Hello everyone welcome back to the history hit warfare podcast I am your host

James Rogers and each week twice a week I bring you brand new cutting-edge

military histories from Napoleonic battles and Cold War confrontations through

to the Normandy landings and 9-11.

You can pop back through our back catalogue of over 200 episodes,

and you can check out our original content on Instagram at James Rogers History, got some great

reels and stories on the go there and on Twitter at History Hit

W.2. Also check out our TV documentaries on History Hit.com. Now once a week I like to delve deep into the History Hit

archive and pull out an episode that I think deserves a bit more attention. And with a title like

this you can understand why. This one is on the forgotten bastards of the

Eastern Front. The story behind this is that from 1941 onwards

Stalin Soviet Union was joined in that close but awkward coalition with the Western allies. Military

aid and intelligence flowed to the Soviets but virtually no troops and this was with

the exception of a small group of US airmen who were sent to Russia to set up an air operation to bomb targets in the third Reich.

This is a story of that unit and they called themselves the forgotten bastards of the Eastern Front. So here is Harvard Professor

Sir He Plocki on all the material he is uncovered that sheds new light on their time

in Stalin's Russia.

Enjoy. Thank you for coming on the podcast. It's a great pleasure to be on the program.

Now, this is a, it does what it says on the tin, this is a forgotten story.

How did these airmen find their way to the Soviet Union during the Second World War?

This is a good question.

Well, they first had to come to Britain, and then most of them were shipped by sea. First they went to Mediterranean, they went to Egypt, then they took a train ride to Iran and then they put them on the tracks and eventually they got to the

...