Lily
of Stalingrad, which became the White Rows of Stalingrad in
(20:14):
English reports, so you'll see it both ways. She earned
the title of Flying Ace and she shot down twelve
German aircraft in a year of combat flying. This is
also sometimes reported with a different number. You'll see it
as eleven, sometimes thirteen. She was eventually transferred to a
men's regiment along with seven other women fighter pilots. She
was shot down in the summer of nineteen forty three
(20:35):
and presumably killed. Because this was the focus of so
many of the articles that have prompted people to ask
us to talk about the Night, which is we're going
to wrap up with a little bit on Nadia Popova. Specifically,
Popova flew eight hundred fifty two missions during her time
with the Night Witches. On August two of nineteen forty two,
she was reported missing after her fuel tank had caught
(20:58):
fire after it was hit by flat After landing, she
became separated from her navigator and witnessed a German air
strike against a convoy of Russian tanks, but the bombs
missed the tanks instead, mostly hitting a nearby column of
fleeing refugees. While trying to make her way back to
her unit, Popova meant Semyon Karlamov, an injured fighter pilot,
(21:20):
and they tried to keep in touch during the war.
He proposed the day the war was over, and the
two married soon thereafter. Nearly every article about the Night Witches,
and one of the books that I read ends with
a quote from Popova. In interview, she said, I sometimes
stare into the blackness and close my eyes. I still
imagine myself as a young girl up there in my
(21:41):
little bomber, and I asked myself, Nadia, how did you
do it? I think many of us probably have that question,
But even having done it, she still has that question.
They're also so so many more stories of heroism and
tragedy among these women, and among the two other Soviet
(22:02):
women's flying regiments as well, And if you are interested
in more of them. I recommend these two books which
I read for this episode. One is Night, which is
the untold story of Soviet women in combat by Bruce Miles,
and the other is a Dance with Death Soviet Air
Women in World War Two, which is compiled by Ann Noggle.
That one includes a lot of personal stories by the
women who were still surviving when you put the book together.
(22:24):
And there's also a tabletop game in the works. Uh.
This was funded through Kickstarter, very successfully, bringing almost ten
times as much as they asked for UH, and as
of this recording, that project was in the proofing stage.
I really love tabletop games, and so I want it
to be done and I want it to be good. Yay.
(22:47):
Do you also want to read some listener mail? I do,
and it is on a completely different track than than
this episode was. Uh. These are two different but related
closely to one another. Emails about our decent episodes on
Brown Versus Board of Education. The first is from Chris
and he says, hey, I just heard your Brown Versus
Board episodes. I lived for years in Clarendon County, South
(23:10):
Carolina and taught in a neighboring county. If you didn't
here don't recall that's one of the school systems that
was part of Brown versus Board. I can assure you
that schools in the area are probably the factor segregated.
All but the tiniest towns in South Carolina have private schools,
most of them from the mid sixties to early seventies
to circumvent integration. The private schools are almost totally white,
(23:33):
and the public schools are even more totally black. I
taught about a hundred and twenty five students grade six
through ten at a public charter school, and only one
was white. Because the tax base in these areas is
so small, the public schools are also criminally underfunded, although
the private private schools aren't much better. Segregation is alive
and well in South Carolina is small town schools. So
(23:54):
that was from Chris, and then I also have one
from Emily, and Emily says, I'm a senior in high
school who ironically first learned of Stuffyments and History Class
podcast from my ap U S history teacher. We had
several assignments and extra credit opportunities involving listening to, summarizing
and expanding expounding upon select episodes over the past year.
I've become an avid listener and listening listen to the
(24:15):
podcasts while working and driving. I drive to and from
my father's house in Springfield, Tennessee, where my fifteen year
old brother attends high school. The brief mention of lasting
segregation in the recent The Road to Brown Versus Board
episode brought to mind a current controversial issue in Robertson County, Tennessee.
After a Department of Justice investigation, the federal government determined
(24:36):
that Robertson County schools have yet to integrate Robertson County
in double A CP president is quoted as saying in
a November four issue of The Tennessee and what the
community needs to be concerned about is that sixty years
after the Brown Versus Board of Education decision and after
the law was put into effect, they still haven't made
any progress. The total community should be concerned about that.
(25:00):
In order to avoid litigation by the U. S Department
of Justice and the cessation of federal funding to these schools,
the county must resone school districts. Several members of the
community are up in arms over the rezoning because many
field their children would be forced to go to an
inferior school than that of which they currently attend. Many
of these complaints are from Green Briar parents whose children
(25:21):
attend the predominantly white schools who are rezoned to attend
Springfield schools. Greenbrier High School student population is percent white,
two percent Hispanic, and one percent black. Springfield High School
is sixty four percent white, eleven percent Hispanic and black.
The state averages are sixty seven percent white, seven percent Hispanic,
(25:43):
and twenty percent black. East Robertson High School is ninety
two percent white. Joe Burns High School is ninety five
percent white and white. House Heritage High School is ninety
two percent white. All data from Grade Schools dot Org.
This battle has been raging for months now over the rezoning,
and the Robertson County Board of Education has agreed to
adopt the elementary school attendance zones as proposed by the U.
(26:04):
S Department of Justice for the academic year, with the
promise to rezone middle and high school attendance zones for
the seventeen academic year, much to the chagrin of some
parents and to the delight of others. The minority student
populations should become more balanced across Robertson County schools to
still be fighting over segregation seems absurd to myself and
(26:24):
many students my age who have spoken with. Many students
are willing and ready to change schools if necessary. However,
the parents are at the root of the backlash. With
every passing generation, more progress is made towards racial equality,
and I and my peers are ready to usher and change,
though some of the older generation may not be. I
thought you would be interested in this current desegregation controversy
as it applies to Brown versus Board and the local
(26:46):
take on it. Thanks for the wonderful podcast, Emily. Those
are both great letters in that they give uh, sort
of a current perspective to to segregation and how as
we talked about in those to the episodes, it's still
a big struggle in a lot of places. Uh. But
they're not as good letters because of the same thing, Uh,
(27:08):
the fact that, as you know, as we've talked about
for a number of reasons, there are lots and lots
of school systems that are still basically segregated. And we
got letters and Facebook status is from other folks as
well who talked about other parts of the United states
that were outside of the South, and other racial and
ethnic groups besides African African Americans and and Caucasian students.
(27:30):
So we may read more of those in future episodes,
but for now, I wanted to start with these two,
um because they were so immediate to what we had
just talked about. Yeah, and there's so much sort of
hard data in them. That's I think sometimes it's hard
for people that maybe are in a more integrated place
to understand the level to which this is still a problem.
(27:53):
So when you have those hard numbers, it's a little
bit uh clearer, like what really is still the case
even in in school systems still figuring this out today. Yes,
if you would like to write to us about this
or any other episode Where in History podcast that How
Stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook
(28:14):
dot com slash missed in History and on Twitter I
miss in History. Our tumbler is missed in History dot
tumble dot com, or also on Pinterest at pinterest dot
com slash miss in History. We have a spreadshirt store
full of t shirts and phone cases and awesome stuff
at that missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com. If
you'd like to learn a little more about what we
talked about today. You can come to our parent company's website,
(28:36):
that is how stuff works dot com. Put into the
search bar world War two women, and you will find
the article did women volunteer to serve in World War Two?
And that's mostly from an American perspective, so you're getting
kind of a look at what it what was like
in other places beside the Soviet Union. You can also
come to our website, which is missed in history dot com,
and you will find show notes for all of our episodes.
(28:57):
Will be sure to put in the names of the
books that I read off for more information on this uh.
We also have um all an archive of all of
the episodes that there are of this show. You can
do all of that and a whole lot more at
how stuff works dot com and myth than history dot
com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(29:32):
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Tracy Wilson
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