What were you doing when you were 16 hanging out of the mall working in a coffee shop

Sneaking out to parties and fooling around in cars or maybe in your bedroom when your parents weren't around

Maybe you're playing so many awesome video games

What about when you were 17 when you're filling out college applications at the kitchen table

Arguing with your parents about how they need to treat you like an adult because you're about to be on your own

Even though they still pay virtually all of your life expenses. How about 20?

Will you work in a part-time job taking some classes kicking back with friends on the weekends maybe party in a little too hard or a lot too hard

Drink it so much cheap beer liquor you black out a couple times a semester or a couple times a month

Obviously, I don't know exactly what you were doing will be doing or are doing right now in your late teens and early 20s

But I do know for a fact you weren't or you aren't or you will not be fighting Hitler's Nazis

I know you've never flown tiny ass airplanes essentially made a canvas and balsa wood and duct tape behind enemy lines

While better equipped and better trained Nazis tried and tried really hard to kill you

But that's exactly what the night witches and their peers were doing on

October 8th 1941 with Hitler's operation Barbarossa

Pressing on Moscow and the Red Army struggling to keep them back

Stalin gave orders to deploy three primarily all female Air Force units the 586

587 and 588 regiments the units used a few male mechanics and other ground personnel here and there

But we're 99% women when they were in fact all women

Led by the indomitable Marina Raskova nicknamed the Russian Amelia Earhart these female pilots will be tasked not only with flying missions and dropping bombs

Many of them would engage in aerial dog fights and shoot enemies out of the skies

Marina selected around 400 women for each of these three units most were university students ranging in age from 17 to 26

Girls who have been flying as a hobby and one of Russia's many flight clubs, but who had never thought they would ever become soldiers

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