History's Secret Heroes: Series 3: The Night Witches

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A spring evening in 1945 the skies northwest of Berlin Two Soviet women flew at 100 kilometers an hour through thick fog.

Their plane was made of little more than plywood and canvas.

On takeoff, the plane's engine had developed a fault.

They were carrying bombs.

According to regulations, they needed to dispose of them before landing.

Maybe they could discard them into a lake or river.

But the fog made it impossible to see anything.

They realized that the fog was getting worse, as if the ground was covered by a layer of cotton wool.

So they asked each other, what should they do now?

In the cockpit's back seat, navigator Paulina Gelman knew she needed to think fast.

Then she noticed a long church steeple.

They must be close to the Soviet airfield.

A red light signaling its location burned through the fog.

They turned again, hoping to land at the main airfield using the searchlight and the steeple of the church.

They were hoping that they'd calculated correctly the distance to the land, But as they were descending through this fog, they realized that, no, they miscalculated.

And through the fog, they could see that they were approaching trees.

They switched the engine off and landed with a thud.

The plane kept rolling.

The bombs were still attached.

As it rolled towards the trees, the women knew that if they hit them, the bombs would explode, taking the plane with them.

Just a few steps away from the trees, the plane finally came to a halt.

The women leapt from the cockpit.

Relieved, they danced with joy.

The guard at the airfield managed to jump off before the propeller hit him, and he was looking at them as mad women when they were dancing, dancing by the aircraft.

They couldn't believe that they made it alive.

I'm Helena Bonamkarter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

The Night Witches.

Paulina Gelman dreamed of flying.

As a teenager, growing up in the Belarusian city of Gomel, she joined a local aviation club.

There was no distinction between boys and girls in Soviet schools or in the Soviet children's movement, the young pioneers.

All children were allowed to take part in all physical activities.

Boys and girls alike could learn to dance or shoot.

It was the same in the aviation club.

Gelman learned to fly a glider and jump with a parachute.

By 1938, when she finished middle school, Gelman had completed the theoretical course in aircraft navigation.

She was one step away from flying solo.

Her instructor picked her up and told her to get into his car.

Gelman, who was just under five feet tall, sank into the seat.

The instructor told her, When you are tiny and cannot

cannot touch the pedals in the airplane, you cannot fly the airplane.

Gelman cried all summer.

Later that year, she put her dreams aside and enrolled at Moscow State University to study history.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union agreed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler's Germany.

This did not last.

Stalin did not believe that Hitler would dare invade the Soviet Union, but he did.

In June 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, its invasion of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union had to struggle to mobilize against the Nazi threat.

On the 10th of October 1941, Gelman and her university classmates were digging trenches along the Belarusian road to slow the advance of German tanks.

It was a compulsory thing.

They were sent without proper tools, proper clothes, proper shoes.

Luber Vinogradova is a writer specializing in the Second Second World War.

It was an emergency.

The German advance was extremely fast.

Large areas were

falling to Germans very, very quickly and the defense lines kept being moved closer and closer to the capital, to Moscow and to Leningrad.

Soviet troops had pulled back to the Možaisk line, 80 miles west of Moscow.

This was a scary time.

Nazis was approaching Moscow when there was a horror in Leningrad.

This is a serious war.

This is a war which can annihilate your country.

Gelman and her ditch-digging comrades were members of the Komsomol, the youth division of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

They just

wanted to fight with fascists.

They wanted to fight for their country.

They had enormous amount of energy.

This was like necessary for survival, maybe.

But But there was a problem.

In that culture as well, there was like, oh, you are a woman, you cannot fight.

All the equality Gelman had taken for granted as a child came to a sudden halt.

She had been brought up with every reassurance that young women were equal to men.

When the Nazis invaded, though, female volunteers were turned away from the military registration and enlistment officers.

That's why she and her friends were digging ditches.

Yet that day in October, a rumor spread among the students along the Moshaisk line, women were finally being recruited into aviation.

Gelman rushed back to Moscow to share the news with her best friend, Galia Dukotovich.

Dukotovich, who was studying at the Moscow Aviation Institute, had already received her orders.

The pair had known each other since school.

After Gelman went to university, Dukotovich continued to fly.

She thought that Paulina was quite clumsy and not 100% fit to be a soldier.

Galia was very tall, really beautiful, and Paulina was a small girl who was also very pretty but different in a different way.

With blue eyes, childlike features, pretty curly hair.

The two women had a lot in common.

They definitely were adrenaline junkies.

They wanted to fly, you know, they were crazy about flying.

And second of all, they were extremely patriotic.

So they both of them volunteered.

The next morning Gelman submitted her paperwork to the Komsomol Central Committee.

She was accepted into the Red Army.

She was thrilled to glimpse their new commander, the Soviet aviator Marina Raskova.

She was a great celebrity of her time.

Her name, her picture, her face were known all over the Soviet Union.

She was a role model.

She was a woman that showed that women are perfectly capable of this kind of flying.

In 1933, Raskova became the first woman to qualify as a navigator in the Soviet Air Force.

She set a world record for a non-stop flight from Moscow to Komsomolsk in the very far east of Russia, close to Japan.

She and her co-pilots were the only three women given the honor of Hero of the Soviet Union before the Second World War.

As soon as war broke out, Raskova began to receive sacks full of letters from women with a background in aviation.

They begged her to petition for women to fly in the war effort.

What they didn't know was that Raskova had a secret.

Nobody knew that she was part of the

secret police, that she was actually a major at the NKVD.

The NKVD was the Interior Ministry and Secret Police.

Rascova may even have appealed directly to the leader of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, who admired her greatly.

Stalin probably gave a very general permission for her to set up aviation units of female pilots.

That October, Gelman and Dukotovich boarded a train from Moscow to the city of Engels on the Volga River.

There, they embarked on a training program that would typically have taken three years,

but they needed to be ready for the front in three months.

It started with the girls cutting their hair.

It was extremely upsetting.

Many girls had been growing their hair, you know, all their life, you know, and this beautiful long hair ended up on the floor in the hairdresser's shop, all colours of hair mixed up.

Next, they were assigned their uniforms.

This did nothing to cheer them up because they were issued with male uniforms, men's underwear.

Later, they were making bras of parachute silk, and the boots were huge.

Gelman, who was Jewish, was motivated by a strong sense of patriotism and a desire to defeat fascism.

In a letter home she wrote, Mummy, my dear one, I have decided to go to the front.

I am a daughter of the Jewish people and I have a particular account to settle with Hitler.

Her mother replied that it was better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Gelman studied in in class for 12 to 13 hours a day.

Owing to her small stature, she was selected to be a navigator.

She woke up early each day to practice Morse code.

Navigators were sitting behind the pilot with a compass, with a map, and helping pilot to find the right course and orient and sky.

I believe there was a pretty small cabin where both of them were sitting and the pilot would

take care of flying and the navigator help her to do it.

Like many of the women, Galia Dukotovich wanted to be a pilot.

When she was selected to be a navigator, she was disappointed.

Diplomatically, Marina Raskova explained they needed navigators with flying experience.

Dukotovich accepted this and flew as a navigator.

After her first flights, she wrote in her diary, diary, Now I see how exciting being a navigator is.

When you've done a little flying, you walk around in a dream and just want to get back up in the sky.

Marina Roscova had assembled a formidable group of 400 women.

They have enough to have three training regiments for fighter pilots, for dive bombers, and for the night bombers.

The night bombers were the all-female 588 Night Bomber Aviation Regiment.

On the 27th of May, 1942, Gelman and Dukotovich arrived with their regiment at a mining town in Ukraine.

The regiment set up quarters in a stable.

The women called it Hotel Flying Horse.

At first, the regiment was assigned to assist the men, yet many of their male comrades were sceptical about these women, in part because their planes were so basic.

At the start of the invasion, many Soviet aircraft had been destroyed.

So they were desperately short of aircraft.

One of the emergency solutions was to use this

Vodva PO-2.

This aircraft dating back to the 1930s was not designed for combat.

It was commonly used to spray pesticides across crop fields.

One of the male pilots jokingly asked the the women, Girls, how do you manage to fly on this bookshelf across the front line?

This sort of aircraft, you know, completely unsuitable, made of wood, plywood, with canvas stretched over the top of the wings.

Unfortunately, to strengthen the canvas, they used stuff called emalit,

which made it a lot stronger, but also burned very easily.

If any bullet hits it, it can just go fire.

The women were not given guns or radios or parachutes.

And the reason why they did not take parachutes because they wanted to take more bombs.

So that was a pragmatic.

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The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

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Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

The night bombers flew at low altitudes.

When they reached German-held territory, they turned off their engines and glided.

This allowed them to get to the point where they were to release their bombs without revealing their location.

The women used the low tech of their aircraft to their advantage.

The wooden planes made very little noise.

The craft were too small to show up on radio or infrared locators, and because they did not use radio, they could not be detected by radio location either.

Each Soviet flying pair, a pilot and a navigator, was given a designated target for their bombs.

They flew at a cruising speed of 120 kilometers per hour.

The pace was relentless.

Folina

would be one of the crews that waited at the airfield for a signal to take off.

And every four minutes, an aircraft would take off, bomb the target and

turn back.

And the other aircraft would take their place.

In the dark, it was too dangerous to fly in formation.

Instead, the women flew in carousel, three or four minutes apart, one after another.

By the time the last plane had dropped its bombs, the first one had already landed, refueled and returned to the target.

They would land, refuel it and go again flying on some nights, dozens of missions.

Their stealth and speed led to the Germans giving them a nickname, Die Nachtrechsen, in English, the Night Witches.

They flew at night on wooden aircraft like brooms and seemed to appear and disappear as if by magic.

The Germans spread rumours about the night witches among populations in areas they occupied, portraying them as genuinely supernatural.

This meant that when the women went into liberated areas, they were sometimes received with shock.

Gelman remembered a civilian woman telling her and her comrades, Girls, how beautiful you are We were told you are not men or women, but just something in between and very awful.

The night bombers found this extremely funny.

As a navigator, it was Polina Gelman's job to release the bombs.

So Polina sat in the back of the cockpit.

She spoke on the intercom with the pilot.

She navigated the plane to the target where they had to drop the bombs.

It requires really some physical strength.

So these bombs, they

weigh many, many tens of kilos.

And if you make a tiny mistake, the bomb can explode in the wrong way or can stuck to the airplane.

Gelman learned this early.

She was about to drop this lighting bomb and took out the fuse, but the bomb got caught in the mittens that she strapped around her neck.

She had about 10 seconds, so at the last moment, she dropped it together with the mittens.

The night bombers developed strong camaraderie.

They'd cook together.

Somebody finds a certain amount of beans, and one has beans, the other has salt, third one has a spoon, and they boil them while waiting for starting the mission at the airfield.

There was a tremendous, tremendous sense of collective.

In between sorties, the women found ways to decompress.

The entire regiment was crazy, got crazy at some stage with embroidering.

They pulled the blue threads from

these long men's underpants that they were giving, you know, as part of their uniform, pulled the light blue threads and embroidered forget-me-nots.

In July 1942, Dukotovich flew a damaged plane.

She was able to land it.

While she waited for a replacement, she lay down to rest in some tall grass.

A refueling truck drove up.

It failed to see her and ran her over.

Dukotovich suffered a spinal injury.

German tanks were advancing.

Polina Gelman was ordered to take off on another mission, but she couldn't leave Dukotovich on her own.

By now, some night bombers had begun to carry pistols.

Fearing that Dukotovich could be captured by Nazi troops while she waited to be evacuated, Gelman gave Dukotovich her gun.

She leaves it with Gale so that Gale can shoot herself to avoid being captured.

Before that happened, a medical plane arrived to take Dukotovich to hospital.

Strikingly, though, Gelman was prepared to compromise her own safety for her best friend.

For these very young people who didn't yet have families, or

most of them didn't have boyfriends, this female friendship was the central role in their lives in that absolutely extreme situation.

Between August and December 1942, Gelman assisted in defending the city of Ladikavkaz in the Battle of the Caucasus.

She bombed enemy equipment and troops.

Each flight took 45 to 50 minutes.

During long winter nights, the regiment would complete up to 14 of these flights.

Gelman was often too tired to leave the cockpit while her plane stopped to refuel.

A fellow night bomber brought her cups of tea.

In January 1943, the regiment's founder, Marina Raskova, flew from Arzamas to Saratov.

There was a thick fog over the Volga River.

Raskova crashed into the riverbank.

She was killed instantly.

Raskova was acclaimed as a Soviet hero and was honoured with a state funeral.

The regiment was distraught and shaken.

If this could happen to Marina Raskova, it could happen to anyone.

Yet there could be no pause in the war.

The night bombers kept flying.

The regiment was recognized with a new name, the 46th Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment.

The night of the 31st of July 1943 was the worst night probably in the entire history of the regiment.

The Germans were fighting on the Taman Peninsula.

Galia Dukotovich had recovered well, and this was her first flight since her injury.

After months of convalescing, she was excited to return to the skies.

That night, Chief of Staff Irina Rakobowska saw off 15 aircraft on their first sortie of the night.

Minutes later, one plane burst into flames and tumbled from the sky.

It was the first time a new technique was used against them by the Germans.

A German night fighter attack.

The German anti-aircraft guns were silent and caught the night bombers off guard.

Flares lit up the sky as more small planes took hits and spiraled to the ground.

There were four crews that burnt to death.

Eight night bombers lost their lives that night.

One of them was Galia Dukotovich.

Paulina realized that most likely

Galia and her pilot that burned in the air is the most terrible death.

Devastated, Paulina Gelman wrote to her friend's family.

It is hard for me to write to you about the irreparable loss of the person nearest and dearest to me.

Every word brings back again and again the grief and pain.

Everybody is now reconciled to the view that this girl who was everybody's favorite is no longer among the living, because it is undeniable.

In a day or two, I will send you her possessions and photographs and will also transfer her money through the accounts department.

It was, I think, a very extreme case of survivor's guilt.

The shining memory of her will never fade in my mind.

If no enemy bullet kills me and someday I have a daughter, I should call her Gala and bring her up to be noble and wonderful like our Gala.

At the end of 1943, the night bombers were redeployed closer to the front line.

Gelman was asked to find a site for a new airfield.

She circled the site along with her pilot.

West of the Kerch Peninsula, they thought they found a suitable area.

They landed, but the field was a swamp.

The plane stuck.

The women had to lighten the plane's load if they were to have any chance of taking off, but there was no cargo on board.

Gelman realized the only option was to remove herself.

The pilot protested.

It was too dangerous, but there was no other way.

Gelman climbed out of the plane.

As the pilot sped up, she ran alongside the fuselage.

At the very moment its wheels cleared the ground.

She grabbed a strut and swung herself up onto the plane.

She fell into the cockpit upside down.

Pauline took part in hundreds of missions, dropped tons of bombs during the German retreat from Belarus in Poland.

They would specifically bomb columns of retreating transport, for example, impeding the retreat, bombing railways for the same purpose, bombing fortifications.

The tide of the war had turned.

Where once the Nazis had pressed forward towards Moscow, now it was Soviet forces and allies invading German territory.

On the 2nd of May, nineteen forty-five, Soviet forces took Berlin.

Within days, Germany surrendered to the Allies and the war in Europe was over.

Gelman was sitting in a plane, waiting for the command to take off.

They were at the airfield ready to fly a mission when it was announced to them.

Armorers arrived to remove the detonators from their bombs.

The women asked what had happened.

The armourers replied, Capitulation!

The war is over.

And Paulina was asked afterwards, what did you do then?

But Paulina said, nothing, we just sat in the aircraft, because it was soldiers after all, you know.

A few months later, in October 1945, the regiment disbanded.

It was the only unit within the Red Army to remain entirely female at the end of the war.

More than 20 night bombers received the great honour Marina Raskova had held, hero of the Soviet Union.

Gelman was among them, the only Jewish woman to be recognized in this way.

When the war finished, on her every single leave in the summer, she'd go and look look for the graves of the missing girls from her regiment for 30 years after the war.

Paulina decided to stay in the army.

She continued with her love of literature and philology and joined the Military Institute of Foreign Languages.

Gelman married a lieutenant colonel and gave birth to a daughter.

True to her vow, she named her Galia after her best friend.

Andre Lind, the Stanford professor, has a personal connection to the night bombers.

And I am a son of Irina Rakabulska, who was the chief of staff of the Night Witches Division.

After the war, Rakaboska became a physicist at Moscow State University.

She kept in touch with Gelman and the other surviving night bombers.

They enjoyed seeing each other.

They were telling each other stories.

Periodically, we were meeting

near

Red Square, near the Bolshevik Theater, in fact, telling who is married, whom.

So it was

a more important part of my childhood to be surrounded by these people.

Professor Lind looks back on his mother's wartime contribution with wonder.

I've seen the photographs in black and white, how they were dancing in the field.

They were

girls who were

doing this job and they were enjoying their life as much as they could under the

bad circumstances.

Paulina Gelman died in Moscow in 2005.

At the air club, where as a teenager she was once told she was too short to fly a plane, a flagstone now bears the name of its war heroes.

Gelman's name is the only woman's name there.

Towards the end of her life, in an interview with the historian Raina Pennington, she recalled how close-knit her regiment was.

She stressed the importance of undertaking their duty voluntarily, which she believed was why the night bombers were so successful.

She said, it was their free will, and that which is done at the call of a heart is always done better than that which is done out of obligation.

Next time on history's Secret Heroes, a Norwegian sailor carries out more than 50 missions via a secret shipping route between Scotland and occupied Norway.

The boats who are coming back from Norway, if not affected, smashed to pieces by the Luftwaffe, then by the weather.

It's hard to say which was the worst enemy at times on the scene.

Life Larsen and the Shetland bus.

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