Night Witches

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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman.  This is the World.  Back to our Geo Quiz now and the Night Witches.  That group of female pilots who made a name for themselves during World War II.  We wanted to know which country they fought for.  Here’s a hint, it was German soldiers who called them the Night Witches.  The Germans were afraid of the regiment’s midnight bombing runs.  No, it’s not Britain or the U.S., although both countries did have female air regiments, it was only the Soviet Union that sent its female pilots into combat.  Those pilots were known in their homeland as Stalin’s Falcons.  The women are the focus of a new BBC radio documentary produced by Lucy Ash.  It was a story she says more than a decade in the making.

LUCY ASH:  I used to live in Moscow in the early nineties and I was looking for an apartment to rent an I got one in one of these wedding cake style, Stalinesque skyscrapers and the building that I was in turned out to be the home of all kinds of Soviet aviation heroes and I was chatting to my neighbors and they talked about these Night Witches and I was really intrigued.

WERMAN:  Fast forward to earlier this year when Lucy Ash set out to find some of those female pilots who might still be alive.  She met Nadezhda Papova.  Papova remembers flying more than a dozen sorties some nights.

NADEZHA PAPOVA:  [RUSSIAN] We’ve learned sequence, one after another and during the night would never let them rest so they called us Night witches and the Germans made up stories, they spread the rumor that we had been injected with some unknown chemicals that enabled us to see so clearly at night.

WERMAN:  The BBC’s Lucy Ash says that she even heard a story about how one German fighter ace reacted to an encounter with a Soviet female pilot.

LUCY ASH:  He refused to fly anymore when he found that his plane had been downed by a mere stick of a girl.

WERMAN:  But don’t for a second get caught up in some kind of romantic ideal about these women fighters.

ASH:  They were issued with pistols and they were told or rather it was very strongly implied to them that they shouldn’t allow themselves to fall into enemy hands.  They should, if they are surrounded, that they should shoot themselves.

WERMAN:  Lucy Ash says that she also came across some amazing archive photos in her quest to track down the Night Witches.

ASH:  One of my favorite photographs features three young women pilots who are sort of having a rest in between combat sorties, I think.  One of them is sitting with her knees hunched up, smoking a cigarette and the other one is writing a letter and the third one is standing up, looking at herself in the mirror.

WERMAN:  That one, looking at herself is none other than the pilot you heard from before, Nadezhda Papova.  Lucy says that despite being in her eighties, Papova is still going strong.

ASH:  She’s a real character.  She’s been photographed numerous times in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin.  She’s, her flat is full of photographs of her with various celebrities from all over Russia.  I mean I didn’t know you could be coquettish in your late eighties but she is.  Pink track suit and matching lipstick and had her hair all nicely done.

WERMAN:  She should go to Miami Beach.  Come to TheWorld.org to find out more about Lucy Ash’s documentary, Night Witches.  We’ve got links to her radio documentary, her audio slide show and much more.

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