Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 248 - The Night Witches of WWII

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Joe, Nate, and Tom talk about the Soviet all woman night bomber unit of WWII that terrorized the Nazis and pissed off Soviet men. support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys sources: https://www.history.com/news/meet-the-night-witches-the-daring-female-pilots-who-bombed-nazis-by-night https://www.wrightmuseum.org/2020/10/01/the-soviet-night-witches/ https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/who-were-the-soviet-night-witches https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/06/night-witches-wwii-female-pilots

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hello and welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me me in studio and by studio i mean a thousand miles away from me in london i have my long-suffering producers tom and mate we don't have a nickname for us we have the zoo crew we don't have a nickname for us yet um on my other show trash future we sometimes talk about the chaos configuration and the ultra chaos configuration so i suppose we have to leave it to the fans to come up for a name for what configuration this is the legion of chaos yeah exactly i i have to say the zoo crew is probably more chaotic if only because they set out with that goal in mind to to infuriate me by showing up drunk and high and me trying to corral them like cats uh of course they do it in good spirit

because the point is is to break me. Together, I believe we are mid-level chaos. If we were a superhero group, we would be HR chaos. Yeah, I would say it's an interesting configuration because Carrie shows up with the intention of like Boston guy fuck with you the whole time. And Francis has just suffered a head injury. So you never know where it's going to go. I mean, Shox has also suffered many head injuries. He has.

But Shox has suffered head injuries because like he had a mohawk so fucking large he couldn't enter any doorway in Boston without getting a concussion somehow. And so like his hair would just fucking connect with his solid mohawk against the wall and that would somehow vibrate his brain like shaken baby syndrome. Whereas Francis is the only person who managed to join the army and already having VA disability grade

traumatic brain injury before he enlisted and it only got worse. I mean, this is why me and Shox work so well on 33rd county because we have connected on suffering multiple you know pleasurable head injuries in the pit from like a skinny dude doing a spin kick who weighs like 135 pounds and 70 of it is in his foot with his doc martin i felt so bad i was in a pit in korea and everyone's having a really good time but i went up against this kid who very enthusiastically was also going up to fucking

slam people in the pit he was like 110 pound korean kid and he went flying like something out of fucking fist of the north star just like literally like impossible geometry of his direction in flight and he was cool i checked out like are you okay he's like cool he's like good kitchen i'm like if i can give me a thumbs up when will uh when will western imperialism in korea ever end yeah're colonizing the pit. Right, exactly. But it was a Korean punk band, so at least it wasn't a colonizer punk band.

And the Korean punk kids were having a great time, but the clubs you would go to in Seoul were the size of your average American living room. So in a way, it was the punk experience. It was smaller than a VFW, but some of them weren't prepared for how how hefty americans are that's what i'm gonna say from now i don't go to pits very often now because you know i'm almost 35 and my bones hurt but now when i go to a pit i'm not gonna say like

yeah let's hit the pimp like let's go colonize that motherfucker exactly they actually just had a death metal festival in yoruban and i'm actually not there right now incredible if fucking ruled i saw videos of it but the thing is is like this is on it this is a bit of 33rd county hardcore lore is that now there is like death metal bands touring on hardcore bills so you've like people like um a gay creeper who are like solidly a like death metal band touring on like hardcore bills and you see like death metal fans there to see them who are really confused because they're not doing like push pits or circle pits and dudes are like swinging around kicking people in the face and they're just like

what the fuck's going on my battle face doesn't have much kevlar protection yeah i wasn't i was like i personally am a fan of having a good time in the pit, but if the pit is basically being run by Immortan Joe, then I just feel as though I may be in the wrong location. When the pit crosses from fun to just felonious assault, I'm out, man. That's when you get in. Maybe when I was younger. Now it's like I've been hit.

That's the through line of all of our shows is we have enough head injuries we don't need to go cultivate more of them joe's decolonizing punk rock by getting out of the pit for old age related reasons yeah i i'm i i hear you i see you you're valid back hurts yeah exactly you're valid my tummy hurts and it's my bedtime he's handing out you know um ibuprofen as people are coming out of the pit yeah it's so funny like before we get into this episode like i uh since i've moved to armenia But you know, ibuprofen as people are coming out of the pit. It's so funny. Before we get into this episode, since I've moved to Armenia, people really don't use medicine. It's like a holdover from Soviet days where you use home remedies for virtually everything. And only when those don't work do you go to the pharmacy and get ibuprofen or something like that.

I didn't realize that Armenia was part of Germany. You go to the doctor and they're like, here's valerian root and some herbal tea. You don't need like a prescription to get ibuprofen there, but you do have to get everything from a specific, like you can't go to like the local grocery store. I'm like, Oh,

I'm going to get a bottle of, you know, paracetamol or whatever. You have to go to a pharmacy to like this old lady that's still wearing a white jacket no she is not a doctor she just works at the pharmacy are you gay but also like my question is is the paracetamol also ararat branded oh probably yeah like everything is our brand everything uh and like i like one of my friends is sick and i tell her i'm like oh i'll just run down to the pharmacy and get some she's like no i don't need any drugs i'm like no i'm just talking about like ibuprofen and she's like no no just make me tea like cognac all right in

britain you can actually buy um codeine pills kind of over the counter i mean you have to buy them from a pharmacist but like you don't need a prescription for them i'll met we need a splice and a guitar riff here because it reminds me of my fucking childhood. Yeah, I was going to say, but you can also... Just getting ripped on Coruscant cough and cold. Correct. Dragon Ball Z would be a lot better if everybody's ripped to their gills on codeine. Well, you can also buy, what's it called? Promethazine cough syrup over the counter here. So you actually can...

Oh, you're going to make some fucking lean. You can go Houston style. You can absolutely go sailing the south but uh the south of england which sucks and doesn't know what you need what you need to do since uh joe is now the fent lord is oh yeah i don't even know what prompted that people are so mad at me about some fentanyl joke that i made no i think it's a fentanyl joke that all you made what uh what are they are they are they like oh like oh fentanyl's no laughing matter or something like that? What are they mad at you about? No, I think that they were mad that we took it too seriously as if we truly believe that

if fentanyl exists in the same room as a cop, them and three generations of their family will do the Yamcha death pose. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Somebody has a single grain of fentanyl in a baggie and that cops causes cops to fall onto their backs and curl their legs up like a bug like when you pour salt on a slug they just shrivel up and fucking die exactly like the

new thing which i think is like very apt for the episode that we're going to talk about is now that uh dealers are splicing amphetamines so they're splicing like walter white meth with fentanyl oh okay so basically you can it's sort of like i can show you the world it's like um you know in the i think 2009 remake of judge dread the drug that they use and they're somehow everything's moving faster and slower at the same time since i've already made multiple dragon ball z jokes i can show everybody how much of a loser i am it's like fucking red eye from cowboy bebop yep yeah you eject it into your fucking eyes and you go rocketing through space

yeah so basically what you're saying is that they found a way to make speedballs less cool like now now speedballs a kill you more and b are made in labs they don't even have any authentic drugs like we've gotten so far away from the souls of the soul of doing real drugs that now it's like lab precursor chemicals made this and that it's like i get uh you know some kind of industrial solvent plus a lot of pseudofed and now i have a new injectable drug that can kill me that reminds me of that old Chris Rock bit from, I think it was from Bigger and Blacker, so like fucking 20 years ago or something,

where it's like if you just lock someone in a basement, they will find a way to get high. They're like, look, man, if you put some lima beans in this aerosol can and huff it, you'll get fucked up. It's true. The Brits love nitrous oxide carts. Balloons, yeah. Balloons. Everywhere you go in britain i notice you'll see like the cartridges are everywhere and it's so funny like you'll see

guys driving down the street like hit a stoplight open up the passenger door and just dump out a bunch of carts and she's like have you just been driving around doing fucking whippets all day long no but like you know what's really funny so uh around the corner from my house is a dominoes and arguably is the best dominoes i've ever had and everything is half price but you see all of the delivery drivers because i live in a cul-de-sac at the end of my street sitting on a wall with their scooters in front of them just huffing balloons until they have an order so you're gonna get your pizza delivered by a 17-year-old on an electric scooter out of his mind on nitrous. Fuck yeah. I mean, that should be the new flag of the city of London.

Is this a guy ripping a nitrous cartridge? I made this joke one time that when you're turning in a busy road intersection on your bike and then you suddenly realize there's no way to avoid in traffic, like rolling your bike over a huge pile of discarded nitrous carts. You're like, this is what a medieval knight felt like riding over caltrops. And you're like, once more into the breach. Going back to our Combat of the 30 episode, everybody is just... Now imagine everybody just tripping and going, oh, oh, oh, over nitrous cartridges. We have an episode that's actually about serious history. But before we begin, I have to ask you, Tom,

because I want your perspective on this. Now, you're not British, but you live in London and you know the Brits. Being Irish, you have to know the Brits very well. It seems like the Brits don't really smoke weed that much. And the ones who do are like really into like being a weed guy as a subculture. But like casual drug users don't

really smoke weed as much they just do way harder shit that can kill you i mean is that fair or am i i would disagree and you live in peckham of all places the weed capital of london just don't i mean i'll be honest i just don't smell weed that much in peckham compared to like obviously it's legal in new york now so you smell it everywhere but like which rules but it's it's just i don't see it as much in the sense that it feels like a lot where i grew up and joe knows this too a lot of people tapped out at weed and the occasional other thing whereas here it feels like people use harder drugs way more commonly and stuff like balloons and then yeah like coke ketamine so i think that i think there is like there and not to get too um analytical about it but there is like a huge kind of socioeconomic

divide in like the type of drugs um i think in terms of like nightlife stuff like coke is way more popular and stuff like ketamine is mainly kind of reserved for like if you're going to raves and everything but like i live in kind of a much more working class area in northwest london and like you see like guys like smoking joints walking around but it's not it's not as common as i've seen in other cities but like i find that the dudes who are smoking weed are driving around smoking joints not walking on the street that's's true. Or like my mom. I mean, there was a time we were loading stuff into the car here at the studio

and there's a guy in like one of those Audi supercars. I don't know what the model is. An R8. R8, right. But he had it custom painted matte black and he had the sunroof and the windows down

and he was smoking a joint playing music loud as hell. And I was just sort of like, man, drug dealers are on a different level in this country because there's like, yeah, there's no fucking cops. No one's going to do shit.

Like, as opposed to in America, you kind of have to like drive a Nissan Altima, you know, take that back. I drive a Nissan Altima. I can't say Nissan like the Brits do. Yeah, drive a Nissan Altima. Keep it like a little bit low key because like the cops are just looking for an excuse to shoot everyone, like everyone in their peripheral vision. Yeah, you have to tiptoe around cops in the US like they're a feral dog.

Yeah. Whereas here, it's like the Tories in the US, like they're a feral dog. Yeah, whereas here it's just like the Tories hate the state so much they've actually cut the cops. So like the cops are too busy being in racist WhatsApp groups. When the worst person you know makes a good point. But I think like the lack of prevalence of weed is because harder drugs are so much more common,

like Coke in terms of, if you go out even to like a pub for a casual couple of drinks on any night of the week, someone's hitting the bag in the bathroom. Yep, absolutely. like are so much more common like coke in terms of if you go out even to like a pub on a or a casual couple of drinks on any night of the week someone's hitting the bag in the bathroom yep absolutely yeah i just think that's that i noticed that when i was there i went to a pisser in some random pub in london there was some guy like doing coke off the urinal and i was like hey man you almost don't have to piss like there's only one urinal my man can you scoot over you can do the line off the top and i'll just

piss along the bottom i got good aim it'll be fine that's actually like a way to get a better high is to have the aroma of an armenian dude's piss hitting you while you're fucking doing a line i thought you were gonna say doing coke through your piss hole like that i mean it's already like grossly cut with ammonia and bleach anyway so it's gonna have the same effect exactly yeah now fellas now that we are almost 20 minutes into this episode we we are talking about something there's absolutely nothing about any country or drug that we actually drugs do come up so never mind um a long time ago uh probably over a year ago uh we talked about the goddess of all snipers ludmila pavlichenko uh a subject a lot of people got really weird about for different reasons uh funnily enough

joe i was actually in a bookshop uh the other day and was looking at like oh you know military history books see if i can spot something that i could you know pick out and like send you to oh we could do an episode about this and saw that book about her she wrote her i mean allegedly she wrote her own autobiography but it was almost uh certainly like perused by state censors because it's fucking awful uh i used it for a source and we did uh the episode but i had to use other stuff as well because like she doesn't talk about herself virtually at all she always talks about the the champions of the people's army and shit i'm like jesus christ give it a fucking rest it's like talking to a 16 year old leninist yeah i mean like i think that's just this is a part of me

that thinks that's probably a rigor for people she probably didn't write it yeah that was also like a way that things were done i mean i think about um uh vasily grossman's novel life and fate which was like just some extent pretty critical of the Soviet state, but also in a lot of ways, super praising the army and the heroism of the army and sort of in a more realistic way is what people experienced in Stalingrad. And that book wasn't allowed to be published until the 1980s. And if you go back and read it, you're like, this is a tremendous book. And it's like genuinely one of the best Russian novels of the 20th century.

How on earth did they not want this published? I mean, that's the same reason why Come and See took forever to get released as well. Which is like an explicitly anti-fascist movie, and yet... Yeah, of course. But like, oh, this doesn't make our glorious partisans look great. That's a problem. It kind of implies war might be bad. Weird.

Now, during that episode, I said we'd eventually be talking about the Night Witches, which was an all-woman bomber regiment within the Red Air Force during World War II that was vaguely suicidal in their tactics, but all around badass. So, here we are.

But, in order to talk about the Night Witches, we do have to kind of talk about why they were formed in the first place and the beginning of the Eastern Front in World War II, which we've done a few times. I'm not going to beat a dead horse on this one. Everybody knows what Operation Barbarossa is. It happened. The Soviet Union was dumber than shit and got caught sleeping. Things went badly for a really long time. Go to our series about the Battle of Kursk where we go a little bit more depth about the beginning of Barbarossa and eventually

we will do a full series about Barbarossa sometime in the future before my brain completely melts. So hold on to that one maybe. Now, obviously things were very, very bad. Let's just take a look about how bad they were for the Soviet Air Force, which is a wing of the Soviet military that generally we don't talk about too often. Now, for starters, they

were technically the largest air force in the world at the time with 9,000 frontline planes. However, these planes were not good. And a Zerg rush of planes does not make for a good air force. And the problem was, is these planes were complete dog shit, much like the Red Army and Navy at the eve of Barbarossa. Much of the Air Force's equipment was several generations too old. It hadn't been maintained and had just been beaten into the dirt. They badly needed replacements, and they certainly had the facilities needed to crank out a decent Air Force at the time like one factory in moscow was six times larger than all of germany's aircraft factories combined so like they did not

lack capability uh and like this factory was noted for being a huge problem uh by the nazi military because nazi engineers were allowed to have a guided tour of it back because you know the two sides were friends and trading and being all around assholes when it comes to right before the eve of World War II. And that's unfortunately something the Soviet and Russian historians really like to conveniently ignore when it comes to the history of the Great Patriotic War. And Soviets aren't alone in that one. I can tell you from experience that Armenian history as well in the Soviet time kind of glosses over that fact a lot. Nobody really likes to talk about that. Now, so if they had the means to replace their aging Air Force, why didn't they?

Well, there's a few reasons for that. Mostly having to do with them having a terribly out-of-date doctrine, which only applied to a few aircraft manufacturers, who were then ruthlessly purged. For starters, the Soviet Air Force on a doctrine came up by a guy named Guglio Dullet, who is an Italian genocide and air power aficionado. That is a combo. I mean, if you had a bit of pilot rather than a tanker, I mean, that could have been you. Well, I will say he was not a genocide researcher as much as a guy who really enjoyed genocide. You know, he's Italian in the early 20s. So you can imagine.

I eat of the pasta. I make of the genocide. He's a genocide enthusiast. Like, he wants the Italians to depopulate East Africa or he's like in the Soviet Union being like guys there are so many ethnic groups you can get rid of. This dude really hates Ethiopians. I cook it to

genocide. Yeah exactly. Alright cool. It's my nonna's recipe I cook it to genocide. He was a World War I veteran and it shows because he believed that the Air Force's entire job was to simply bomb things, civilians included, which require an Air Force made up entirely of bombers. My man had no time for escort fighters at all. And he's actually who we have to think for the concept of strategic bombing, i.e. the carpet bombing of cities that the Allies and Axis alike conducted throughout the war.

that the Allies and Axis alike conducted throughout the war. So this is a guy that both sides kind of liked, though other sides kind of understood that, you know, if you put bombers in the air, you need something to protect the bombers. The Soviets had no time for that bullshit. All gas, no brakes, let's do 100% bomber air force. So following his doctrine of bombers go brr,

the Soviet aircraft factories cranked up bombers with little thought to any other kind of plane. They were so dedicated to this theory that they cut production of fighter aircraft in half so they could pump out even more bombers. I mean, if you look at the entire continuity of Soviet history, there's one thing they love more than anything, and it's committing to the bit. Yeah, especially when the bit yeah yeah especially when the bit is dumb military doctrine right before world war ii starts i mean if if i had to survive for maybe another 20 years i feel like the soviets would have figured out how to make you know planes and tanks run on borscht i mean they did figure out how to incorporate a lot of booze into fighter aircraft like we talked about about during our Soviet Afghan war series, they called it the booze carrier

because you could drink the coolant. Yeah. And it was happening so often that it was making the planes not work right. Yeah. Well, I was thinking about this too, that I presume you're going to get to also the point that there was also this big deficit of Soviet aircraft because a thing happened with not wanting to acknowledge that the reports of what was coming were real, which meant not relocating fighters that were going to be targets or planes that were going to be targets at frontline airfields or what would become frontline airfields in the very far western borders of the Soviet Union.

And so a thing happened yeah it was bad uh you know the soviets you see treated the nazis the same way that you treat a t-rex which is if we don't move it won't see us um and it turns out that is bad um so even when the soviets had good planes the kind of luff waffe, which they did, they just didn't have nearly enough of them and they weren't positioned in the right place, like Nate just pointed out, for different reasons. And the bombers that they cranked out happened to kind of suck. This is owed to the fact that during one of Stalin's favorite activities, that being purges, when he wasn't busy stroking out and pissing all over himself until he died, when he wasn't busy stroking out and pissing all over himself until he died. A lot of the Soviets' best designers found themselves with a speed hole punched to the backs of their head by death squads run by local serial rapist

Lavrentiy Beria or thrown into a gulag system. Now, there was the gulag system for professional engineers and stuff where they continued to develop and plan new designs. But you could see how this whole being locked in a prison camp possibly disrupts a functioning aircraft development process.

It's not good for the old synergies and whatnot. I mean, this is the same country or same Soviet Union that the leading cause of house fires in 1985 was exploding televisions. So, you know. Now, the purges went beyond the men behind the Air Force. It also went for commanders, pilots, and everybody who may have once sneezed in a way

that could be considered counter-revolutionary. By the time the war started, 91% of all Air Force commanders, even down to formation leaders, had been replaced within the last six months. And this also goes for the army as well. We talked a lot about this during our Russian invasion of Finland series. But the Air Force itself was hit quite heavily by the purges. And the process cost the Soviet Air Force at least 6,000 officers at the time the government rapidly expanded the Air Force from 1.5 million people

to 5 million people in 1941. So what you're saying is the manufacturing capacity of the Soviet Union was run like a small cafe with a small business tyrant owner, you know, super high turnover of staff. And, you know,

it's not like you can just like quit after a month. No, you are a forcibly quit with a bullet in the back of your head. And everyone just goes on. Like everyone's a happy employee. Or your job is to like, you know, you're like,

Hey, guess what? We've got a great opportunity for you. We've got a really, really dull ax and you're going to cut down trees and negative 60 fucking temperatures. And like the calling up from the peninsula, like,

yeah, like a sick railroad for you to build. Yeah, it's a sick railroad for you to build. Yeah, exactly. It's like hope you enjoy I don't know, hope you enjoy lice and wooden barracks in the worst place on Earth. Do you enjoy uncontrolled

cholera? Do we have a vacation spot for you? Exactly. So yeah, you have officers being purged. Now purged can mean a lot of different things. Of course, being murdered, thrown into work camps, or just being fired. So you have all of these officers being fired while at the same time, the Air Force is being expanded to the population of a mid-sized country. It's estimated that the Air Force was short at least 60,000 officers that would be needed to command a force as large as the one that they had created. Condemnation is going wrong. Yeah, nothing bad can happen from this.

The expansion of flight schools is also seriously half-assed to the point that they didn't even have enough instructors or fuel for the training planes. So rather than realize, wow, Joe Stalin, we fucked up, they just cut training down to nothing. So going back to what I said before, even when the Soviets had good planes and the off chance ain't enough of them to go around and fuel for said planes, the pilots could barely fly them at a level that can be considered competent. This meant virtually nobody had enough flying hours, leadership, or organizational structure to know what the fuck was going on during the opening stages of this war. structure to know what the fuck was going on during the opening stages of this war.

This lack of organizational capacity was so bad they didn't even bother to space their planes on runways or move them to the front line or protect them in any way, kind of like what Nate was talking about, leading to something of a shooting fish in the barrel type situation when the war started as the Luftwaffe was easily able to target huge groups of planes, as they said, on the runway, bunched together and unprotected. This also goes for their staff, who were billeted nearby. So again, things are bad for everybody. Life sucked, and it was terrible. This brings us to the main character of today's episode, the Amelia Earhart of the Soviet Union, as she's often called,

though I would argue that this woman is significantly more badass than Amelia Earhart. Her name was Marina Reskova. Marina was born in 1912 to a very well-off family. Her mom was a teacher and her dad was an opera singer and singing coach. Her aunt was a professional singer and minor celebrity, while her uncle was Boris Manolin, a guy largely considered to be the father of the soviet ship industry so she doesn't exactly come from you know austere background but unlike most people we talk about as main characters on this show her home life was normal marina wanted to follow in most of her family's footsteps to become an opera singer or something in music though she eventually failed out of school because she had an inner ear infection, which ruined her ability

to hear herself while she sung. So then, like most normal people, she simply became an engineering and chemistry whiz because she's just one of those people that's good at everything that she's ever done. Why not? Yeah, like, saves them for the rest of us. Fuck.

She graduated in 1929 and ended up going and working in a dye factory as their lead chemist where she met her eventual husband it was around this time that she had a kid and began working for the aero navigation laboratory as a draftswoman and then because it's the 20s she eventually became a navigator in planes by 1930, because this is the period of history where you could just grind set your way into doing something crazy from a position of a dye factory chemist to being a navigator. You know, kind of like back then you could just be a biologist because you could scuba dive or whatever. And who said meritocracy and upward mobility was a lie? Yeah, exactly.

Who said meritocracy and upward mobility was a lie? Yeah, exactly. Now, however, she was working for the Soviet Air Force, and she became quickly the best navigator in the entire Soviet Union. But she was not in the Air Force. She was like something of a subcontractor. And she was eventually given a rank within the Air Force because she would teach at the local flight at school, but she was not allowed to command any men with this rank. She never outranked any men that were

around her. She was not technically in the Air Force. It was something of like, I don't know, when you give someone's little brother on a basketball team a jersey to let him feel like he's part of the team or something. Because the Soviet Air Force and the Soviet Union in general, when it comes to the military, was heavily segregated when it came to gender, which we talked about during our Pavlichenko episode. Now, plenty of women flew planes within the Soviet Union. She was not like the first pilot or the first navigator ever. Flying clubs were super common and very popular, and thousands of their members were women. These were civilian pilots that learned how to fly, you know,

crop dusters, whatever as a hobby. However, because the military is still strictly segregated, the, they couldn't just be like, okay, well we have an emergency.

All of our pilots are fucking stupid or got blown up. Let's bring in all these women. They just didn't do that. But Marina was teaching in the net, teaching navigation at the air Academy. And she was the first woman to ever do that. And remember, she's teaching men how to do a job she was not technically allowed to do, despite the fact, again, she is considered the best navigator in the entire Soviet Union. I hate to see a queen winning. That's right. We've got to keep a queen down.

She was so good at her job at the Academy. She was eventually sent to one of those flying clubs to become a pilot and graduated in 1935. And this is where she earned her Soviet Union celebrity status, setting several long distance records. One of those records was set on a nonstop flight from Moscow to the Manchurian border in 1938, during which time Marina, who was one of a crew of three, all of whom were women, were forced to crash their plane in a blinding snowstorm into a swamp where they all had to parachute out. They all landed separately, and she had to march several days without any food or water through blinding snowstorms until she found the rest of the crew, and they all survived.

These three record-setting women were turned into not small celebrities throughout the Soviet Union, but particularly Russia. But Raskova's fame far outlasted the other two. She was chosen among them. All three were awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union status, the first woman to ever get the award, and the only ones before World War II would start. Because of this, she also got to meet Joseph Stalin herself, which is a connection that will become quite important and say, 1941, when bad things

occurred on the border. Things happened. Yeah. It's known as a tiff between neighbors, you know. The recent unpleasantness. And when the war started... Why did Germany become Russia's neighbor, you might ask? Well, there was this thing that happened.

And there was this equal sharing agreement between this one country and its borders and its nation status that happened. I don't want to derail too much, but when Russia, when the Soviet Union was invaded in 1941, obviously, many people in the state apparatus saw it coming. Stalin was in denial. He was even warned by British intelligence. A couple of days before Barbarossa even started, I think it was a couple of days, maybe a week, a German defector ran over the border to surrender and tell them all of the plans, and they just fucking disappeared.

Nobody knows what happened to that guy. But obviously his advice was not taken. Yes, but basically the point I was getting at was that in 1939, in the aftermath of them having signed the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact, when Germany invaded Poland, so did the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union invaded obviously from the eastern side, the Germans from the western side, but they split Poland in half, and if you really want to get down into some reasons why the Poles hate the Russians, they basically execute all of the Polish military's

officers in a place called Katyn Forest. And yeah, there was like 22,000 people buried in a mass grave there so needless to say the poles hate the russians for this reason this gets forgotten because obviously the germans then betrayed the russians or betrayed the soviets and invaded soviet union and the soviet union suffered uh more deaths in world war ii than any other country uh the lions won't eat my face so the i'll vote for the lions eating faces party exactly poland those Poland. I was going to say, the Soviet Union and the Russians

in general are spiritually British. There's an argument to be made about their similarities, but that would really, really take this on a spin. So we'll just stick to the Night Witches. But yes, basically the point I'm kind of driving at here is that they definitely

tried to come to an agreement with the Germans. And I think Stalin would have accepted that. Oh, yeah, they absolutely would have. Hitler absolutely fucked it by being like, no, we have to purge the Slavic race also. What about my Judeo-Bolshevism, et cetera, et cetera? Yeah, exactly, exactly.

It's just like that meme is like, trust no one, not even yourself. Yeah, I mean, we talked a little bit more about this during our series about the Auschwitz hero, about how Poland got ruthlessly fucked by virtually everybody. So there should be no secret why most people who live in Eastern Europe

and the Caucasus generally dislike Russia and the Soviet Union in their history. They're generally considered colonizers in our history in Armenia because they were. Same with the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. I mean, it'll be Putin doing diplomatic visits

and doing a reverse land acknowledgement saying, I just want to acknowledge that this land is Russia before I start my speech. We should take a moment to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Russian people, the Kievan Rus.

Yeah, it's an interesting one. I would just say too that reading a little bit recently about the battle for moscow like the defense of moscow in 1941 you realize that it was not very long it was from june to like november that the germans you know uh were basically uninterrupted in their push eastward um but they got so close to moscow were within the western suburbs of Moscow.

They got incredibly close the first time. Obviously, the second time they went to the Caucasus instead. But the degree to which there was just disorder on the Soviet side, it's hard to overstate it. So some big changes happened because they came so... Stalin refused to to evacuate but like had stalin evacuated moscow like it wouldn't have seemed to out of the realm of kind of what you might call reason because the the nazis were

that close oh yeah you know things were so fucked by night by the end of 1941 you know what i say to to hitler is at least napole Napoleon actually took the city. Don't look into what happened afterwards. You can go listen to our series about it. It gets cold. We hate to see short kings fighting. He was normal sized. No, I mean Hitler and Stalin. Oh yeah, fuck those guys. It is also

very funny to read some of the stuff about Stalin giving, I mean like, you know, doing these kind of like the blitz style speeches defending Moscow and being like, like we're gonna we're not gonna leave moscow but like uh the response to a lot of his speeches people being like man he's got a funny accent georgians sure do you speak russian weird yeah my favorite part is he had a speech coach because he wanted to be considered russian and get rid of his georgian accent and failed miserably i mean that's one of the reasons why he changed his last name from jugosvili as uh he didn't want to be considered russian and get rid of his georgian accent and failed miserably i mean that's one of the reasons why he changed his last name from jugosvili as uh he didn't want to be seen as georgian yeah yeah but it's just one of those things i mean if anyone does internecine

racism better it's the russians the general russian sphere yeah exactly yeah it's like the balkans but bigger now when the war started there were thousands of women who knew how to fly or in the middle of training in the various different flying clubs around the Soviet Union. And because Marina was a celebrity and literal hero, tons of them wrote her letters begging her to use her connections and try to pull some strings to allow these women pilots to join in the war effort in the skies. And like we talked about in our Pavlyuchenko episode, frontline service for women wasn't technically segregated or banned in the Soviet army. Instead, they kind of did a workaround where they tend to block women in various bureaucratic nightmare ways and either make it incredibly hard or nearly impossible for them to actually serve on the frontlines while trying to influence them to join service roles like medical treatment and nursing and stuff. However, the Air Force is different. It strictly banned women pilots from serving in uniform and especially as fighter or

bomber pilots at the start of the war. Why? Because it's the 40s and people are fucking stupid. Marina personally went to Stalin and begged for him to allow women flying units, pointing out that why was the Air Force segregated when the army wasn't? Not to mention, beggars can't exactly be choosers at the moment, and we need fucking pilots due to you being stupid. Of course, she didn't say that or she would have vanished. As if to press home about how many pilots Stalin was keeping down, she showed him the thousands upon thousands of letters she had received in only a few weeks' time. By October 1941, Stalin relented, allowing Marina to establish three air combat regiments staffed solely by women. Now, this wouldn't exactly stay that way. One in particular, and obviously the topic of today's episode, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment

would be made up entirely of women, but not just pilots, mechanics, commanders, and everybody in between would be women as well. And the other units had men in it and at various different levels. The 588th, which would eventually get the nickname the Night Witches, was not that way, which is why we're focusing on them. Once again, slay. Everyone would have to apply. All the everyone would have to apply all the women would have to apply and personally be interviewed by marina for approval which took some time thousands applied but only three regiments the three regiments only had room for 400 people each

and she made sure to weed out those she called summer patriots or people who are not really dedicated to the cause of the war and understanding the dire reality that they found themselves in. Consider these people like all of the British World War II and World War I guys we've talked about. They're the type of people looking for an adventure in war rather than service. And she wanted to weed them out. And after being accepted,

they were all smashed into a camp outside of Stalingrad because that hadn't been a charnel house yet, for the same training that any Soviet pilot got. And by that, I mean bad training. They got bad training. The training had been slashed down to the bone at this point due to the desperate and immediate need that they were facing. And that didn't mean they didn't fly in training. It just meant they didn't spend in training. It just meant they didn't spend a lot of time on anything else. For instance, as soon as the women showed up,

they were stuffed into different trainer planes and sent off into the sky. And now, I know I said that a lot of them had previous flying experience, but a lot of them didn't. And due to the massive influx of people, it was less pilot academy and more on-the-job training. You better keep up or fail type situation. Most of these women were between the ages of 16 and 26 years old. And it was sink or swim.

Again, when it came to flying a fucking airplane. So there was a lot of crashes going on here this is like you know being deployed to vietnam after playing 30 minutes of arma 2 this is like that story we did a long time ago of the guy who volunteered in his fault he took his friend's place who was in the army because they looked vaguely alike to go to v Vietnam and didn't have a single day of training and ended up being a sergeant. It's like, all right, here's the sticks to this Yak-9 or whatever. Don't die. We need the plane. Now, before the war, in the best case scenario, pilot training could take years because flying is hard. Flying fighter planes is hard. Flying bombers is also hard. flying is hard. Flying fighter planes is hard. Flying bombers is also hard. And that was very common around the world in most air forces. But like most air forces, the war starts,

and that shit just gets slashed to ribbons. So that training got slashed down to around a year for the women of 588th, which meant 12 to 16 hours of flying every single day. But they also had to train to recognize German planes from an instant across the room, which they did by flashing flashcards against the wall. And failure in the academy came quite quick. This wasn't a situation where we need bodies, push them through.

It was like, if you fell behind, they just had to get rid of you because they just did not have time to train up anybody who was having a hard time. And somewhat insanely, the training for the mechanics was kind of the same. Rather than getting any classroom time to learn the ins and outs of these planes that they're going to use they was simply turned out to the hangers and started working on planes as the pilots in training broke them so like when you when you're a trainee pilot trainee you'd go out to your your your your trainer plane and know that someone who is just as badly as trained as you are just fix that motherfucker from the last time you used it that is not a vote of confidence i like

yeah yeah like as as nate would agree like one of the the most important parts of military training is confidence in your equipment which is one of the reasons why they gas you in gas chambers and shit and and now the pilots are realizing like oh some fucking chuckle dick from down the street has two weeks of training and just fixed my plane from the last time I tail-striked it because I don't know how to land. It's like the local guy who's like a mechanic but also is technically not a mechanic fixing your car.

Yeah, it's like getting your car fixed in literally any place in Armenia. It's just a guy who insists he knows how to fix your car. What I would say too is I remember encountering this very, very different sort of approach to problem solving when I had to work closely with the Air Force when I was in Honduras. And what I realized was that in the US Army, at least, there's this notion of

get the job done no matter what. If you have to get an LMTV, like a two and a half ton truck up a hill by having like tying handholds out of parachute cord and every single one of the soldiers in your platoon has to carry it up the fucking hill, get it up the fucking hill. Whereas in the Air Force, like if you weren't certified and current on whatever maintenance, you just don't touch it. And that mentality comes through in terms of like, you try to solve a problem. They'd be like, sorry, not my pay grade.

Can't do it. And it's like, you'd be like, but I'm literally like saying we need to get a drinking fountain fixed. And they're like, sorry, can't do it because that's 100% their mentality on shit. But it also kind of makes sense. It kind of makes sense. It makes sense because you don't want someone fucking putting your plane back together with parachute core.

Like that will kill you. That will kill you. Everyone on the plane, people on the ground, et cetera. So like you absolutely get it. And I didn't understand that at first. But then I was like, no, this absolutely makes sense that like in order for the people to be able to perform their job safely and have confidence in their equipment they have to also have confidence that only someone who knows what they're doing and can do has been proven to do the job and

certified on it uh and like even people who are trained to do the job if they aren't regularly certified like they'll fuck shit up so like it has to be rigorous. I can clearly recall them a crew recertifying to drop paratroopers flying a fucking CH-47 and they'd forgotten what to do and they turned the green light on while we were over the ocean and the jump master

was like, I guess we're gone. And then they're like, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. And it's like, then they turned it back off again. They're like, yep, sorry guys. Flipped the wrong switch there. You're all Marines now. Yeah, exactly. It's like we would have fucking, it's Alaska.

The ocean is like 33 degrees. We would all have. We're invading Atlantis, boys. We would all have died. We would absolutely all have died if we'd gone over. Like, it's just insane. And so.

I hear this level of professionalism, Nate. And what if I, I see that, but I offer you Anush, some woman from like downtown Tbilisi who's never seen a wrench before in her life. 100%. She's going to put your propeller back together for you. What I'm saying is that there's obviously desperate times, desperate measures, etc.

But that confidence in your equipment that you're describing, they just absolutely wouldn't have had that. And it's that... No. When you think about the fact that you have to then go up in the sky where if anything goes wrong it crashes to the ground and you die you burn to death like you get obliterated that must have been absolutely insanely nerve-wracking also like you're like 17 like big metal big metal things falling out of the sky are not good for anyone involved on the ground in the plane the people working on the plane you know an explosion that burns a forest all around you.

The second Soviet pilot trainee has hit the building. Joe, did you ever have to sing the cadence? Actually, I don't want to sing it on the show, but the one about there are no airborne rangers in the whatever. There are no airborne rangers in the Air Force. There are no airborne rangers in the Air Force.

Because they fly up in the sky and sometimes crash and burn and die. Oh, there are no airborne rangers in the Air Force because they fly up in the socks, because they fly up in the sky and sometimes crash and burn and die. Oh, there are no airborne rangers in the Air Force. And it's like, big joke, but also true. It's just like, you're dead. It happens. And that's in the most obscenely well-funded Air Force in human history, which this was emphatically not.

No, this is just a whole bunch of farmers being very confused that they're flying contraptions at this point. Which is, I mean, which is how most pilots were at the time. They just had time to work through that. This is why you shouldn't trust helicopters. Even to this day. They go up, so many of them come down in flames. They took

Kobe Bryant, they've taken so many other famous celebrities, and just don't trust them because most of them... That's why I was laughing the other day. There was like a video of President Biden flying away in a V22 Osprey and I'm like Kamala Harris probably planned this. It's just that meme

he ain't driving that shit. Joe's just pressing buttons wondering is there an ice cream cone going to come out. You know, he's like what's the dude that with the weird name that like threatened him with a rusty razor when he was a teenager corn corn pop he's like where's corn pop where's the corn pop button corn pop on a nearby mountain with a stolen like anti-air system yeah exactly you know revenge will be mine joseph biden exactly exactly i didn't realize

that wilmington delaware a had high ground and b had guys selling stinger missiles but corn pop found a way yeah he got them from the gangster disciples that bought them from omar gaddafi they're gonna instead of the basketball player they should have traded corn pop for that russian arms dealer oh Victor Bout? Victor Boot. Kornpop is just being held in some dank gulag out in Yukotsk. Yeah, exactly. They let Kornpop go, but he has to be like, do you understand

how many genders they have in America? They're so depraved. Now, here's a fun detail about all of this, just to make all of this look more ridiculous. Because they're already flying planes that are slapped together with duct tape and hope um the soviets made no preparations for receiving women in the ranks of the air force they did not even bother to stock up uniforms or boots that would fit them instead they were given massively oversized surplus shit uh which

was you know several times too large which included boots now it'd be easier to just let the women use the shoes they came there with because they would fit them but they forced them to wear these comically oversized mickey mouse ass shoes that they had to pack with different uh foot wraps and rags because like remember the soviet military and the russian military up to this day does not issue socks they issue foot wraps which is exactly what they sound like uh and they would just pack tons of them into the front of the boots so they could actually wear them and then they would drag around their shoes uh like a kid wearing their parents uh like uh oversized uh shoes around the house or whatever but they're all pilots i just know full well there is some like depop reseller going crazy

selling these oversized you know women's uniforms for like 400 quid a piece yeah i was i was saying it was like props to uh props to the night witches for a prefiguring the super duper fly era of missy elliott's fashion the night witches were wearing the original fubu exactly yeah uh now a lot of women graduated from this school and joined one of the three regiments or ended up in men's regiments that had gaps to fill as well because eventually losses

stacked up to the point that the previous segregation didn't matter so much. The people who did the best in this school were assigned to the 586th Fighter Regiment as dogfighting is probably the hardest kind of flying you could do back then. The second best students

were sent to the 587th Bomber Regiment, who would fly conventional bombing missions. And then there was everybody else. The people considered the worst pilots to come out of the training academy also ended up being

not even arguably the most famous. They were assigned to the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, who would become the Night Witches. So these are the worst pilots that come out of this program. Now, the 588th was under the command of Major Yakutia Barskaya, and they would be flying easily on its surface, the worst plane in the entire soviet air force and arguably the worst plane that any air force would use during the war in any real numbers that is saying a lot yeah uh it's kind of makes sense you remember these are the the bottom of the barrel to come out of the training

program they didn't want to waste important fighters or normal bomber aircraft on people who graduate by the skin of their teeth and the plane they'd be flying was called the PO-2, which was a relic of a far bygone era. It was plywood and canvas biplane, an airframe more likely to be seen dusting crops or training pilots when they first learned how to fly rather than flying combat missions. The Night Witches themselves jokingly called the PO-2 a coffin with wings due to the rumor that

you would die in it. And mostly, because it was canvas and wood, that if a tracer round hit it, which for people who don't know, tracer round are slightly incendiary, so you can see where they're flying through the air, that the PO-2 would simply burst into flames

because it was like 90 fabric though the best nickname that the pilots came up with with for the new death trap was the kerosene or kerosene lamp uh because of how quickly it caught on fire i was gonna i was gonna say this is basically like hell yeah we're going to go into war with a paper lantern that flies you know you can you can drop bombs out of the side up so it's like not too far off the mark there yeah this thing is a fucking death trap and adding to that it could only go 90 miles per hour but had a cruising speed of 60 making it the only combat aircraft to go slower than my toyota prius during world war ii say it's kind of like you want to play metallica's was seeking destroy while you're fucking having authorities being flown of like a Dodge Neon that's made of

cloth and wood. And it's just like... But like the bitch in music has to play like a 10 minute song because it takes so long for the formation to cross into the frame. Like at this stage, they might have just as well like strapped bombs to kites and just let them fly over in the hopes that the Germans would shoot them and it would just fall down. frame i like at this stage they might have just as well like strapped bombs to kites and just let them fly over in the hopes that the germans would shoot them and it would just fall down like your walmart drone probably goes faster than this they be careful about the kite bombs

because the one ip address in our stats tracking that's being listed from fucking southern afghanistan is like our our best friend like the the guy who listens to podcasts for the taliban and he's just like that's a great idea. We've definitely got some kites and we've definitely got some bombs. Let's get on this shit. Kite runner gritty reboot. You're going to have M.I. Folley

have called to the studio because you have to ship a fucking t-shirt to Kabul. Exactly. I remember one time there was a guy who slid into my DMs insisting that he was a member of the Pakistani Taliban asking me to email him a copy of my book.

I was like, I feel like that's probably a crime. No, no thank you. Yeah, buy it on Amazon, dude. At least give me the royalties. Unfortunately, you know, podcast distribution websites don't list Rhodesia as a legitimate country, so you don't know how many of them are listening to your podcast. Joe has

actually had, I don't know if you've heard that story about a guy who was a Zimbabwean communist obviously not a white Zimbabwean who heard about the episode he didn't know the story about the American Nazis who would like post Vietnam went over to fight with the Rhodesian military and so this guy, the fan

sent Joe a photo of him pissing on this dude's grave in Zimbabwe It's still one of my proudest moments I'll's one of the proudest moments of the show. Incredible. Absolutely incredible. Now, in comparison, the Yak-1 fighter that the top students would be flying went over 300 miles per hour, as could the PE-2 bomber the second group would be using.

You could see why this plane, originally designed in the 1920s and out of production by the time the war started, would be not you know, not the top priority here. The Soviets simply hit the plane build button because they could slap them together with some wood glue and loose fabric and it wouldn't put any strain on the manufacturing

infrastructure that was already largely coming apart at the seams because the Lend-Lease Act hadn't fully switched into high gear for them. They're just using the Age of Empires to infinite money glitch. I would really like that if like the Age of Empires, you know how sometimes you kind of

forget to upgrade some unit so you'll have all these fighter planes and like a Roman Legion marching around afterwards. I just appreciate that like they were using the 1940s equivalent of Randy Quaid's plane in Independence Day. That figure, that character is eternal, has to recur through time. And so in a way, it's like that to me is a little more like a warm and fuzzy versus what you were describing in Civilization or Age of Empires.

In Civ, we're like, why is my tank being attacked by 14 spearmen? Why have 14 spearmen managed to kill my tank? I mean, if you just want to look at a plane flying along with Roman legionnaires, I think that's just all of Joe's literary oeuvre as a writer. Fair enough. I feel attacked. Now, the PO-2 had a terrible payload of two very small bombs on kind of how light and slow it went, and it didn't have any lift capacity, really. And because of the weight of those two bombs, the pilots would be forced to fly low and slow.

They wouldn't even be able to get up to their peak of 90 miles an hour once they were fully equipped. to their peak of 90 miles an hour once they are fully equipped this of course meant they were very easy to be spotted uh as you know put it putting around at the speed of smell while flying a pack of gum with wings as ron white would say um yeah i can imagine that you know obviously night night missions less of a common thing at the time they did happen but they were rarer because like just the systems were it was much more dangerous to fly at night and so that's that's why this plane ends up becoming the night bomber plane because like but even then you can use this thing but in daytime obviously you're fucking dead but even at night it's just sort of like yep there goes that slow ass lawnmower overhead i wonder what that could be it's just like

oh we'll get to that point they come up with a They come up with a plane hack to fix that. I reckon there's definitely some regional urban legend from Eastern Europe of some weird bat that flies around and makes that sound because some confused farmer just heard the fabric flapping in the wind as it slowly moved across the sky. Well, right. Especially because the planes had only been around for 35 years at this point.

Imagine if you're on the front line in belarus or something like that and you're just like what is this demonry because it's just like yeah have you ever have you ever seen anything that's not made out of potatoes and potato related products and then they've got some shit flying varsava mothman fuck and this plane also had a completely open cockpit uh meaning that the crew of two were completely exposed to the elements, which is a real motherfucker when you realize they're flying on the Eastern front. So depending on what month it was just touching the outside of the surface

of your own plane while flying with them, like having like, like that scene from the Christmas story where the kid's tongue is stuck to the pole, but you're also attempting to fly a goddamn. So you're basically going to have to have baseball mitt-sized gloves when flying this thing. And because they were flying so low, the pilots did not carry parachutes because they wouldn't work at such low altitude. Yeah, you just...

Instead, they were instructed, if you were going to go down, to aim their plane towards the ground and die on impact so they wouldn't be captured. Failing that, they were given a sidearm so they could shoot themselves. We love the Soviet Air Force. Yeah, once again, it's like my first car was a Dodge Neon, so I was like, oh sweet, a Dodge Neon that you fly to do heroic combat with, but this is like the shittiest

Dodge Neon story I've ever heard, and like that's saying something. This is just like what if an Air Force is entirely made up of boxcar racers it's funny you mentioned boxcars because there's i can't remember the the nomenclature but there's a plane that the u.s army uses the alaska air national guard uses them and they are made in northern ireland and they 100 look their call sign is boxcar and they 100 look like a project plane built in someone's garage of course the country that gave us the delorean makes this

shit this shit but i can't remember if it's like a C-12. Probably less coke involved. Or a C-20. I can't remember the fuck they're called, but hundreds have jumped out of them. I just don't remember what the planes are called. Now, all of these reasons that we've talked about so far is like I already kind of said,

is why this became the night bomber regiment. Their planes were total death traps during the day, and at least by night, they could hide in the darkness. Its small size did have some benefits. For one, it was incredibly maneuverable because, you know, again, it's going 60 miles an hour. And it's going so slow that this ended up becoming its main defense mechanism. It went so slow that if enemy fighters, say like the ME-109, the Nazi ME-109, attempted to slow down enough to shoot at it, it would stall out and fall out of the sky. Because even if the PO-2 went the full 90 miles per hour that it was

capable of when it was unladen with bombs, the ME-109 could not go below 100 miles an hour or it would stall. So it was so goddamn slow, it was almost fighter aircraft proof. So it's the tortoise and the hare. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if they attempted to slow down and engage the PO-2s, they would fall out of the sky like a V-22. They had no real counter to this.

And because it was wooden fabric, the PO-2 was virtually invisible to radar, meaning the Soviets had accidentally invented a stealth aircraft by slapping bombs to a crop duster. Another benefit, again, its size and weight, meant they could take off from anywhere. They didn't need a long runway. because its fuel tanks were so low, that these things would have to take off virtually right behind Soviet front lines, which were constantly moving because, you know, it's the Eastern Front in the beginning.

They would have to take off from directly behind Soviet lines, bomb them, and then turn around and land again. It says a lot that the Soviets in the 40s invented a VTOL that works way better than the U.S. armies. And because of the rapidly moving front lines, the women of the 588th were constantly moving their planes and ground crew during the day and then flying at night, meaning they were almost always sleep deprived to the point they don't sleep for days at a time. So how do you manage to fly a biplane bomber without crashing into the ground when you don't sleep? Amphetamines.

Yeah, you already know the answer to this one. It's drugs. It's drugs, everybody. We already did an episode on the widespread Nazi use of a drug called Pervitin, which was methamphetamine. The Soviets didn't use methamphetamine. They used an upper called D4-D-trenophenol. Nailed it. This wasn't meth or any meth derivative.

However, when this pill was swallowed and not used as a powdered explosive, it was used to kill hunger pangs. So it was a diet pill. So much like myself, Nate, and virtually every other member of the U.S. military, the Red Air Force is ripped to the gills on diet pills and being kept awake. So you're saying that Lord Mountbatten wasn't actually assassinated.

He was just using Slimfast. Hey, listen, you know, I mean, Slimfast manufactured in Belfast. At the end of the day, like the Soviet Union and soldiers in and soldiers in the US military in the 2000s were powered by yellow jackets of one form or another. Ours, you could buy it. And ripped fuel, baby. Yeah, gas stations and fucking bodybuilding.com or whatever the bullshit website was. But in spirit, we are the same.

Now, the Soviets also thought that this pill would help them handle cold weather cold weather better because it's a thermogenic it's not really what thermogenics do or how they work it's not going to keep you more it's like if you get drunk while it's cold outside you feel warmer but you will still die of hypothermia and it did have a smaller side effect of course because it is a diet pill that's also a fucking explosive of just giving tons of people heart attacks um so yeah the pervitin probably safer uh that the nazis were using but hey whatever gives a whole new meaning to explosive diarrhea it'll slim you down it'll keep you awake and you'll crash your plane right on target imagine imagine how efficient they would have

been if they had jack 3d and were in world war ii oh fuck yeah like oh that's sick pumps old recipe jack 3d it would have just made space marines like dudes like absolutely off their face on dmma just like running over hills just screaming just imagining soviet veterans of the red air force you know hearing the len bias story and being, they're just like us. We're all the same. I know exactly what that feels like. Now, this meant the women of the 588th, gacked to their gray matter on diet pills,

could fly all day and all night. And the Night Witches flew multiple bombing sorties every night, from eight to 18, sometimes more. They would drop their two bombs, circle back around, load up, and do it again and again and again. Sometimes these missions were so close to the front line

they only took about 20 minutes. This is a fucking bucket brigade. This isn't an Air Force. It's just bombs. Yeah, it's a bucket brigade to drop handheld bombs. I mean, that rules, but also like, wow, once again, the Soviet Union just absolutely loved being like, we have a lot of people and a lot of shitty equipment

not really going to think about it too much Yulislav get the diet pills like 30 years 35 years later these diet pills would help Paul Weller write A Town Called Malice that is true the Brits loved speed like it used to be so ubiquitous here uh yeah like

like early depeche mode they were all on speed which is just weird when you think about it but like that's what i just can't get enough exactly exactly fucking yeah new life is the way you feel when you pop some of the good shit 3 a.m in the morning just like just can't get enough just can't get enough yeah exactly now speaking of these bombs you probably imagine they're quite small right they were they were they hardly caused damage to hard targets but it turned out not to actually matter that much this is because they were turned into a magnificently accidental terror weapon remember they're flying at night that meant German soldiers spent the whole night getting bombed by planes they could not see or hear and maybe could have rolled out of the local high school shop class, meaning they didn't get to sleep either.

The Germans at first had no idea what was attacking them. The planes were quiet, barely made any noise as far as combat aircraft were concerned and this is because the pilots of the night witch uh regiment found out a way around that they're that they're little you know fart can of a of an engine making somewhat of noise now they've we already talked how they flew short distances very very close to the ground but right before they went in for the attack they would rip the plane back climb as high as they possibly could which for these things is probably like 50 feet or something kill the engine and then glide onto their targets oh wow so they could only hear the plane coming

from really far away and then it silence and then they would only kick their engine back on once their bombs were released and then pull away now sometimes this didn't work and they just crashed directly into the target because these planes suck um and now another thing because everybody knows about like the stuka dive bomber having a built-in like scream nozzle yeah um these kind of had an accidental one the exhaust manifold on the engine was you know rickety badly made, and it rattled constantly and made popping noises, which ended up being the only thing the Germans could hear when it dove up on top of them. They gave the plane a ton of different nicknames, including the coffee mill, the sewing machine, and honestly, this is probably everybody's personal favorite, duty nco because it was annoying and came around at the same time every night oh man of course the most famous one is the night witch because soldiers said that that that tapping that that that noise that the exhaust manifold made

sounded like tapping broomsticks and it made the people flying them witches because they were flying the broomstick. And they came up with this nickname after word got out that women were flying these planes. And rumors quickly took off about what kind of women

could possibly be flying these rickety shit buckets of a plane. The Nazis said they were all hookers, drug addicts, or people from the insane asylum or the soviets had harnessed some super medicine to develop pills that gave pilots perfect night vision because their bombs are so almost always on target on infantry targets it's like the um that legend about is it the u.s or british pilots eating carrots that have like oh that was british yeah that like gave them perfect eyesight.

And that's why to this day, people think carrots give you better eyesight. Yeah, in reality, it was just radar. Yeah. So these were communist super hookers flying repurposed crop dusters while also maybe being from the insane asylum. I always love these rumors because they make things sound so much cooler, but enough about discord. Now, Najita Popova was probably the most famous of the night wishes.

She would eventually fly 800 missions, be shot down three times. And at one point crash land, leave her plane and join a nearby infantry unit where she met her husband she fucking rocks yeah that rules geez yeah chicks rock like that I mean you know like this is what modernity has taken from us you know

now you have to use hinge or tinder to meet someone back in the day you could crash your plane get out join an infantry unit meet the love of your life you know just simpler times return this is what we need to return to anyway she knew about these like the popova knew about these nazi rumors everybody did because they kind of laughed about them and while she thought they were funny uh uh she uh

was in no rush to try to convince the the germans otherwise that it wasn't just you know gacked up super hookers flying crop dusters uh she said quote this is all nonsense of course what we did have were clever educated and very talented girls once again slay yeah the nazis did come up with an effective way to track the things but the night witches are quick on their feet the nazis use huge amount of low level search lights because they could then point them up out of the night sky. And then they would light them up with regular gunfire because they were, you know, biplanes. So, Joe, what you're saying

is that there was Russians flashing lights, weird noises. So what you're basically saying was... ... I love when I give away control of the soundboard and I have no idea what's coming. This became so common that nearly every sortie of the Night Witches

returned to base with a few bullet holes in them and some would crash. At one point, someone remarked that pretty much every single one of the pilots had been shot down at some point. But thankfully for them, their targets are so close to the Soviet front line, most of the time they could scamper off back across and not get murdered or captured or something. Can't keep a good woman down.

That's right. So the witches developed their tactic to get around this, namely using people as bait. Three planes would take off simultaneously, with two of the airplanes drawing searchlights away from the main body of bombers and then the third main body would stick to the darkness and drop the bombs

and they would rotate through so not everybody was bait all the time so that's at least good now despite all of this and this might shock you the night witches were treated like shit male pilots and traditional military officers fucking hated them.

No matter what they did, even winning multiple heroes of the Soviet Union awards within the ranks, did anything to stop the constant discrimination that bored on actively trying to get them killed. For example, the night, witches weren't given similar equipment as their male counterparts, like something as simple as fucking radios or defensive machine guns to

protect themselves from german ground forces and interceptor planes because command simply deemed them unworthy yeah they actively try to get these fucking people killed through negligence and discrimination um but like we talked about the uh the nazi fighters generally um couldn't get a beat on them, right? Because they moved so slow. But one guy, one Nazi, eventually figured out a way to do it. An ace several times over. His name was Josef Kakiak.

I don't know. He figured out that if he flew giant slow loops around the bases of the Night Witches, he'd have just a split second opening to shoot at them before he ripped by them, but then he would do another loop and shoot at them again. And one night in 1943, he downed three Night Witches, I believe two of them

died, and harassed their base for so long, they were unable to fly for the entire rest of the night. He was virtually the only German pilot who managed to have any effect on the Night Witches throughout the entire rest of the night. He was virtually the only German pilot who managed to have any effect on the Night Witches throughout the entire war, and that night was the only night of the Night Witches' existence where they were unable to fly bombing missions. The unit would eventually lose about 30 planes, but nearly all of them were to ground fire because the tracer

rounds would cause them to explode into flames like something from an 80s action film. Unfortunately, the mother of the regiment, Marina Reskova, died in a plane crash. Not in combat, mind you. Just a regular-ass accident. Like Dale Earnhardt going down what looked like a normal race car accident. Sometimes the kings are taken down easy. The 588th also officially became known as the 46th taman guards night bomber

regiment uh for their actions during the tamam events of near krasnodar and uh like their one of their unofficial names was like the reskova guards and named after her by the end of the war the night witches were one of the most heavily decorated units within the soviet air force and they were the most decorated women's unit of not only the entire branch, but the entire Soviet military for women. The regiment flew over 23,000 missions, dropping over 3,000 tons of bombs, which is a lot when you realize they're carrying a couple dozen pounds each time, and 26,000 incendiary shells. Several of the pilots had flown over 800 missions themselves, with many others breaking 1,000, meaning they were easily the hardest-working pilots in the

entire war. And if that wasn't enough, they also found time to deliver supplies to cut off Soviet soldiers and occasionally rescue people. For the loss of only 32 pilots in action, rescue people. For the loss of only 32 pilots in action, they were awarded 23 Hero of the Soviet Union awards. And for comparison, only 95 women won that award throughout the history of the Soviet Union. 23 of them came from this one unit in the span of a couple of years. Can we just say in their honor? I was also going to say too, one thing that's weird about this is that it feels as though, even though they have all these incredible disadvantages, material disadvantages, this actually sounds like a better survivability rate than a lot of Soviet units.

Oh, yeah. It's better survivability rate than American bomber pilots. I remember reading about... I was talking about this because I just recently read a book about the defense of Moscow. And some of the figures where the author is able to get the numbers involved, you would hear stories about companies of civil guard or civil defense units that were then activated and deployed as infantry

troops. They were more or less pulled in from civil defense missions and sent to the front and out of a company of 100 or 110 guys, maybe two survived the war. That's atrocious. And you think, wow, this is just, once again, Soviet and out of a company of 100 or 110 guys, maybe two survived the war. That's atrocious. And you think, wow, this is just, once again, Soviet Union doesn't exactly have the world's greatest track record when it comes to prioritizing survivability of its troops.

And this sounds like, at the outset, this is going to be just fully meat grinder. Y'all are just getting people killed non-stop but actually it sounds like they didn't they managed to adapt in a way that like worked to their favor despite also being like the people you send to get killed if you are a soviet you know leader who doesn't like women pilots or whatever yeah i mean i think i think they had a lot of things accidentally in their favor for their survivability. Namely, they're operating so close to friendly lines. They're flying quite low to the ground.

I mean, the interceptor fighters could not handle them because they were too slow. So they had a lot of things in their favor. But even then, this does seem like when those situations are like, and none of them survived. Right. But it also sounds like when you think about the technical mismatch, to use a really, really out of date old millennial reference. This is like the fucking Mooner Knights firing the quad laser, but it works. It actually works. Now, on June 24th, 1945, the Soviet Union held the longest military parade so far ever, taking place just over a month after the end of the war in Europe.

parade so far ever taking place just over a month after the end of the war in europe it involved around 40 000 soldiers and nearly 2 000 vehicles and there was going to be planes flying overhead though the air portion of the parade was eventually canceled due to bad weather and the night witches were never invited in the first place you want to guess why sexism i mean that's certainly part of it uh they had a better record than other units and they didn't want to make the other units feelings hurt their planes flew too slow for the rest of the air force to keep up with information oh yeah that's very funny yeah once again the humble dodge neon fucking doing all this work and not being recognized and that is the story of the night witches i know i promised that one like well over a year ago,

but I hope everybody enjoyed it. And fellas, we do a segment on this show, also on this episode, called Questions from the Legion. If you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion, you could message me on Discord or Patreon after becoming a supporter of the show

and we will answer it on the air. And today's question is, what is oldest time? What is the biggest animal you think you could beat in a fist fight? Oh, that's such a stupid question. Not a stupid question to the person who asked it, but it's more like it's a question

that makes people say stupid answers. Yeah, this reminds me of the fucking flow chart that says like 40% of Americans feel like they might be able to take a wolf in a fight or something like that. It's like people think that, but then if you're actually a veterinarian, they're like definitely use long hooks and drugs

to subdue a cat, for example, because you'll lose to a cat in a fight. I would say I could definitely beat the shit out of most small lap dogs and potentially something the size of like a raccoon they do a grouted bout against a chihuahua exactly i'll take his tiny arms just protect it fucking jack russell terrier just going completely like parabolic route of flight absolutely launched somewhere um everybody knows that jack russell's have shitty ground defense

exactly just just pick them up and just trebuchet that shit. I would say, last night, there's a sick fox in our neighborhood who's constantly making horrible noises and basically dying. That's just me. I moved to London recently. Exactly. They're trying to get a charity because there's no animal control here to help this fox. There's also a healthy fox that's out

so periodically we can never figure out because foxes make this horrible death scream. And yesterday, I saw the fox out there and I went outside. I was like, is this the sick one? It looked at me. No, it's the healthy one. Pretty fucking big fox. Foxes, by their nature, don't really fight people.

I wouldn't want to fight a fox. I think a fox is too big. I think something the size of a fox, you probably lose. So I'm saying, given an object, if I have to use my fists, raccoon or smaller, but even that's kind of wary because a bunch of their little bastards. They move quick.

They got solid footwork. They got pretty sharp claws, if I remember correctly. Oh, yeah. But definitely smaller than that. Any kind of lap dog, I think I could beat their ass. But I definitely wouldn't go

any bigger than that. And I feel like you're a fool if you think you can because that's why humans invented tools and weapons because we aren't really good at tearing animals asunder with our hands. non-urban foxes if you like get too close to a rural fox either they will run away or they will bite the shit out of your ankles and your legs like they are vicious it's like um in there is like some evidence of interspecies fighting between foxes and badgers and if you know about

badger not like honey badgers i'm talking about your regular indo-european badger European badgers and if you know about badger not like honey badgers i'm talking about your regular indo-european badger European badgers are so much different than American badgers yeah it looks like completely different animals and like they will bite the shit out of you typically if you're like hunting badgers or you want to smoke them out all you have to do is you have to like light a branch on fire and shove it in the warren because it will smoke them out. But yeah, foxes. No, not fucking with foxes. Folks, don't smoke out your local badgers. Smoke down your local badgers. Exactly.

I guess I'm a little bit bigger than the both of you. I'm going to say I could fight a mid-sized house dog. It wouldn't be an easy fight. I'm not saying like a Doberman or a German Shepherd or anything like that.

I'm saying like I don't know, a Whippet. I feel like I could kick a Whippet's ass. Or like a Greyhound. Greyhounds are pretty big though, but also I think like with dogs... They're very skinny. Yeah, but they're fast as shit. The thing I'd say is that you might... I'm not going to fight in a foot race. Yeah, but they get fast as shit. The thing I'd say is that you might get- I'm not going to fight in a foot race.

Well, you might. Yeah, but they get on you really quickly. I think you have to land a really good kick to one of those assholes, and then they'll realize that you're a force to be reckoned with, and they might think better of it. Bitches don't see my left hook coming because their eyes are too close together on the front of their slight snout. Exactly, because they've been bred through thousands of generations to just chase rabbits down a track, so they aren't expecting an Armenian dude to give

them a right hook. Anybody could beat down a bulldog or something, because genetics have already done that. So I feel like a mid-ranged house, pampered house dog, like a golden retriever doesn't stand a fucking chance. Right, but that's the thing, though, is

you think everyone can beat down a bulldog but like like thousands of small children every year proof this is not the case so it's because children suck i could beat down children all day i think bulldogs like think about the visit like if they've got they've got strong jaws i feel as though like the reason i'm not fucking with most big dogs or even most mid-sized dogs is that like they do have the advantage of the strong jaws and sharp teeth and like that like if they get the bite in on you like you might be screwed like you might but a bulldog you just backpedal like five steps and it's gonna keel over from asthma but like as the only person on this recording who has been bitten in the face by a dog not once but three

times i am uh i'm gonna be training for this question yeah i i'm gonna tell you that if you get like if you have a larger dog they're like the the force at which they're able to close their jaw it's not the dog biting you it's getting the dog to open its mouth once it's latched on to you if it's a smaller dog they they don't have the strength so you could literally just like punch it in the head and it will open its mouth whereas like see this is why i'm saying i couldn't fight a German Shepherd or a Malinois or something. But a golden retriever in an octagon doesn't stand a fucking chance. That soft little motherfucker is going

down. Alright? Period. I mean, fighting a golden retriever is like trying to fight Joe Biden. Like this old golden retriever doesn't know where it is. Exactly. My sneak attack is I jingle my car keys at it and then start slapping the hell out of it.

That's how I fight children. Tom, what is your animal of choice? So I have been reading a lot about primates the past while, you know. Oh, primates are going to beat you every time. That motherfucker is going to be the human champion of MMA. So I've been reading a lot about

different types of apes and monkeys. So the majority of apes are going to destroy you like this it feels very joe rogan to like talk about chimpanzees but like chimpanzees hands down gonna beat the shit out of you gorillas nate pull up a picture of a yolk chimpanzee but funny enough um it's like uh when zoos don't know how to design glass that is strong enough to hold gorillas because you cannot accurately measure how strong a gorilla is. So all the glass in zoos that hold gorillas is just like, fuck around, find out. We don't know. It might work. It might not.

But I think I could take between three and five spider monkeys. They're small. They're spindly. You punch them in the solar plexus, they're going to go flying across the room. Like a macaque as well. Yeah. They're quite small. I don't know.

First of all, I don't know if I'd want to fight a monkey because I feel like it's just like you're kind of fighting your dim-witted distant cousin. But also, I just feel like they're going to go... I mean, we talk about ape strength and ape mode. I feel like even the weird sun bear looking proboscis monkey or whatever, some deep down, they've got that Cro-Magnon spirit in them and they're just going to beat the shit out of you. I know Cro-Magnons and monkeys aren't necessarily related.

Or they're going to tear off a chunk of your face or your dick or whatever because it's the first thing they go for. Exactly. I feel like you are disrespecting the spirit of our monkey ancestors if you want to fight a monkey. It's just wrong. This is why I picked the safest bet I believe here by saying a golden retriever.

I'm not a doctor going down, you soft asshole. All right. Guys, thank you so much for joining me today. This is the area where you can plug the shows if people listening are not familiar with them. So I am the co-host of What a Hell of a Way to Die, which is a podcast about why you shouldn't join the military. I host with Francis Horton from Zoo Crew and other shows you're probably familiar with. I'm also the producer of the Trash Future podcast, a tech pessimist podcast about the tech industry.

And I produce this show, and I also produce Kill James Bond, a movie podcast hosted by the three funniest trans people you will ever meet starting with the Bond series but then now working through the Man from U.N.C.L.E. series and the Jason Bourne movies and all these kinds of just bad Euro spy movies in general so if that sounds interesting please check those out

I co-host and produce a history show called Beneath the Skin, it's about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing. I also co-host a show called 33rd County with Shocks from the Zoo Crew about the connection between Irish experience and the Irish American experience. And I host the show you've been listening to and nothing else because I cannot possibly imagine doing another podcast. If you like what we do here, consider supporting the show via Patreon.

You get bonus episodes, early episodes, Discord access, which a nice little community has formed over the years. You get all sorts of stuff and you help keep the show running. And if you don't, that's fine. Consider leaving us a review on whatever podcast platform you listen to

because that is free and it helps us in weird ways i don't fully understand but it does um and guys again thank you so much for joining us uh joining me on this incredibly strange journey through the night witches and various other things that we talked about and uh until next time do diet pills and bomb nazis