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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. For

$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the hard questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. I'm your host, Zach Cornwell, and this is episode four, Wonder Women.

On December 3rd, 2015, the United States Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, issued an announcement. Beginning in 2016, the United States military would allow women to serve in all combat roles without exception. They'll be allowed to drive tanks, he said, to fire mortars and lead infantry soldiers into combat.

They'll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force Para-jumpers, and everything else that was previously open only to men. This was not a universally lauded decision. In the United States, the case against women serving in combat was, and in certain circles still is, a well-documented and ferociously argued position.

Before Carter's announcement, some said women lacked the mental constitution to deal with combat and posed a higher risk of developing PTSD. Others worried that a gender-integrated military would become a minefield of sexual misconduct, as if that hadn't been a pervasive reality of warfare for most of human history. And a few retreated to the tired old refrain that women simply weren't tough enough to fight, kill, and lead in the field.

I think these naysayers would have had a pretty hard time explaining their position if they ever came face-to-face with some of the women we're going to talk about today. Throughout history and across continents, women have taken up arms in times of war. For defense or conquest, for glory or greed, for themselves or in obligation to someone else. Now when I say warrior woman, who comes to mind?

Now you might immediately think of someone like Joan of Arc, right? Or Elizabeth I, or Cleopatra. And they were all undeniably remarkable people. I mean, there's no doubt about that. But they were figureheads, not fighters. They wielded huge political power and used that political power to wage wars and battles. But they never really fought in those battles. Well, today we're talking about the fighters.

The women who spilled blood, faced battles and bodily harm, and proved themselves just as capable, if not more so, than their male counterparts. In this episode, we're going to be looking at three stories. Three incredible examples of female soldiers from all over the world and across different time periods. We'll meet graceful samurai, African berserkers, and deadly Soviet fighter pilots. All of them women, all of them fascinating and nuanced in their own ways.

So without further ado, let's meet these ladies. Our first story begins on the western coast of Africa in the early 1930s at a seaside city called Cotonou. A group of little kids are playing in the streets and, you know, they're doing what kids do. They're running, shouting, skipping, roughhousing. Suddenly something catches their eye. Shuffling down the dusty road through the hectic bustle of the city is an old woman.

She's extremely elderly. Every single step she takes is a struggle. And her spine is bent and weak. Her body is gnarled and crooked with the weight of age. And when the little kids look at this old woman, they don't see a kindly, grandmotherly figure. They see a sideshow. You know, a freak. They start throwing rocks at her, jeering, yelling stuff at her. But she keeps walking. She doesn't seem to notice them at all, really. And then one of those stones hits a metal pipe.

and it causes a spark. At this point, the woman's entire demeanor changes. It's like a light switch has suddenly been flipped. She straightens up like a ramrod, her vacant face hardens into a snarl, and she starts to march. She dives to the ground and crawls, angling her bony arms like she's holding a rifle, and she pretends to fire and imitates the sound of a musket volley with her mouth.

And then she springs up and pounces on an enemy that's not there. She shrieks and spits and stabs the air with a knife that doesn't exist. And when her ghostly enemy is dead, she stands up and she sings, quote, The blood flows. You are dead. The blood flows. We have won. The blood flows. It flows. It flows. The blood flows. The enemy is no more.

But then her eyes cloud over again, and she just kind of crumples up like a used candy wrapper, and she just walks away. Naturally, the kids are freaked the hell out, and a passing adult who saw what had happened explains to the children, quote, She is a former warrior. The battles ended years ago, but she continues the war in her head, end quote. This anecdote comes from a French historian named Helena Almida Topor,

And she interviewed one of those kids years later who told her this story as an adult sometime in the late 70s. He never forgot that odd encounter with the elderly woman that day in the city of Cotonou. The French historian connected some dots and came to the conclusion that the elderly woman had been one of the last surviving members of an elite force of female warriors called the Dahomey Amazons.

Centuries ago, the western edge of Africa bordering the Atlantic was known as the Slave Coast. Human trafficking was a thriving industry. Huge amounts of wealth flowed into those coastal African nations via trade with the transatlantic slavers. One of the beneficiaries of this lucrative slave trade was the Kingdom of Dahomey, located in what is now the nation of Benin.

By trading human captives for Western goods, Dahomey was able to get its hands on Western weapons technology, like firearms. And they used that technology to aggressively expand their territory, which yielded more prisoners to sell as slaves, which meant more wealth, more weapons, more war, more prisoners, and on and on and on the cycle went.

The fearsome coastal empire quickly earned the nickname Black Sparta among Europeans, both for its territorial aggression and the reputation of its armies. In 1861, a missionary named Francesco Borghero is invited by the King of Dahomey to watch a military demonstration of his most elite forces. Over 3,000 soldiers march into the square.

And much to Borguero's shock and surprise, every single one of them is a woman. These women are impressive. They're tall, lean, muscular, armed to the teeth, with clubs and knives and muskets. Some of them are carrying three-foot-long, two-handed machetes, which the king says can easily cut a man in half. They are known as the minos, which means mothers in the local language.

But some people have said that the connotation of that word is a little bit closer to witches. We have another account from some captured Frenchmen who were held as prisoners in Dahomey for a few weeks before eventually being released. And they told journalists when they got back home, quote, "...we reached the second line, consisting of 4,000 Amazons, the 4,000 black virgins of Dahomey who formed the bodyguard of the king."

armed with rifle and knife and ready to attack at the slightest signal of their master. Old or young, plain or handsome, they are all alike marvelous to see. As full of muscle as the male warriors, their attitude is well disciplined and correct.

and the leaders at the head of each column are easily recognized by their rich attire and their resolute air. Such are the Amazons, underarms differing very much from the savage horde which fancy has painted them. The triple circle which they form is immense, without a single break, and seated at the center of the circle was the king." This is how Dahomey had conquered its empire, crushed its rivals, and expanded its territory."

The king proudly proclaims to his guests that these are the finest warriors in Africa, and equal to any troops in Europe. It's a claim that would be put to the test before all was said and done. So who were these female soldiers? Who were the Dahomey Amazons? Their role in society was layered, complex, and very strange.

And at the time, they were the only regularly deployed all-female fighting force in the entire world. Now, there is no 100% confirmed origin story for the Dahomey Amazons, but historians have been able to draw some conclusions and formulate a few pretty strong theories on how this wholly unique military phenomenon got started.

The kingdom of Dahomey was established around 1600, right? And those early monarchs, as many monarchs do, kept large harems of wives and concubines. At some point, a number of them transitioned out of their concubine roles and started serving as royal bodyguards. They personally protected the king, staying close to him day and night. They guarded the palace and kept him safe on trips across the kingdom.

So this tradition begins, and over time it develops. Subsequent Dahomey kings want to have the most fearsome ladies in the land guarding them, so they seek out the most talented killers in the kingdom. Female huntresses, famous for running down elephant herds, were either recruited, volunteered, or press-ganged into service as the king's personal bodyguards.

These huntresses brought a deep familiarity with violence to the group and elevated the institution from something more ceremonial in nature to a practical instrument of war and conquest.

Now, in all transparency, there's not a lot of concrete historical evidence for the elephant huntress origin story. It's actually rooted in a colorful folktale. The tale goes that after the king praised the courage of the female elephant hunters, one of them cheekily replied that they would enjoy hunting men even more. The king got a real big kick out of this, and he immediately recruited them into his army.

Whatever the case, over the course of the next century, what began as an armed entourage evolved into a full-time regiment of battle-hardened career soldiers. There's also another factor to consider in the rise of the Dahomey Amazons. The frequent wars between the different tribes and nations in this region of Africa greatly reduced the population of fighting-age men. So in order to put more soldiers, more bodies, on the field, the Dahomey turned to its female population.

and they were more than up to the task. The Dahomey Amazons really take off under the reign of a guy named King Gezo, who ruled in the mid-1800s. So under his patronage, their numbers grow from about only 600 warriors to over 6,000. At the end of the day, they made up about half of the entire Dahomeyan army. So we know they were effective. We know they were scary.

And we know that there were a lot of them. But what kind of role did they occupy in Dahomian society? What was it like to be a badass female warrior in 19th century West Africa? The Amazons had a complicated relationship with gender. You know, it's tempting to think of them as proto-feminist champions, right? Living testaments to the equality of the sexes. But the truth is a little thornier than that.

For one, these warriors didn't think of themselves as women. They believed that by undergoing intense training, they became men and left their female identities behind. Another wrinkle to all this, technically all 6,000 of these warriors were wives to the king, but very few of them had any relationship with him whatsoever, which meant that they had no choice but to be celibate. Fooling around with a Dahomey Amazon was a huge no-no.

In fact, when the female warriors walked through town, they'd be preceded by a servant who rang a bell as a warning, and any man who heard that bell had to immediately turn around and cover his eyes. According to historian Stanley B. Alpern, quote, to even touch these women meant death. So all the Amazons lived together in barracks where they had an impressive array of comforts and luxuries,

They had access to large amounts of tobacco, alcohol, and they even had slaves of their own. Some sources say that each Amazon had a retinue of 50 slaves apiece. Now, it was not all comfort and luxury for the Amazons. They trained rigorously. They were tested in every way imaginable, both physically and psychologically. The goal was to harden these women, both to bodily pain and emotional distress, and

They had to drill every single day, train with weapons, and even crawl over razor-sharp thorn bushes. In this way, the Black Sparta nickname holds a lot of water. You know, the ancient Spartans had a similar hardcore regiment. But these women also needed to develop emotional calluses too, and that meant immersing the younger recruits in the sights, sounds, and smells of death, which often required their direct participation in ritual killings.

In 1889, a French naval officer visited the kingdom and actually managed to witness one of these rituals. What he saw was a teenage Amazon, just a kid, who hadn't killed anyone yet, and she was forced to decapitate a bound prisoner. According to him, she did it without flinching, and then she licked the blood off of her blade.

Colorful details like that could be true, or they could be the embellishments of a European colonialist parodying some of the cliche dark continent narratives. We don't really know. But what we do know is that these women were fierce killers, molded and shaped through a series of violent rites of passages. And as powerful and as badass as they were, it would not be the ferocious Amazons who steered the ultimate destiny of the Dahomey Kingdom.

It would be, surprise surprise, a group of white politicians. In 1807, the slave trade is abolished by Great Britain. Not slavery itself, but the transatlantic slave trade that has been thriving along the West African coast for two centuries. You can own, you can buy and sell existing slaves, but you can't steal any new ones.

All that revenue just goes away, dries up for those coastal African kingdoms, and that weakens them financially. Now, they can still trade with the Europeans, but instead of human trafficking, they need to export their natural resources instead. Well, the Europeans get a taste from that cup and start thinking to themselves, what if we just roll in and colonize these areas proper? We can take control of these resources and just cut out the middleman entirely.

So, in the late 1800s, the European nations like Germany, Great Britain, Belgium, France, and so on begin to colonize and seize African territory in order to exploit its natural resources. And it should be noted to also exploit the local people for cheap labor to gather those natural resources. This whole time period is something we call the Scramble for Africa. It's basically just this madcap rush by the Western powers to get their slice of the cake.

So you can probably start to see where this is going, right? It was only a matter of time before the Dahomey Kingdom came into conflict with these avaricious Europeans. And it ended up being the French that ultimately found themselves on the business end of the Amazonian machetes. The spark that lit the powder keg occurred in 1889, when Dahomey warriors raided a neighboring tribe that just happened to be under French protection.

The leader of the village tries to explain this to the Amazons, but they're not having any of it. They promptly cut his head off, and they carry it back to their king wrapped in a French flag. Pretty much a big F.U.

So this gives the French no choice. They gotta go to war. The Dahomian king, Behanzin, realizes that he's about to have the well-trained, well-armed troops of the French Foreign Legion knocking at his doors. So he authorizes a preemptive strike against their fort at the port city of Cotonou. At dawn, under the cover of a heavy downpour, the Dahomian army advances on the fort for a surprise attack. They're led by hundreds of Amazons.

The Africans assault the French stockades, and when the French soldiers see the female warriors, they freeze. They hesitate. That split second of inaction means death for many of them. The Amazons crawl over the stockades, tearing away stakes with their bare hands, and they engage these French troops in hand-to-hand combat. With the knives, with the machetes, with the two-handed swords that can cut a man in half, it's nasty.

This battle lasts for about four hours. The Amazons fight very well, but the advanced European weaponry is no joke. The French have artillery and repeating rifles, and that technological advantage is enough to turn the tide. The Amazons are driven back, but they leave a deep impression on the French soldiers. The French are very impressed by their courage, their skill in melee combat, and just generally how hardcore these women are. They're scary.

And there's certainly a hint of admiration in the way that the French talk about them afterwards. You get the sense that anyone who went toe-to-toe with these women came out of the experience feeling genuine awe towards them. After that first encounter, the French send their armies to crush the kingdom of Dahomey once and for all. They fight a long, nasty campaign into the interior that takes a few months.

The Amazons fight something like 23 distinct engagements with the French forces, but again, those modern European weapons turn the tide every time. When the French finally get to the Dahomeyan capital, they find it in flames. The king and his court have chosen the nuclear option. They burn their city to the ground, and they flee into the wilderness. The French take control of the region and gobble it up into their overseas empire.

That was the end of Dahomey and its female warriors. Now, it's amazing to me that there wasn't anything like the Dahomey Amazons at the time. You know, an official regiment of entirely female fighters that kicked ass on a massive scale. It seems that just the right amount of environmental and social factors came together to create opportunity for these women.

Now, the deeply problematic facet of the story is that their success came at the expense of freedom for thousands of enslaved Africans. The Amazons were deeply complicit, if not outright supportive, of the slave trade. Their success is held up by the grim pillar of human trafficking, and it's important to consider that before lavishing them with too much reverence.

Now, there's a lot of debate about the culpability of those kingdoms and the blame that they shoulder in perpetuating the transatlantic slave trade. But the purpose of this episode is not to unpack that particular Pandora's box. So let's end the story on a brighter note. You might think the Dahomey Amazons have been kicked under the rug of history, right? Relegated to being discussed in sparsely attended college courses and the occasional history podcast.

But odds are, you've already seen a big screen Hollywood adaptation of these female warriors. Extremely recently, in fact. If you're familiar with the film Black Panther and the elite female bodyguards that protect the King of Wakanda with their lives, then you're already sort of familiar with the Dahomey Amazons. You know, that group, they're called the Dora Milaje in the movie. They were based on the Dahomey Amazons. It's pretty cool.

And it's heartening to see the cultural legacy of such a unique group alive and well in our pop culture today in such a visible way. Hundreds of years later, the kingdom of Dahomey is still, in some small part, inspiring women to reach beyond their traditional role society has planned for them. ♪

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Welcome back. You're listening to part two of Wonder Women, a three-part episode on remarkable female soldiers throughout history and the complicated lives that they led. Please enjoy. Our next story takes us far from the sweltering coast of Africa to another hemisphere entirely, to the islands of Japan. At almost exactly the same time that the Amazons of Dahomey were at the height of their power, the stage was being set for a seismic geopolitical shift in the Far East.

a stage that would shine a tragic spotlight on another fearsome female soldier. On July 8th, 1853, fishermen in the harbor of Edo, Japan noticed something strange moving towards the docks. What appeared as tiny black shapes at first quickly became towering monoliths, belching thick smoke and shearing through the waves like scissors. The terrified fishermen rushed back to the port in a panic.

The superstitious ones reported seeing, quote, giant dragons puffing smoke. The others said they saw black ships coming into the harbor. Well, these dragons, these black ships, were actually steamships, and fluttering above each of them was an American flag. An expedition from the United States, led by a man named Commodore Matthew Perry, had arrived in what is today Tokyo Harbor.

These were the first foreign ships to enter those waters in some 250 years. And Commodore Perry was a man on a mission. He had a letter in his possession meant for one and one person alone, the Emperor of Japan. But before we get into all that, a little context, a little table setting.

The period in Japanese history that's about to come to an abrupt end is an era we call the Edo Period. It's named for the city of Edo, which is now called Tokyo. This period began way back in 1603, when a man named Tokugawa Ieyasu crushed his rivals, united the entire country, and established a ruling dynasty that would last for the next two and a half centuries.

Now, the reason that no foreign ships had sailed into Edo Harbor up until this point is because Japan had closed itself off. By order of the Tokugawa shoguns, the country had ceased any contact with the outside world. The idea was to inoculate itself from the corruptive influences of foreign culture, religion, and political ideology. For 250 years, Japan had been living in a bubble, and Commodore Matthew Perry had just popped it.

So remember how we talked earlier about how 19th century Western powers had seen the potential of Africa and wanted to exploit it for trade and natural resources? Well, East Asia was no exception. Foreign powers like Great Britain, Germany, Belgium, and France had already gotten their claws into the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and China. And the last scrap on the map, the last sponge yet unsqueezed, was Japan.

And the United States wanted in on that colonial action too, so President Millard Fillmore sent Commodore Matthew Perry to establish trade relations with the notoriously prickly Japanese. And when Perry's black ships enter Edo Harbor, the term gunboat diplomacy was coined. To make a long story somewhat less long, the Japanese are not pleased with their unexpected guests at all. But they can't argue with massive cannons and modern steam technology.

To show he means business, Perry fires on a few buildings in the harbor, which quickly go up in flames, and he says he will return in one year's time, and expects the Japanese to sign a trade deal with the U.S. when he does. So the Japanese have a crisis on their hands. They had carefully cultivated this little snow globe to live in, and no one had given it a shake since 1600.

But almost overnight, that's over. Because once the West comes, you can't unring that bell. There's no going back. A Japanese poet at the time actually wrote a few verses about the shock that people felt regarding this rude awakening. And it goes like this, quote, Awoken from sleep of a peaceful, quiet world by Pacific tea. With only four cups of it, one can't sleep, even at night. End quote.

It's very understated and subtle, but it beautifully encapsulates the disruption that this arrival has caused. So Commodore Matthew Perry returns and negotiations begin, but not with the Emperor. For hundreds of years, the position of Emperor has been purely ceremonial, rendered a powerless prop by the military clout of the Shoguns. The Emperor may be a living god with a bloodline that stretches back to antiquity, but he was essentially toothless.

It was the Tokugawa Shogun, descended from the original unifier of Japan back in 1603, that was the true power in the country. So when Commodore Perry returns, negotiations quickly turn in the favor of the Americans. The Shogun, not having any real leverage, folds and signs a very unfavorable trade treaty with the United States.

This enrages the Japanese population. From their perspective, this looks like an absolutely embarrassing belly-up move by the shogun. You know, he was supposed to protect them, to keep their shores safe and their culture unadulterated, and now he's opened the door for a veritable clown car of foreign diplomats, hell-bent on squeezing the Japanese people for every dollar they're worth. I guess every yen they're worth.

Eventually, after much turmoil and tedium that we don't have time to get into, all of this sparks a civil war. Many of the Japanese lords rise up against the shogun with the intent of restoring power back to the emperor, who they hope will do a better job of protecting them from being taken advantage of by the West. So what we have here is a war between two factions. The loyalists, who fight for the shogun and want to protect the status quo,

and the imperialists, who fight for the emperor and want to see a change in the balance of political power. Now, finally, after much table-setting, thank you for being patient, this is where a 21-year-old woman named Nakano Takeko enters the story. Nakano Takeko was from a samurai family in the province of Aizu, an area fiercely loyal to the shogun. Her father was a high-ranking official, but at a very young age, she'd been sent to live with a teacher in Edo.

Under the tutelage of this man, she learns how to read and write. She learns the etiquette expected of a woman from her class, but she also learns how to fight. Women from the samurai class were often trained in the use of weapons, specifically the use of a halberd-like instrument called the naginata.

So, when you think of this thing, just imagine a really long pole with a metal tip at the end, kind of like a spear, but instead of that traditional straight spearhead is a 15 inch curved blade, almost like a small sword made of razor sharp steel. And you'd hold it with two hands and you could swing it around in these wide sweeping arcs. That huge range made it easier to keep bigger, heavier opponents at a distance.

and with a flick of the wrist you could bring it down on an exposed neck or up into an unprotected groin not exactly something you want to find yourself on the receiving end of well Nakano Takeko was an expert with this weapon

Actually, women in Japan had been training with the naginata for centuries. That long reach and propensity for nimble movement made it ideally suited for female combatants. Samurai wives were expected to be proficient in this weapon in order to protect their families and homes from bandits or roving enemy soldiers.

After Tokugawa Ieyasu unified the country in 1603, Japan became a much more peaceful place, and the naginata evolved into more of a symbolic thing. Women would often be given new naginatas as wedding gifts, and they became emblems of her ability to shield her home, her children, and her way of life from the random violence and misfortune of the world.

This tradition persisted well into the 1800s, and training with the naginata became less of a practical consideration and more of a moral art. Basically what that means, it's like a deeply spiritual form of exercise. We have goat yoga, they had naginata practice. It took patience and hard work and talent to master, even if you knew you'd never have the opportunity to use it. Nakano Takeko likely never expected to carry her naginata into an actual pitched battle.

She never expected to have to kill heavily armed enemy soldiers with it. But when war came to her home province of Aizu, she was more than prepared to do just that. Nakano Takeko was born in 1847, so she would have been only about six years old when Commodore Perry's black ships steamed into Edo Harbor for the first time and fired on the city. She probably would have heard about this strange, frightening arrival.

She might have even seen the smoke rising from the buildings that the American ships had destroyed. And for someone her age, this had to have been what we call a flashbulb moment, right? Like the JFK assassination or 9-11, an event so dramatic and shocking that you never forget where you were or what you were doing when it happened. And a strange mechanical ship with loud cannons and oddly dressed white men was almost certainly that for the people of Edo.

and possibly for Nakano Takeko as well. You have to wonder if that uncertainty, that fear that gripped the Japanese people in the days after that encounter, didn't make an impression on the young Nakano Takeko. It might have had a deep effect on her, and even reinforced her need to protect herself in a rapidly changing world. Fast forward to 1868. The Civil War is in full swing and going very badly for the Shogun.

He's lost Kyoto, their traditional capital. He's lost Edo, the seat of his authority. And he's been forced to abdicate power to the emperor. The last pocket of resistance loyal to his cause is holed up in the northeast, in Aizu, which, if you remember, happens to be Nakano Takeko's home province.

The Imperial Army, bolstered by modern weapons, rifles, and artillery that they've acquired from the West, has this last area in a stranglehold. There's really no chance for the Shogun's forces at this point. It's only a matter of time. And the people in these areas begin to panic. Many of the women and children have husbands and fathers serving in the Shogun's forces. This does not bode well for them as the Emperor's army marches through their towns and their villages.

Rumors start to circulate about the horrible fates awaiting them if they're taken prisoner by the imperial forces. Gossip and fear just spread like wildfire. Many of the women here rumors that capture means a life of slavery and servitude to the Western foreigners who have turned their country upside down.

Mass suicides start happening in these towns and villages. Women from samurai families, separated from their sons and husbands with little idea of what's actually going on and no sense of hope, kill themselves and their children in these large, organized suicides. It's horrible, but in their minds, it was better to die that way than to befall whatever horrible fate awaited them at the clutches of the imperialists.

Nakano Takeko sees, or at the very least hears, about all of this. We don't know much about her thought process because she didn't leave any diaries or first-hand accounts behind, but she manages not to fall prey to this panic. Instead, Takeko, her mother, and her younger sister gather 30 women just like them, women from samurai families who've trained with the Naginata all their lives and head towards the last stronghold in Aizu.

a place called Crane Castle. At this point, Crane Castle is under siege by the Emperor's forces. It's totally surrounded, but it's also the only safe place left in the province for supporters of the Shogun. Safe is a strong word, but hey, options are limited. Takeko and her female warriors offer their services to a contingent of the Shogun's forces who are trying to break through the enemy lines and take refuge inside Crane Castle. The commander basically laughs in her face.

He does not want his men fighting alongside women. He argues that if the enemy soldiers saw women fighting for the shogun, they would interpret it as a sign of how weak and desperate the loyalist cause had become. Now, Takeko could have taken the out. Her pride wounded maybe, but her life and the lives of her warriors intact.

She tried, after all. It wasn't her fault the Shogun's own forces didn't want her to fight, but she and her 30 women warriors are deadly serious about their desire to defend their home. And Takeko pulls the suicide card on this commander, saying that if he decides to shame them by not letting them fight, they'll all kill themselves right then and there. The commander, presumably not wanting the blood of 30 young women on his hands, begrudgingly agrees to let them join the Shogun's army.

Now, I just want to take a quick second to talk about the role of suicide in Japanese society during this time period. It's been talked about a lot, and in many ways it's propelled parts of the narrative, so it's worth taking a look at. From an outside perspective, it might seem as though the Japanese had a very flippant, reactionary, even impulsive relationship with an act that we, in modern times, see as an absolutely tragic, completely avoidable thing.

We have suicide prevention hotlines. We have massive, aggressively funded initiatives to offer help and counseling, which is a great thing. You know, we don't want anyone to take their life or even threaten to do so. And what Takeko did could be seen as incredibly manipulative. It's not the same as threatening to kill yourself to motivate a lover or a friend or something like that, but it's in the ballpark. It is a manipulative thing to do, to threaten to kill yourself to get what you want.

But context is important, mainly because these women were not bluffing. They were absolutely prepared to take their own lives. And that's because suicide was anything but trivial to the Japanese. It was sacred. In many Asian cultures, and especially in Japan, suicide existed as a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card to reclaim a lost sense of honor or dignity. It was an act of redemption. For the 19th century Japanese, community was everything.

Shame and failure sent an earthquake of consequences rippling through not only your life, but the lives of your family members and acquaintances. It's hard to really understand in the West, and particularly in America, where we're so individualistic and such big believers in pulling oneself up by your bootstraps, overcoming failures, getting back in a saddle, and so on and so on. But it was another time, it was another place, and it was a vastly different value system informed by centuries of tradition.

So, for better or worse, Takeko and her thirty Onabushi they were part of the army now. So they formulate a plan to break through the siege lines surrounding Crane Castle and make it to the safety of the keep. To do this, Nakano Takeko takes her female warriors and leads an attack on the Imperial forces.

All of a sudden, these imperial soldiers see Takeko and her Onabushi sprinting towards them at full speed, carrying razor-sharp naginatas and bearing jet-black teeth. Now, this is a little visual detail I've been saving for the end. Women from samurai families in the Edo period often dyed their teeth black. The practice was called ohaguro, and it was actually a sign of maturity and considered very beautiful at the time.

Now, full disclosure, we can never know for sure if these particular women were rockin' pearly blacks, but it was a common practice at the time among their class, so for the sake of the visual, I'm gonna go with yes. Within seconds, the Onabushi fall upon the Imperial soldiers.

There's no time for these guys to form a firing line, so it just immediately devolves into an all-out brawl. Once the soldiers realize they're fighting women, the commanders start shouting orders to capture them, bring them down. But the Onabushi are hacking them apart, doing lots of nasty damage with those naginatas, and the capture order quickly gets abandoned in favor of the let's-just-make-it-out-of-this-thing-alive plan. Nakano Takeko performs exquisitely in combat.

All her training and years of practice come to fruition during this battle. She kills 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 heavily armed soldiers in the first several minutes alone. She's clearly one of the most skilled fighters on the battlefield. Unfortunately, that makes her a priority target. Before she can kill her seventh opponent, a musket ball shatters her sternum and she crumples to the ground.

Her 16-year-old sister, Yuko, sees her fall and rushes to her side. With her last breath, Takeko begs her little sister to remove her head so the emperor's soldiers can't take it as a trophy. And then she dies. Yuko tries to do what her sister asks, but she's either too exhausted from fighting or just, you know, not emotionally capable of decapitating her own sister. She can't do it.

Luckily, one of the Shogun soldiers, a group of whom had joined the battle at this point, sees the situation and helps her. He does the deed and gives Yuko her sister's head. She escapes the chaos of this battle and flees with this precious remnant of her brave sister to the safety of a neighboring province. As the story goes, she takes it to a secluded Buddhist temple and buries it beneath the boughs of a pine tree. Crane Castle eventually falls.

and the Emperor extinguishes the last remnants of support for the old world. In Nakano Takeko's tragically short lifetime, Japan has undergone a violent, shocking transformation, pulled back onto the world stage and blown out into the stormy waters of an uncertain future by the inexorable tide of Western imperialism. And in the midst of all that fear and cynicism and pain,

Nakano Takeko became a bright little flame of courage in a mercilessly changing world. Whoa, landing an account this big will totally change my landscaping business. It's going to mean hiring more guys and more equipment and new trucks for the new guys to drive the new equipment in. I don't know if I'm ready.

You can do this, and Ford Pro Fin Simple can help. Our experts are ready to make growing pains less painful for your business with flexible financing solutions that meet the needs of your business today when you need them. Get started at FordPro.com slash financing. Welcome back. You're listening to the third and final story in Wonder Women, a multi-part episode on remarkable female soldiers throughout history and the complicated lives that they led. Please enjoy.

Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, was a very perceptive man, a very intelligent man. And when he sealed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939, he was happy to carve his compensatory slice off of eastern Poland as reward for his troubles. Hitler would continue bringing Western Europe under Nazi control. The Soviet Union could continue developing and sit the conflict out undisturbed.

No one was stupid enough to attack the USSR, massive as it was, stretching all the way from the frigid forests of Eastern Europe to the icy islands of the Northern Pacific. Yes, Joseph Stalin was an intelligent man, but even he could not have anticipated the betrayal of Adolf Hitler.

In the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany broke its agreement with Stalin and launched an offensive called Operation Barbarossa deep into the heart of Soviet territory. Suddenly, without notice, the sons and daughters of Russia were called upon to defend their home.

Years earlier, a young woman named Marina Raskova had huddled against a frozen tree, gnawing on a single square of rock-solid chocolate with chattering teeth. Her plane, for which she had served as navigator, had iced up and run out of fuel over Manchuria, just north of China. She bailed out and parachuted into the dark forest.

It was no ordinary flight, but a Lindbergian attempt to fly the entire length of the Soviet Union, from Moscow to the Pacific. Not knowing the fate of her aircraft, she survived 10 days allotting a single square per day from the chocolate bar she'd kept in her pocket. Eventually, she found her plane, her crew, and almost overnight, her lifelong celebrity status.

This 26-year-old woman, who had survived a week and a half with no food, no shelter, was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union for her struggle and sacrifice. And a few short years later, as the mechanized might of the Third Reich cast its shadow over Russian territory, Marina Raskova found herself in the Kremlin, waiting outside the office of Comrade Stalin himself, with a very specific request in mind.

Marina Raskova was an aviation hero, and when war came to Russia, she saw an opportunity to create something unheard of, a trio of combat flying units consisting solely of female pilots, mechanics, and navigators. No one knows what exactly Raskova said to Stalin, but he agreed. And after that meeting, three regiments were born. The 586th Fighter Regiment,

the 587th Heavy Bomber Regiment, and the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. Raskova had done the impossible, an official exclusively female branch of the Soviet Air Force blessed by Comrade Stalin himself. Now all she had to do was find some pilots.

In their meeting, Stalin had been very clear. Raskova was not permitted to draft any Soviet women into her units. They all had to be volunteers, from the cockiest pilot to the grubbiest mechanic. She found them in spades at the Soviet Union's numerous flying clubs, where women studied aviation theory, technique, and mechanical know-how alongside men.

Once word was out that the Marina Raskova was looking for brave Soviet women to defend the skies of Mother Russia, the girls came flocking. They came from all corners and all backgrounds. But most were poor, looking for glory, excitement, and maybe even a little money for their families back home. One of these women was 20-year-old Lilia Litviak.

Lilia's father had died in the purges of the 30s, detained and shot by Stalin's secret police force, the NKVD.

What his crime was, we don't know. But whatever misgivings Lilia had about the government's role in her father's death, she still felt the Patriots' pull to defend her country against the Nazis. When she arrived at the training base on the Volga River, she was surprised and perturbed to find that the first thing she was required to do was have her long chestnut brown hair sheared off to just below the ear. Raskova's orders, they said.

Many of the new female recruits had to say goodbye to their locks. Some wept for the hair they'd been lovingly growing out since they were little girls. But when Lilia Litviak had her hair cut, she immediately went and found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and dyed the short curls that remained bleach blonde. Lily, as she came to be known, wasn't about to let them snuff out any expression of her femininity, even if they were in a desperate war for survival.

This would not be the last act of defiance from the headstrong Lili Litviak. Discipline was loose in those early days as the new recruits struggled to adjust to the rhythms and expectations of life on a military airbase. There was one incident where an officer caught two of the women sleeping on guard duty. Furious, she reported them directly to Marina Raskova.

Raskova just kind of laughed it off. She said, quote, Marina Raskova was no softie, though. She was a true Russian hardass. When she arrived at the airbase and found her personal sleeping quarters lavishly, and I use that term loosely, lavishly decorated with a large bed and a rug, she ordered them removed and replaced with a simple cot.

As the women trained to fly, fight, and repair their aircraft, they faced all kinds of obstacles and hardships, both from without and within. One of which was widespread pushback from their male peers that they could even do the job properly. They were mocked, belittled, patronized, and even endured outright hostility. To the women out there listening to this show, if you've worked in any kind of professional environment, a lot of this is probably ringing a few bells.

In Russian historian Lyuba Vinogradova's book called "Defending the Motherland," she writes, quote: "The men and other flying units stationed there were greatly entertained by their arrival. An all-female unit, and an airborne one at that, was simply unbelievable. The men immediately nicknamed the girls 'Dollies.'

When the Dali's administrator, Nina Ikavina, told their instructor, a senior lieutenant, that she was a political officer, his eyes grew wide with astonishment, and he exclaimed, What? You even have political officers? Like, a real regiment? A few of the more dickish male pilots even had their own equivalent of a women-can't-drive joke.

When the female pilots would approach the runway for a landing, the guys would jokingly dive for cover as if she was going to crash into them. They'd say, quote, A lot of this pushback stemmed from a misplaced sense of protectiveness. The men felt they needed to keep their girls out of harm's way, even if they were technically equals under the egalitarian communist society. It all lends truth to Orwell's notion that in the USSR, some really were more equal than others.

To add insult to injury, when these women get their official aviators uniforms, they don't even fit. Like, at all. The Russian military doesn't have uniforms designed to fit the female body yet, so they're stuck wearing ridiculously large, baggy, uncomfortable clothing. It drags, it chafes, it's difficult to run in. Not the ideal situation for a soldier.

And it goes without saying that they don't have comfortable undergarments either. In fact, most have none at all. For this reason, German silk parachutes become prized discoveries later in the war. The pilots would tear out the soft silk and sew themselves bras and underwear from the captured material. As you can imagine, this fashion-challenged situation is not acceptable for the newly blonde Lili Litviak.

In the Soviet army, modifying your uniform, changing it, was a big no-no. Well, Lily Litviak either missed that day in basic or didn't care. To make her uniform a little more stylish, she sews a white fur collar onto it. It seems trivial, but this is actually like a huge incident. It provokes some disapproving shade from some of her fellow pilots, perhaps with a little tinge of jealousy.

But it also gets Lily in the crosshairs of the political officer embedded in the regiment. The Soviet army had thousands of hardcore Communist Party reps woven into every single unit in its military. These officers served as the white blood cells of the communist ideology, identifying and combating threats to the party as they arose in real time. That meant putting down dissent, disobedience, and anything that could be construed as anti-communist.

Something like, say, sewing a white fur collar onto your flight jacket. And you didn't just have to watch out for the political officers here and there. There was a really pervasive culture of informing, tattling, essentially. Many of the women kept diaries, and they soon discovered that they needed to be very careful about what they wrote down, what they put in the letters they sent home, and what they said to each other during meals or in the sleepless hours of the night.

If it got back to party representatives that you'd said anything even remotely defamatory or disrespectful about the Soviet political institutions, you could find yourself demoted, sent to a prison camp, or facing a firing squad. Lily manages to get herself out of the hot political water, but she develops a reputation after that as a bit of a brash rule-breaker. Thankfully, she's good. She's really good. Her talent as a fighter pilot is undeniable.

In fact, many of the female pilots become very skilled very quickly, and that competence quickly shifts the perception of their regiments away from a one-off novelty and towards a legitimate combat unit. I think it's absolutely amazing what these female pilots, and in fact any World War II fighter pilot, was able to do. When you were up in the sky, in the cockpit of one of these aircraft, the enemy was only one of the myriad things that could kill you.

The smallest mistake or variable could cost you your life. A sudden change in the weather, low visibility, featureless terrain, a misjudgment of altitude, a malfunctioning instrument, a faulty parachute. Any of these things could turn you into a charred corpse in a matter of seconds. And that's to say nothing of the German Air Force. They're called the Luftwaffe.

These dudes had arguably the most advanced aircraft in the world in 1941. They were fast, agile, and piloted by some almost supernaturally skilled aces. These German aces had kill counts in the dozens. You get into a dogfight with them, and you weren't likely to set foot back on solid ground alive again. For the first several months of the war, most Soviet pilots just outright avoid direct confrontation with them.

One German bomber pilot said, It wasn't much better on the ground either.

To say life for the average Soviet pilot was uncomfortable would be a massive understatement. First of all, these air bases are not particularly well built or developed. As the Germans advance deeper into Russia, the Soviet air regiments have to keep moving constantly to new airfields to keep from being overrun. These airfields are largely improvised, often consisting of no more than a runway to land the planes on and maybe a few clay huts or drafty wooden buildings to set up living quarters in.

Sometimes there weren't even buildings at all, and the women would have to take shovels and literally dig holes in the ground to sleep in, and then cover them with metal sheets and warm them with little oil lamps. There's no toothpaste available. There's no toilet paper either. It sucks. But at least the food was really good. No, just kidding. The food was awful.

All the best rations went to the infantry and the armor units fighting on the front lines, so the majority of women in Raskova's regiments got thin, watery porridge and about a thimbleful of vodka every day. Some of the officers would get meat and butter, but only in little meager amounts. And even that was enough to arouse severe resentment and jealousy within the lower ranks.

Some of the mechanics would save little hunks of bread to chew on while they worked just to feel slightly less hungry. But these ladies were tough. They take it all in stride. And in an environment that stressful, you gotta find a way to have fun. To blow off steam. The women are not shy whatsoever about fraternizing with their male peers. And you gotta remember, these are mostly 20-something men and women with the constant threat of death hanging over them.

Many of the female pilots look forward to going to local parties and dances. It's all kind of frowned upon by leadership, but they understand how critical it is to keep morale up whenever possible. The women not having any access to makeup or cosmetics, some of them came from peasant families who'd never even seen a tube of lipstick, they just, uh, they improvise to get themselves party ready.

What some of them would do is burn the tip of a cork to a charred black, then they would use that to shade their eyebrows. For lipstick, they'd crush red pencil lead up and mix it with animal fat, and then daub it on their lips. Lili Litviak is a big hit at these parties. She loves to dance, her radiant personality just always lights up the room, and many sources mention what a great laugh she had.

Needless to say, she left a trail of broken hearts wherever she went. The guys loved her. Lilly's best friend and fellow fighter pilot, Katya Budanova, is also a big hit at these parties. But she's the polar opposite of her friend. Whereas the bleach blonde Lilly was hyper-feminine and loud and vivacious,

Katya Budenova was a quiet and reflective person. She was very tall and she was slender, and what she liked to do occasionally was tuck her hair back a bit and then wear her dress uniform to these parties. Many of the local girls who didn't know her would think she wasn't a young woman at all, but a strapping, handsome male pilot. The ladies loved Katya.

Sometimes she'd walk them home from the parties, and on one of these walks, the local woman who she was escorting just suddenly throws her arms around her and starts kissing her. Katya immediately flees. She's blushing. She's embarrassed. Another funny story involves a young enlisted woman named Valya Krasnashiakova. Try spelling that, by the way. Good lord. Liuba Vinogradova says in her book about Valya, quote, Valya noticed a small packet on the table and picked it up.

She said, is this some kind of spare part? There was a roar of laughter and Valya, confused, realized it must have been a condom. As I mentioned before, a lot of these stories come from the book Defending the Motherland by Liuba Vinogradova. And the author does such an amazing job at bringing these women to life as fully realized people with flaws and dreams and little personality tics.

It's a great book, and if you're enjoying the story so far, you should check it out, because we only have time to barely scratch the surface of the fascinating lives that these women led. Anyway, let's zoom out a little bit. By winter 1942, the war is going really badly for the USSR. The Germans have plunged their armies into the heartland of Russia, capturing city after city, town after town. The Soviets can't seem to get it together.

When the Germans start bearing down on the key factory city of Stalingrad on the Volga River, Stalin snaps. He issues Order 227, which becomes known as the Not One Step Back Order. The Soviets have been retreating and retreating in the face of superior German firepower and tactics, but now it's time to dig their heels in and fight to the death.

If Stalingrad falls, and its key production facilities with it, that could be a knockout punch in the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Order 227 said, quote, End quote.

This is a death sentence for many Soviet soldiers. But Stalin's thinking big picture. Basically, he's like, look, if we don't stop the Nazis here and now, we lose everything. Some of you are just going to have to take one for the team. And Stalin's hands were already drenched with the blood of his own people at this point. So what's a few more hundred thousand in his eyes? Stalingrad becomes a massive engagement. It's a long, nasty, urban battle.

One of the biggest of the war. And it was over the skies of this ruined metropolis that the women of Raskova's aerial regiments would receive their baptism by fire. On September 27th, 1942, Lili Litviak, callsign Siegel, hops into her single-prop fighter and soars into her first real engagement. Weaving through the cloudy, smog-choked skies above Stalingrad, she shoots down a small German dive-bomber.

The Soviet radio operator later reported that Lily had started her attack with a cheerful, here goes. This bomber manages to crash Lance safely on the ground. Soviet troops haul its pilot out of the cockpit and are shocked at what they find. A German ace pilot, his chest covered in medals and Third Reich honors, likely credited with dozens of kills, sat there scowling back at them.

When he hears that a 20-year-old woman had shot him down, he literally refuses to believe it. This is the first of many credited victories for Lily Litviak, and she quickly gains infamy as one of the most skilled female fighter pilots in the Soviet air regiments. Her successes serve a big role in legitimizing the use of women in the aviation forces.

Liliya's close friend Katya Budenova also serves with distinction in the Battle of Stalingrad, racking up some impressive victories and developing a reputation of her own. But it wasn't all glory for Raskova's women warriors. Tragedy hung over these regiments constantly, and women were often injured and even lost their lives in pointless, inglorious ways.

On one occasion, a young pilot named Lina Smirnova was flying a superior officer's plane, and she was nervous about anything happening to it while in the air. See, pilots had really strong attachments to their aircraft. Vinogradova says in her book, "...it had something of the cavalryman's attitude to his horse. The technology was seen almost as a living thing, and if there was the slightest chance of saving it, even at the risk of their own lives, people tried."

As Lena was making a routine landing, she misjudges the altitude because of some tall grass she can't see where the ground is. She hits the ground really hard, and the propeller on her superior's plane was badly damaged. She's distraught over the fact that her superior's machine took such a beating on her watch. It could have been a lot worse, but, quote, "...despite this good fortune, the pilot went to pieces."

She climbed out of her plane, saw it was damaged, wrote a note, and shot herself in the head. End quote. Another sad story involves Gaila Dukovic, a pilot from the Night Bomber Regiment. She had returned to her airfield after a long night of flying multiple missions, dropping bombs on German targets. It had been a really successful evening, and she got quite a few claps on the back when she returned.

Exhausted but proud of herself, she fell asleep in the grass of the airfield, looking up into the night sky. Well, there was a refueling truck making its rounds around the airfield, and it didn't see her, and it ran her over with its heavy wheels. She didn't die, but she spent months and months recovering from catastrophic spinal injuries. Eventually, she gets well and makes it back to her unit, only to be killed a short time later.

Her closest friend and fellow pilot, Polina Gelman, managed to survive the war, and years afterwards, named her first daughter after her friend Gela. Polina passed away in 2005, at the age of 86. There were many things for Soviet aviators to fear on the Eastern Front, chief of which was being shot down over enemy territory. Although maybe not for the reason you'd expect.

Another woman from the night bomber regiment, a chief engineer named Sonia Ozarkova, was shot down over Nazi-controlled territory. She survives the crash, but has to trek back with her pilot through miles of wilderness, circumventing towns and roads, crawling with German soldiers. Sonia tears up her Communist Party ID card, because if the Nazis find that, they'll kill her on the spot.

One time they're found by a Wehrmacht motorcycle patrol. Before the Germans can figure out who she is, Sonya pulls out her pistol and shoots them both. After three weeks, she finally makes it back to Soviet territory. Sonya is relieved at first. Her ordeal is over. At least she thought it was. Her debriefing quickly becomes an interrogation, and agents from Soviet military counterintelligence start asking some very pointed questions.

Had she spoken with any Germans while behind enemy lines? Well, yes. She'd had a brief exchange before she shot the two patrolmen. Where was her party ID card? Uh, gone. She'd torn it up to protect herself in the event of capture. Was she not willing to die for her communist beliefs? Had these German soldiers indoctrinated or infected her with any fascist ideology when they'd spoken to her?

This conversation quickly spirals out of control, and before she knows it, Sonia is arrested, her head is shaved, and she's been sentenced to death by firing squad. This kind of thing happened in Stalinist Russia all the time, both in peacetime and war. The Soviet authorities were very suspicious of people who had spent any time in other countries or in territory controlled by different political ideologies.

They viciously interrogated their own soldiers and often accused them of being converted to fascism and returning home as brainwashed double agents bent on bringing down the Communist Party. It sounds like the paranoid ramblings of an unhinged Reddit thread, but that was just how the Russian government was back then. The Soviets were intensely paranoid and distrustful of other countries, and their own people often paid the price of that irrational, conspiracy-minded worldview.

Luckily for Sonia Ozarkova, before she can be lined up against the wall, a party rep from her unit gets wind of this whole situation and negotiates a pardon for her. Putting bullets into heroes from Marina Raskova's all-female regiment just wasn't good PR. Naturally, the whole thing left a lasting effect on Sonia. She said after the war, quote,

If I am walking down the street and someone gives me a fixed stare, I shudder and my heart starts pounding. End quote. By this point, the war is starting to turn in Russia's favor. Stalingrad ended in a crushing defeat for the Germans and the Red Army is soon back on the offensive. But on the heels of that miraculous victory, the unthinkable happens. On January 4th, 1943, Marina Raskova and her crew are flying to an airfield near Stalingrad.

Suddenly, the weather gets very bad, and rather than turn back, Raskova makes the decision to press on. Snow flurries and mist bring visibility down to zero, and in an attempt to make an emergency landing, Raskova crashes headfirst into the banks of the Volga River. She and her crew are killed instantly. This is a huge morale blow to the Russian people, and the women of the aviation regiments especially.

This is the woman who survived 10 days in the Manchurian wilderness, who lobbied Stalin himself to create three all-female regiments. She was a hero to the Soviet people, and she died not in battle, but on a muddy riverbank in a crash she herself had brought about. Marina Raskova is given a massive state funeral, and all of Russia mourns her. But the fight isn't over, and no one, especially the female aviators, can afford to wallow in their grief.

By this time, the female aviators had proven their worth many times over, and they're quickly integrated into larger, traditionally male regiments. The air forces needed all the talented pilots they could get, and Raskova's soldiers had proven that they were no mere sideshow. But there's still the occasional doubting Thomas when it comes to their abilities. One commander asks a pilot named Anya Yegorova why she would want to be transferred to his regiment.

He said, quote, Her response is pretty awesome. Anya says, quote, quote,

Or maybe being a sniper, spending hours in all weathers stalking enemies, killing them, and getting killed yourself. Or maybe it's easier now for women in the rear, smelting metal or growing crops while trying to bring up children at the same time. End quote. That shuts the commander up pretty quick. Lili Litviak is transferred to one of these co-ed regiments. And there she meets a handsome young ace named Alexei Salamatin. He's a prolific fighter pilot as well, with many kills to his name.

And they fall for each other, and they're soon inseparable. By this time, the Russian female pilots were coming to the attention of the Germans as well, particularly the women of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment. They flew in outdated, rickety biplanes, dropping bombs in the dead of night on unsuspecting German positions. The Germans started hatefully calling them the Nachthexen, or Night Witches.

supposedly because the whooshing sound of the wooden wings sounded like the whoosh of a broomstick. The Night Witches are an interesting case of what's almost like inverse propaganda. So the Germans were scared of them, for sure, but colorful little rumors start popping up on the Russian side about just how scared the Germans were of them.

The Night Witches came to believe that the Germans honestly thought that the women were given special injections to attain night vision, or that they were half-women, half-animal hybrids sent to the front to terrorize the German forces. One myth even said that when any Soviet pilot was shot down, the German soldiers would make them strip to determine whether or not they were the dreaded Night Witches.

The Germans were legit scared of them, though. Shooting down one of the Night Witches would automatically earn you a medal. Whatever rumors were being whispered by scared German soldiers on the Eastern Front, these outlandish stories helped bolster the confidence of the almost suicidally brave women of the 588th.

In the summer of 1943, as the Germans are pushed back further and further west, the Nazi high command realizes they need to stop the Soviet forces and reverse the tide of the war. So they launch a massive offensive called Operation Citadel in an area called Kursk, just north of modern-day Ukraine. It's a huge battle. Millions of people die in this engagement, including many, many Soviet aviators.

On July 19th, 1943, Katya Budenova gets into a dogfight with three German fighters. She riddles one with bullets, shooting it down. She damages the second, forcing it to retreat, but the third damages her aircraft's wings, and she has to make an emergency landing. She manages to put the plane on the ground, but her wounds are too bad, and she dies right there in her cockpit. Lili Litviak lost her best friend that day. Just two months earlier,

She'd had to bury her lover, Alexei Selomatin. He crashed his plane doing aerial tricks above a Soviet airfield. In the late summer of 1943, Lily writes a letter to her mother. She says, quote,

End quote.

On August 1st, 1943, Lily Litvyak flies four successful missions. She goes on her fifth mission for that day and never comes back. She disappears. Her wingman said he saw her being pursued by German fighters, but he lost sight of her. Some locals reported that they saw a Russian fighter shot down that day over the Kursk area. So the Soviet forces scour the area, but they find nothing. Not a plane, not a body, nothing.

Lily is never found. Some rumors pop up in Russia that she was taken captive or that she defected to the Germans. No one really knows how to explain her disappearance. Her death is shrouded in controversy for a long time. Did Liliya Litvyak die a hero? Did she betray Russia and go AWOL? Did she join the Germans? For years, her mother hoped and prayed that she was somewhere out in the world, alive and happy.

Well, in the 1970s, some schoolboys were playing outside of a small village. They were reaching into a hole trying to capture a garden snake, and they find the remains of a woman. The body didn't have any identifying marks or clothing, but they do find pieces of a World War II-era flight helmet and a few clumps of bleach blonde hair. Whatever happened to Lily Litviak

On May 6, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev posthumously awarded her the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. By the end of World War II, the women of Raskova's three female aviation regiments had flown over 30,000 missions. Their efforts were critical in the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany.

Well, what a journey it's been. This has been a long episode, we've covered lots of ground, so thanks for sticking with me. Hopefully you enjoyed the globetrotting format as much as I enjoyed researching and reading about all these incredible women. And the most amazing thing is, these are only three examples of women in combat. There are so many more remarkable stories throughout history of women putting their lives on the line, fighting, killing, and dealing with the intense pressures of war.

But these particular stories stuck out to me as having not just the right mix of drama and emotional resonance, but also some uncomfortable moral implications and messy ideologies. The Dahomey Amazons were absolute badasses, but they were willing accomplices to the transatlantic slave trade and all the terrible misery that came with it. Nakano Takeko fought on the wrong side of history, as the tides of change were sweeping Japan in a more progressive, prosperous direction.

But she did so with incredible skill and grace, motivated not by any political loyalty, but a commitment to her family and personal sense of honor. Stalin's Russia was a human rights nightmare, which persecuted, murdered, and oppressed its own citizens, but the women who fought to preserve it were heart-wrenchingly brave and uncommonly resilient.

It's been a hell of a ride, and hopefully the next time you hear someone express doubts about women in combat, or in any context, you can point them to these stories for a little enlightenment. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening. I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol, about the choices they confront when failure is not an option.

I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.