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In 1977, David Frost interviewed disgraced former President Richard Nixon. I let the American people down. It was even made into a movie. But nothing is as exciting as the real thing now reading as you've requested the whole country.

Let me just stop right there. Right. Right there. You are reading there out of context.

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Happy Saturday, everybody. We have had some requests come in for an episode on the night, which is over the last few days, if you're not familiar with them. No, this is not a belated Halloween episode. That was a nickname for the 580 8th night Bomber Regiment, which was part of the Soviet air forces during World War Two. And our episode that we already did on them originally came out on March 9th, 2015. And honestly, it's not entirely surprising that we still get requests for this one from time to time, even though we have an episode about it already.

So many people asked for it before we originally recorded the episode that I actually sound a little exasperated trying to describe it.

These new requests, though, gave us a great excuse to share this episode again today. We hope you enjoy. Welcome to stuff you missed in History Class, A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And I'm Holly from today's episode is probably the most requested one in Holly's than my time on the show for sure. It's possible. Yeah, it's possible. We've said this about some other episode, and at this point we're 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 It has far superseded anything else we might have said that about.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 Allison, and 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.

Since then, just from our email that I still have lying around, we got requests from Mallory, Zoe, Jen, Erica, Ford, Aaron, Susie and Jeanette. And there are many, many, many, many, many other requests that have come in via via Facebook and Twitter and even Tumblr. But those are all less searchable than like the archive email box. So I finally, I am Holly and in all capital letters said, OK, we're doing one on the night witches and I think I said yes, yeah, we weren't avoiding them before we were.

We just had other things going on.

Well, and part of it, too, is that, you know, we try to avoid sort of cultural redundancy.

So if they're being talked about a lot on other sites 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, like when there have been deaths amongst the women that remain, you know, those kind of pop up. So at that point, it seems extraneous for us to then add to the pile and like, it's just going to get lost.

But, yeah, especially because our production timeline means that we are like two weeks behind 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. Yeah.

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 150 of these clubs in about a quarter of their members were actually women. This was in part because of Marina Reserva. She had become an idol to teenage girls and young women after she set a record for women's nonstop distance flying in 1938. And she was 26.

At that time, Raskob had set this record along with two other women, after flying a twin engine plane about 6000 kilometers, which is roughly 3700 miles. And that was from Moscow to Komsomolskaya on a more which is in the Russian Far East. During the flight, the plane started to isover and the three women started to jettison everything that they could in an effort to lighten the load and gain altitude. But it wasn't enough. It's they were going to crash.

And so finally, Reserva took a compass heading. She marked 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 risk Auvers consequent disappearance got widespread coverage on the radio, and people were absolutely glued to it. All three of the women became heroes.

They became known as the winged sisters. They were all named heroes of the Soviet Union. But Rescue Eva was particularly beloved. People often make comparisons to the United States love for Amelia Earhart when they talk about Rakova.

So thanks to all this interest in flying, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, there were lots and lots of Soviet pilots with lots and lots of air time 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. But that changed thanks to Marina Rakova.

It was then major risk over 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 2000 volunteers, a pool of candidates that she personally sifted through narrowed down, and she interviewed them herself. And it wasn't just the pilots they would need. Frequently, the mechanics and other support personnel in these 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 1941. And after gathering in Moscow, they moved to an airfield at Engle's 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.

Larisa Rosanova was one of the women who made it to the interview stage, and she had actually packed one of her favorite 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. Let's fine. Larissa Rosanova and Adelgid Popova, who by Nadja were rescued us first two recruits to be officially selected when they started their official training in October of 1941.

The female recruits formed the twenty second composite air group and eventually they would be sorted into three all female regiments, which were the 586 fighter regiment, the 587, the bomber regiment and the 588 night bomber regiment. Each of them 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.

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There have been a number of news articles about them that have circulated in recent years, a lot of them, as we alluded to at the top of the show, followed Nadia Popov's death in 2013. 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 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 the 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 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 for them, although and I love this, since many of the women knew how to sew, they could alter those uniforms so that they fit more properly.

The boots were much bigger issue 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 women who were the best at tailoring wound up with uniforms. That really looked quite smart on them. All right.

I'm I told Tracey, as we were looking at pictures, getting ready for this episode, that I want to be the knight, which is for Halloween, and then we could get everybody to be knight witches for Halloween.

Yeah. And then I said, step one, start with men's uniforms. That's not a problem to you. I did those with my dad's uniform.

So these recruits went through 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 in flight training, plus basic military instruction to stretch beyond 14 hours a day. They were definitely immersed in what was widely regarded as a world for men, which made it very important to many of them that they maintain their femininity. Many had brought one pretty outfit with them when they reported for training and they decorated their planes with flowers.

They died their silk under helmets in really pretty colors, and they called one another by their first names, trying to remember to use surnames in official ranks when the men were about. But they kind of developed this more casual camaraderie amongst just the women.

The women were assigned into their regiments in April of 1942, 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 586 Fighting Regiment flew Yakovleva black 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 to both reach the pedals and handle the controls, they got used to it there.

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 black ones were single seat planes, unlike the bombers and the train, the planes that they have been training on, the five hundred and eighty seventh day bombing regiment flew Polycarp off Pareto's, which were armored bombers with a bubble protected machine gun stationed in both cases. Their actual aircraft were a complete departure from what they had been training on.

Not so for the night, which is their planes were Polycarp of Protus, originally known as Utica'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 wood and canvas biplanes with open cockpits that were mostly used for training and for crop dusting. And they were so slow that they could only 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 had been pressed into military service. They had complete sets of 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 plotters 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 that we're going to talk just about their time in World 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 derived through their formation. And most of the women believed they were under attack 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 recognize them as Soviet planes. They panicked instead of maintaining their formation. When 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 housing at the front was in a cowshed which was not currently sheltering any cows, but it had done so recently enough that it smelled horrible, no matter how much they cleaned it.

Once their command decided that they were, in fact ready the night, which is finally flew their first combat mission on June 28th of 1942, 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 would earn them the nickname that we've used several times now. The potty was a really, really noisy aircraft. It 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 comparatives, stealth and silence.

Apparently, the rush of air over the wings reminded the Germans of the sound of a witch flying on her broom while that first mission was successful. Sadly, two of the women, Liuba Olkowski 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 literally at the very, very beginning of their time in combat was really threatening to shatter the rest of the regiment's morale and confidence. Regimental Commander Major, you have Dalkia Berson. Skya 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 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 and bombs and then taking off again a night. Which plane took off on a bombing run every three minutes from sunset 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 Honest 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 a decoy so the other one could proceed in more silence. So anywhere the night witches were active, the Germans on the ground were not getting any sleep.

They were constantly being awake and wondering if they were the target and then being kept on high alert the whole time, purportedly because of this, the night witches became so hated that any German who shot one down was automatically awarded 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 had their share of tragedy.

And we are going to delve into that after we have another word from a sponsor.

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What would you say is most Americans main fear, main hope for this man?

That was my dad, legendary interviewer David Frost, aged just 29 ahead of the 1968 election. He posed that question to every single candidate that year. He'd go on to record over 10000 interviews in his life. And I've spent the last few years reviewing them, selecting the most powerful and relevant ones to share with you.

I believe that this country is going to be saved by women and students.

I happen to believe that when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.

And in the process, I've got to spend hundreds of hours with my dad again, learning from him along the way and talk to rather than interview.

That's a key thing, because what I'm interested in this first special really is conversation, not an interview or an interrogation.

Listen to the tapes on the radio and Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Eight months into their combat duty, many of the night, which 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, as well as letters from friends and family who started to talk about their friends as heroes.

General and papa visited the five hundred and eighty eighth during the early winter of 1943. During that visit, he announced that the 588 Women's Night Bomber Regiment would be given the title 46 Taman Guards' Bomber Regiment guards units were elite units in the Soviet military. So 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 them in the night, which is where the first regiment in their division and 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 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 site, 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 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 31st of 1943, the German army tried a new tactic against the night, which is up until that point, they had mostly relied on searchlights and flak 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 four escape for the women on board. The plane itself would just go up like kindling in the woman who were flying and didn't have any parachutes. Some reports say that this was because they flew so low during their missions, but in reality, parachutes just weren't assigned to them until the following year.

Larisa Rosanova, who we mentioned earlier, is one of the first recruits, was one of the pilots flying that night. She was the fourth 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 might 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. 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 one night. The night, which is flu, their last mission in May of 1945 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.

In the end, the night, which is where the only one of the 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. 23 of them were named heroes of the Soviet Union. Five of those awards came posthumously. They flew roughly 24000 combat missions between May of 1942 and May of 1945. 30 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, which is talked in their later years about how one of the driving forces behind their time in combat was actually the chauvinism that they'd 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 five eighty seventh day bombing regiment was commanded by Major Marineris sakova until she was killed in action in 1943. And night like the night, which is the day bombers were eventually named the Guards Regiment, which was a credit to their work, the 586 fighters mostly flew defensive missions.

Lydia Litvack, the most famous of the fighter pilots, became known as the white lily of Stalingrad, which became the white rose of Stalingrad in English reports. So you'll see it both ways.

She earned the title of Flying Ace and she shot down 12 German aircraft in a year of combat flying. This is also sometimes reported with a different number. You'll see it as 11, sometimes 13. She was eventually transferred to a men's regiment along with seven other women fighter pilots. She was shot down in the summer of 1943 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 852 missions during her time with The Night, which is on August 2nd of 1942.

She was reported missing after her fuel tank had caught fire after it was hit by flak. After landing, she became separated from her navigator and witnessed a German airstrike 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 met Semion Karlov of an injured fighter pilot, 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 Popover.

In a 2013 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 little bomber. And I ask 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.

There are also so, so many more stories of heroism and tragedy among these women and among the two other Soviet 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 airwomen in World War Two, which is compiled by and Nergal.

That one includes a lot of personal stories by the women who were still surviving when she put the book together.

There's also a tabletop game in the works. This was funded through Kickstarter very successfully, bringing almost 10 times as much as they asked for 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. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook URL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now, our current email address is History podcast and I heart radio dot com. Our old HowStuffWorks email address no longer works and you can find us all over social media at MTT in history.

And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcast, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.

Stuff you missed in history class is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from my heart radio music by her radio album, podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

In 1977, David Frost held disgraced former President Nixon to a count three years after his resignation, his days talking about this hush money, talking about blackmail and all of that, I would say that you endorsed or ratified it, but let's leave it on when I get the answer right.

Why didn't you stop it?

He even got Nixon to the point of remorse. I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.

It was and is the most viewed political interview of all time and was even made into an Oscar nominated movie. But nothing is as powerful as hearing the real drama unfold.

Now, reading as you've requested the whole country. Let me just stop right there. Right right there. You are reading there out of context.

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