Narrator: April 1945 -- Berlin is in ruins.

Hitler has retreated to his bunker.

He's surrounded.

The Soviets, the whole Red Army's on the doorstep.

It's time to get out.

Grab what you can and run.

Narrator: But some Nazis want to fight on and save their beloved fuhrer.

A daring rescue is planned.

At the heart of this suicide mission is a famous test pilot and Nazi "It" girl, Hanna Reitsch.

Hanna is a brilliant pilot, and she had huge physical courage.

Narrator: Together with the head of the Luftwaffe, Hanna plans to snatch Hitler from Soviet clutches by flying across enemy lines and landing close to his bunker.

The only aircraft left available to them was a little light reconnaissance aircraft.

Narrator: Over Berlin, their defenceless plane is attacked by Allied fighters.

Hanna Reitsch has defied death many times.

but this rescue may be a mission too far.

Hanna wasn't the only woman fighting in the skies over Europe.

Thousands of female pilots, gunners, and navigators -- on both sides of the conflict -- put their lives on the line in their quest for victory.

This is their story.

The only protection we had was our steel helmets and our respirators.

But we never thought about it being dangerous.

If we could stop the planes coming in, the less bombing would be done in land.

Adkins: She was very determined.

The more people said, "You can't do it," the more she said, "I'll show you."

Women are doing the unthinkable.

They are fighting.

That just years earlier would've been beyond their wildest dreams.

♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: June 1940, the Battle of Britain.

The Royal Air Force versus the Luftwaffe -- a fight for aerial supremacy and a fight for national survival.

The Germans are at the French coast.

Hitler seems unstoppable.

The British people are preparing for an invasion.

They fully expect at this point that one is possible, and seeing the dogfights in the air every day when you go outside really brings that home.

It's a scary, scary time.

Dunlop: We can take a historian's point of view and say it was never gonna work.

You know, Hitler was never gonna manage to invade Britain.

You just need to look at the numbers.

But that's not what it felt like in the autumn of 1940, not when you got Nazis in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in France.

You can see the glint of their binoculars if you go far enough down on the southeast coast looking over the channel.

Narrator: During the course of the battle, over 500 RAF pilots were killed and over 1,500 planes were lost.

Factories across Britain made replacements as fast as possible.

Pilots were needed to fly them from the factories to the airfields, where the main fighter squadrons were based.

But no-one from the frontline could be spared.

Coming to the rescue was the all-male Air Transport Auxiliary -- the ATA.

Miller: The Air Transport Auxiliary is a civilian organisation that is basically created to carry out non-operational flying to help the RAF, carrying mail and medical supplies and ferrying things from place to place.

But eventually the ATA actually manages to help the RAF moving operational aircraft from factories where they're made or maintenance units and taking them to stations where they'll be flown into battle.

Narrator: It became clear that the scale of the conflict could overwhelm the Air Transport Auxiliary.

A well-known pilot named Pauline Gower had a solution.

She proposed something totally unprecedented.

The ATA should form a women's branch.

The top brass reluctantly agreed, although they had conditions.

When Pauline Gower first recruits the first eight women who joined the ATA, they are recruited to carry out strictly non-operational flying.

So, they're not allowed to carry out duties in war planes, and they are paid around 20% less than men.

But Pauline Gower, having worked very hard, managed to get them paid equally, which is a first for the British military.

They're also, because of Pauline's fight, allowed to fly operational aircraft, ranging from Spitfires and hurricanes all the way up to four-engine bombers.

Narrator: These pioneering women faced opposition.

The editor of a leading aircraft magazine wrote... Biggin Hill Airfield in Kent... During the Battle of Britain, pilots here defended London from German bombers.

Just like their wartime predecessors, today's Biggin Hill technicians work to restore and keep fighters in the air.

This is the hollowed-out fuselage of Spitfire UB441.

It was flown by an exceptional aviator who joined the ATA at the height of the Battle of Britain -- Jackie Moggridge.

♪♪ ♪♪ Jackie's daughter, Candy, has come to Biggin Hill to see the plane that meant so much to her mother.

She'd have really made friends with this.

I can't wait to see it as a plane again.

Narrator: At the end of the war, Jackie flew UB441 all the way to Burma, just one of scores of Spitfires she flew during her career.

Adkins: This is what she steered it with.

This is the joystick.

Gosh.

It makes me want to put my hands where her hands were, just feel that she was sitting there.

I don't know why it moves me so much, but it does because she talked about this, and I've actually seen it.

And wouldn't she have loved to have seen this, to actually have seen it resurrected?

Mind you, she would probably think it's looking a bit battered.

[ Laughs ] Narrator: The women of the ATA flew alone, even Wellington bombers, which usually had a crew of six.

It was a dangerous job.

They were unarmed and defenceless.

Brand-new planes weren't fitted with guns.

To escape the Luftwaffe, they had to rely solely on their aviation skills.

They are not taught to fly on instruments.

So, if they run into British weather, like fog, which they're quite likely to do in Britain, they are not able to use instruments to fly through that, which is obviously quite a big problem.

They're not using radios so they're not connected to anybody if they need help.

And then there are issues of mechanical failure or accidents in training, and it's actually quite dangerous work.

Narrator: In some ways, more was expected of an ATA pilot than a typical RAF flyer.

Often ATA pilots would be climbing into an aircraft that they probably haven't seen before, with nothing more than a notebook or a ring binder full of statistics and instructions on how the aircraft works and how to fly it.

And it tells you what you need to know -- flaps, engines, tanks.

it'll tell you the distance you needed for the runway.

A hundred and forty-seven planes in here in total in the war.

And my mother flew 83 different types.

Narrator: Candy's collection of her mother's logbooks and journals give a glimpse into Jackie's life in the ATA, including the many dangers she faced.

Over 170 ATA pilots were killed in the Second World War.

They risked death every day -- and not just from the Luftwaffe.

Barrage balloons -- tethered by long steel cables -- protected British cities from low-level enemy attack.

But they were also dangerous for ATA pilots.

Adkins: They were meant to know when the barrage balloons were coming up.

But if you had sirens and you were in the air already, no connection with the ground, no one could tell you.

Narrator: One day in 1941, dodging the balloons and their lethal cables, Jackie came into land at a heavily defended airfield at high speed.

She came in too late on the runway, and she's heading too fast for the gunner at the end, and she's like, "I'm gonna kill him."

So, she veered to the left and luckily there was a hedge and not a wall, and she didn't damage the plane.

You knew that you could replace the pilot.

But the plane cost so much money that the war couldn't cope with losing any more planes.

Narrator: By September 1944, the ATA were headline news.

The best-selling magazine "Picture Post" put 1st Officer Maureen Dunlop on the cover.

The establishment had resisted the female pilots.

but the public took them to their hearts.

By then the ATA had made a significant contribution towards Allied victory.

Over the course of the war, they ferried over 309,000 aircraft across the U.K. Just to put it in perspective, that's 309,000 aircraft that the Royal Air Force are not having to fly, which frees up a tremendous number of pilots for frontline service.

So, it's incredibly important work that they're doing.

In this total war, women have suddenly been given an instrumental role.

They've been given agency.

Women have become a vital component part of a war machine, which just years earlier was all male.

Narrator: Jackie Moggridge's flying career didn't stop when the war ended.

In 1950, she got her full RAF wings and went on to become Britain's first female commercial airline pilot.

She was very adventurous, and she was very determined because the more people said, "You can't do it," the more she said, "I'll show you."

She thought the sky's the limit, and she went there and beyond.

Narrator: Supporting Jackie and the other pilots were thousands of women determined to help defend Britain's skies, not from a cockpit, but from the ground.

During the Second World War, the pilots of the Royal Air Force and the Air Transport Auxiliary worked alongside another remarkable team of women -- the WAAFs, the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.

They supported the RAF from the ground, as mechanics, radio operators, and as plotters.

They did everything except get in the cockpit.

Jacqueline Coleman became a WAAF in 1942.

Coleman: I joined up, because I wanted to do more than just a safe occupation.

The men had all been sent off to operational stations, and the ones that weren't operational were getting short of mechanics.

That's when they made the girls mechanics.

And I said, "Well, don't make me in engines because I'm the most unmechanical person you could possibly find."

And so, she said, "Well, you can do airframes."

So, airframes I did.

Narrator: The airframe is everything but the engine.

It Includes the plane's mechanical structure, wings, and undercarriage.

Jacqueline was assigned to Spitfires at an RAF base in the south of England.

We looked after the aircraft, and every time they flew we did a quick inspection.

We changed the wheels, and we did everything, more or less outside of the aircraft.

Screwed things on and screwed things off and one thing and another.

Narrator: The female mechanics Jacqueline worked with faced their fair share of danger, especially during Spitfire test flights.

Two of us had to sit on the tail of the Spitfire because with the thrust of the props going round, it would have tipped up, so we used to sit on the tail, until we turned into the runway.

Then you jumped off.

Well, one girl didn't jump off.

She was lying across the tail and got airborne, and when the pilot wanted to bank, he couldn't, because his what they called the ailerons wouldn't work.

So, he had to get an emergency landing, and when he got landed, this girl jumped off.

He was terrified.

He thought he'd killed her.

Narrator: Over the course of the war, a quarter of a million women served with the WAAF.

Their skills were a vital component of the RAF strategy to win the war in the air.

And they were also part of the world's first integrated defence system.

Miller: You have the radar operators who are using this brand-new technology, radio-direction finding, which can figure out where enemy aircraft are, what altitude they're flying at, what bearing they're flying on.

So, it's real-time intelligence that informs the RAF's operations.

Man: A highly important job in the Air Force is that of radio-direction finding.

Specially selected members of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force are trained as operators in this branch of the service.

Narrator: This intelligence was fed into Fighter Command -- the operational nerve centre for the RAF -- at Bentley Priory on the outskirts of London.

The WAAFs stationed here passed vital information to the frontline pilots.

Although the women were based on the ground, the life-and-death struggles of the men in the air were very real.

There was one instance in particular, a woman called Eileen Clayton, she was responsible for intercepting enemy communications, and she's spoken about how on one occasion she did feed the coordinates of an enemy aircraft to the RAF, who then were able to shoot it down.

She could actually hear what the pilot in that plane was saying.

All the way down, he was screaming for his mother.

And it obviously emotionally really affected her, but she then spoke about the fact that in a time of war, it is us or them.

Narrator: RAF bases were prime Luftwaffe targets.

During the war, 187 WAAFs lost their lives.

Despite the dangers, their dedication to duty never failed.

They were engaged at the coalface of a job that involved radar, technology, intelligence.

You can see that that had a tremendous appeal.

And they felt so useful.

Narrator: It wasn't just British women playing key roles in the war in the air.

On the Eastern Front, young Soviet pilots were pioneering new ways to attack the enemy, even though the odds were stacked against them.

On the 22nd of June, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa -- the invasion of the Soviet Union, turning on his ally Joseph Stalin.

He wanted to cleanse Eastern Europe of the Soviet people, of the Slavic people, and replace them with a Germanic people.

This was an ideological, racialized conflict.

Narrator: By November, German forces were only 12 miles from Moscow.

But the Soviet people weren't finished.

Stalin had placed them on a war footing many years earlier.

In the 1930s, he was very much encouraging young people to take up, what we might think of as sort of military hobbies.

There was an association called the Society for the Assistance of the Defense Aircraft and Chemical Construction, which was this society where young people could learn how to shoot, they could learn how to parachute, they could learn how to fly.

Narrator: This military club was open to both boys and girls.

Unlike a lot of countries at this particular moment in time, the Soviet Union really understood that exceptional talent was equitably distributed among the population, whether you were a man or a woman, no matter your ethnicity, and certainly no matter your class status.

Narrator: One woman with talent who was allowed to prove herself in combat was the air-force navigator and pilot Marina Raskova.

♪♪ She was an innovator, a pioneer, a woman who almost single-handedly, as it were, inspired the nation to accept that women could be fantastic and great aviators.

Narrator: In 1933 Marina Raskova qualified as the first female navigator in the Soviet Air Force and five years later made history when she and two other women attempted the first all-female long-distance flight across Russia.

When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Marina decided to convince the High Command that hundreds of women wanted to fly and fight for their homeland.

Marina collected letters from female pilots keen to sign up.

Marina Raskova was able to gather evidence and prove that there were women all over the country that wanted to fight for the nation.

This was at a time when officials within the Soviet administration were saying, "From a pragmatic perspective, we need more pilots.

And if these women are willing to become pilots and fight for the nation, then put them forward."

Narrator: Marina's campaign was successful.

In 1941, three special bombing squadrons were formed.

Two had both male and female pilots, but the third, the 588th, would be different.

Woman: ♪ Gather your roses while you have time ♪ ♪ Sleep safe in your bed tonight ♪ The 588th is really fascinating because it's an all-women unit.

Not only were the women pilots and navigators, but the entire ground crew was also female.

Woman: ♪ There is no way to know which way the wind blows ♪ Narrator: Marina Raskova selected over 260 women to be part of this regiment, some of them as young as 18.

Their mission was to attack enemy lines at night.

The Germans soon nicknamed them die Nachthexen, or the Night Witches.

Woman: ♪ Every heart we break surrenders to ♪ ♪ The witching hour ♪ The idea is to sort of strike terror into the heart of these German soldiers so they can't sleep, so they can't rest.

They're afraid to light cigarettes at night.

They're incredibly mobile.

They're incredibly flexible.

They're easily moving up and down the frontline.

So, their remit is huge.

Over the course of the war, they fly hundreds, thousands of these sorties and do massive amounts of damage not only in killing Germans, but also in really destroying German morale and preventing these soldiers from getting the rest they need to fight the following day.

Narrator: The Night Witches became legendary, often flying more than a dozen missions in 24 hours.

They fought tirelessly, regardless of their substandard equipment.

They didn't have uniforms.

They didn't even have shoes.

Some of the women aviators talk about tearing up bedsheets and shoving bits of sheet in the front of their shoes so that their shoes won't fall off while they're walking.

So, it was pretty brutal conditions.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: One of the key aircraft flown by the Night Witches for their bombing raids was a biplane -- the Soviet-made, open-cockpit Polikarpov PO-2.

Pilot Clare Tector has a decade's experience flying one of the few surviving PO-2s.

Tector: It's an interesting aeroplane to fly.

It's very noisy sitting in the cockpit.

You're well aware of the noise.

It's quite an unusual noise.

It sounds like a bag of nails in a washing machine.

It gets airborne quite quickly, but once you're in the air, you're quite exposed, and the feel of it to fly is quite heavy.

You have to take hold of the controls and really put it where you want it to be.

So, you have to be quite strong with it.

But if you tell it forcefully, it will behave, and it'll do exactly what you want it to do.

And you can then have some good fun with it, as well.

So, it's a rewarding aeroplane to fly.

Narrator: The PO-2 is made of wood and fabric, so it's easy to construct.

Over 20,000 were made, more than any other aircraft in the Second World War.

But its simple structure made the PO-2 potentially dangerous for the Night Witches.

Tector: Because it's so easy to build and because it's lightweight, you can shoot at it and make holes in the wings.

And actually the wings will still fly, and it'll still behave.

So, in that sense, it's reasonably robust, and it's easy to fix.

But in the sense of as a pilot sitting in the middle of all that, you are very vulnerable.

There's no protection.

There's no armour.

There's nothing to stop you from being hurt if a lucky bullet ends your away.

Narrator: One Night Witch said...

The PO-2 was built as a training aircraft and so had a top speed of only 93 mph.

The engine was so noisy, the women developed a tactic to give them the element of surprise.

When they were coming in on a bombing run, they will have idled their engine.

By idling, it means bringing the power all the way back so that it's just running it the lowest power setting, which makes it as quiet as possible, but it's still actually quite noisy.

But it would give them better opportunity to, not quite sneak up, but less notice for the Germans as they came in.

But as you get closer, too, you'll hear the wind whistling over the wires and the struts and the parts of the aeroplane that stick out.

And that whistling noise will have sounded a little bit like a whooshing noise, which is obviously quite disconcerting -- not pleasant.

Narrator: The sound was said to be like a broomstick, helping to give them the infamous "Night Witches" nickname.

The cockpit of the PO-2 is cramped, the controls and instruments, basic.

Tector: There's not a lot of room, particularly with the big flying kit on.

Even sitting here now I can feel the wind and the cold air.

So, in flight, you are quite exposed.

Narrator: Flying in the dark was an extra challenge for the Night Witches.

Everything you would find by touch.

You would know where the controls are.

You get used to know where they are.

But for the instruments, the instruments have glow-in-the-dark paint on them so that you can see them.

But you wouldn't be relying on the instruments in order to fly.

You'd be looking out to see where you're going and to know what you're doing.

Narrator: Over the course of the war, the Night Witches flew over 23,000 sorties.

They dropped 3,000 tonnes of bombs and more than 26,000 incendiary shells.

destroying river crossings, railways, and fuel depots, beating back the Nazi advance wherever they could.

Ghodsee: There's a way in which the Night Witches represent a violent femininity.

Because they were still very much women, and they were so deadly, people like remembering this moment in time when women were really on the frontlines fighting the good fight, because, let's face it, they were fighting Nazis.

Narrator: Their success wasn't without sacrifice.

Thirty-two of the Night Witches lost their lives, including the pilot who inspired and created the squadron, Marina Raskova.

She died in January 1943 when her plane crashed near Stalingrad.

Marina was 30 years old.

Those ladies were gritty, determined, strong.

They worked tirelessly through a night.

They were back and forth and back and forth.

That drive and determination and motivation was phenomenal.

Narrator: This steely resolve was shown not just by women flying for the Allied cause.

Two controversial and pioneering aviators played a vital role in giving Germany success in the air.

♪♪ When the Nazis unleashed the Blitzkrieg in September 1939, they swept through Northern Europe in a matter of months.

Their success would not have been possible without one aircraft -- the Junkers 87 dive bomber, known as the Stuka.

Walters: The Stuka is one of the most iconic aircraft of the Second World War.

When they came into a dive at you out of the blue, I mean, that's bad enough, but they would also make this kind of screeching, droning sound as they dived.

And that was terrifying because you knew that that was in all likelihood the last sound you were ever going to hear.

♪♪ Narrator: The pinpoint accuracy of this deadly aircraft would not have been possible without the work of one woman -- the fearless Melitta Von Stauffenberg.

♪♪ Melitta is completely exceptional.

She's the only female aeronautical engineer in Nazi Germany.

Melitta had always had a real strong sense of adrenaline.

So, when she was young, she liked to ski.

She liked to dive off the top of dams, absolutely terrifying all of her friends and often in skiing leaving all of the boys and the girls far behind her.

She was a real adrenaline junkie.

But she was also very interested in physics, mechanics, and engineering.

Narrator: In the early years of the war, Melitta worked on the Stuka's gunsights to improve its accuracy and also on its dive brakes, which ensured the aircraft would pull up before it hit the ground.

What she worked out on the drawing board, she tried out in the cockpit.

Melitta diced with death every time she tested the Stuka.

Mulley: It is absolutely terrifying.

They would have what's called "red out," when the blood goes into your eyes and it creates a red film on your vision.

The next step after that is to black out and lose your consciousness.

And yet Melitta would insist on doing all of her own tests, and she wouldn't just do two in a day.

She'd do 15 nose dives in a single day.

She did over 2,000 during the course of the war.

There is nobody that comes anywhere near her.

And then she would go back to the drawing board and work up from her conclusions, having done the tests, how to improve the aircraft.

Narrator: Melitta refused to let others take risks.

She said... Walters; The idea that you've got a female test pilot even today kind of bucks the trend, doesn't it?

It shouldn't, but it does.

But now imagine what that's like in the '30s, in Nazi Germany, a place where women are meant to be tied to the stove and raising children.

This is nuts.

Narrator: The Nazis were mystified by Melitta's ability to do so many more nose dives than men.

Being Nazis, they sought a biological explanation.

They took blood tests.

They wanted to know perhaps women had a different red-to-white-cell ratio and that might affect her oxygen uptake -- absolutely ludicrous.

Of course, there was one good reason why Melitta was doing all these tests.

She knew she had to make herself absolutely irreplaceable to the Nazi regime.

Narrator: In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws took away Jews' civil and political rights and outlawed marriage and sexual relations between Jews and so-called "Aryan Germans."

Around this time, Melitta discovered that her father had been born Jewish.

Mulley: Suddenly she knows that she and her family are vulnerable in this state, and the only thing that can protect them is her skills.

Narrator: Melitta lived on a knife edge.

But the regime eventually recognised the value of this remarkable pilot and engineer.

In 1941, Melitta was given the official status "equal to Aryan."

For the moment, she and her family were safe.

Melitta was not the only outstanding female German aviator.

Another pilot was indispensable to the regime, a fanatical Nazi who fully embraced their ideas of race.

Her name was Hanna Reitsch.

♪♪ ♪♪ In the 1930s Hanna became famous, first as a skilled glider pilot and then a test pilot for the Luftwaffe.

In 1938, she cemented her place in the Third Reich when she undertook a daredevil publicity stunt as part of the Berlin Motor Show, becoming the first person to fly a helicopter inside a building.

Unlike Melitta she had been very keen to be in the limelight, so she would be filmed at the cinema for Hitler's birthday showings.

She was in films.

She was on the cover of magazines.

There was even a Nazi modern beauty collectable cigarette card Narrator: When war was declared in 1939, both Hanna and Melitta Von Stauffenberg wanted to fight for their country.

However, being a frontline pilot wasn't an option, despite their prodigious skills.

Mulley: Of course, the Luftwaffe did employ hundreds of women, but they were all in secretarial roles.

Hanna and Melitta were not in the Luftwaffe.

They were civilians seconded to the Luftwaffe for the duration of the war.

And there were a number of reasons for this.

I mean, the essential reason is that the Nazi regime was, of course, deeply racist, but also very, very sexist.

And Hanna was once told actually that she wasn't allowed to line up on the morning parade because her profile ruined the silhouette at the gentleman's chest.

Narrator: The aviations arms race that began in the 1930s escalated with the outbreak of the war.

Both sides built scores of revolutionary new planes.

Mulley: Hanna always wanted to test the most dynamic, the newest equipment.

one of her fellow test pilots actually said in a very sexist way, "it was like she wanted to sleep with every new man on the block."

Narrator: In 1942, Hanna had the chance to test the Me 163 Komet, the world's first rocket fighter, which could reach speeds of over 500 miles per hour.

The fact that she'd seen two pilots killed flying the plane didn't deter her.

Mulley: The Me 163 is an incredibly dangerous machine.

It's powered by the combustion of two very unstable fuels.

Because it burnt these fuels, it could go incredibly fast, but it burnt the fuels very quickly.

And then it had to do a gliding land.

And Hanna's real expertise was in gliding.

Narrator: Her first four tests went without a hitch.

Hanna said it was like...

But the fifth attempt went badly wrong.

The Komet's undercarriage, known as a dolly, failed to jettison as planned.

Mulley: So, she tried to land as shallowly and slowly as she could.

But as she came down, this dolly hooked the ground, and she spun around and was knocked unconscious.

When she awoke, she did what she was trained to do.

So, she tested was, you know, everything okay.

Her legs were fine.

Her arms were fine.

And then as she later wrote, her hand reached the place where her nose had been, which was now just a cleft, bubbling with blood.

And it was later said that she'd effectively, you know, wiped her nose off her face.

Narrator: Hanna underwent pioneering surgery, and for her bravery she was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, the first woman in Nazi Germany to receive this honour.

Melitta von Stauffenberg was the second -- her work on the Stukas rewarded.

The two women shared honours and aviation skills but little else.

Mulley: For Hanna, honour was very much serving the regime.

Her career had risen on the spreading wings of the Nazi party.

She considered them this very dynamic new regime, and she was deeply committed to them, whereas Melitta was much more sceptical about them.

Narrator: By 1944, many Germans were convinced Hitler was leading them to destruction.

Melitta's brother-in-law, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, was one of them.

He planned to assassinate Hitler at his HQ in Prussia.

Melitta offered to fly Claus to safety once the deed was done.

Clare Mulley has seen Melitta's logbooks.

She's testing all of these aircraft to see how long a distance she can get out of them, but in the end it wasn't possible.

But she's really at the heart of the assassination attempt.

Narrator: Claus' bomb exploded but failed to kill the fuhrer.

The conspirators were tried and executed, including Claus.

All his family were suspected.

Melitta always vehemently denied any involvement.

She said she knew nothing about the plot, and she insisted that her vitally important work for the Third Reich was being delayed.

Narrator: But Melitta's husband, Alex, was interned in a concentration camp.

She would never see him again.

Hanna Reitsch's fanatical devotion to the Nazi dream never wavered.

She watched in despair as Germany crumbled.

In January 1945, Hitler retreated to his bunker.

There's a general feeling that the war is basically over.

It's at an end.

Narrator: By April, the Soviets had surrounded Berlin.

Their planes controlled the skies.

But Luftwaffe commander Robert Ritter von Greim thought Hitler could be flown out of Berlin to safety.

He asked Hanna to advise him on the risky mission.

Hanna is not actually supposed to accompany Greim directly into Berlin.

She's not gonna miss this opportunity.

And so what she does is she stows away in the back of the plane.

And it's not until they're well up in the air that she suddenly announces her presence.

Mulley: As they flew across the Red Army line below, they shot up towards this aircraft, and armour-piercing bullets went through the fuselage and actually went into Von Greim's legs.

Hanna stretched over him, took the controls, and managed to land this little plane on the main east-west axis in central Berlin.

Narrator: Hanna and Von Greim made their way to the bunker.

The beleaguered fuhrer was delighted to see them.

Mulley: He said, "At last, there's some honour left in this country."

And he gave her a gift to thank her for coming in, which was a cyanide tablet, so she could die alongside him.

Narrator: Hitler refused to leave the bunker and ordered von Greim to fight on.

He believed victory in the air was still possible.

Dodging Soviet artillery, Greim and Hanna managed to fly out of the capital.

The next day, the 30th of April, Hitler committed suicide.

By then, Melitta von Stauffenberg was dead, shot down in early April by an American pilot as she searched for her husband.

Hanna Reitsch survived the war and after a short jail term made a new life for herself in India and Africa.

She died in August 1979, still a devoted Nazi.

There were rumours she took the cyanide pill given to her by Hitler.

The planes tested by Hanna and Melitta helped make the Luftwaffe a formidable force.

But they weren't unopposed.

waiting for the Germans across the Channel were a team of women determined to blast those planes out of the sky.

In June 1940, with France defeated, Britain braced itself for a German invasion.

Thousands joined up to defend their country, including women like Grace Taylor, then a teenager working as a domestic servant in the south of England.

Taylor: You have to be up early in the morning and clean out the fireplaces and lay the fires ready.

That was the only life I knew when I was so young.

Narrator: With Britain at war, Grace wanted to do more than just scrub floors.

I think the main thing was seeing so many posters up.

And they were posted everywhere.

And I thought, "Yes, would it be nice to do something for the country."

I told them I was older than I was because you had to be 17 and a half.

And I wasn't yet 17.

[ Laughs ] But so many girls did it, and they never asked for a birth certificate.

♪♪ ♪♪ Narrator: Grace joined the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women's branch of the army.

In the early years of the war, the ATS were confined to jobs such as clerks and drivers.

But by the time Grace joined up, all that had changed.

Miller: So, the British Army, the British authorities are very uncomfortable with the idea of women working in combatant roles.

But as is often the case with various roles during the Second World War, the manpower crisis that is created by men going off to war in large numbers leaves a vacuum.

Where do you get young, keen, intelligent recruits?

Oh, let's have a think about that.

You get them from tapping into women.

Narrator: In April 1941, the women of the ATS were promoted to frontline roles joining the war in the air, deployed on the gun batteries taking on the mighty Luftwaffe.

This move was described by the under-secretary of War as...

The gun batteries, like this one near Poole Harbour, protected ports and cities.

Each battery consisted of up to 8 guns, capable of firing 20 rounds a minute, reaching a height of 30,000 feet.

The Luftwaffe is the most formidable and terrifying air force in Europe in the Second World War.

It is immense in size.

It outnumbers Britain's Air Force tremendously.

And that's a scary thing for the Royal Air Force and for the British people.

The anti-aircraft artillery sites are kind of the next line of defense to keep them from getting to British civilians and cities to cause carnage -- very, very important work.

Narrator: Grace Taylor became one of over 56,000 women deployed to gun emplacements across Britain.

Recruits even came from all over the Commonwealth, including Jamaica and Barbados, keen to serve with the ATS and help fight the Nazis.

The ATS gunners did everything but pull the trigger.

That was considered "unladylike."

We might have put women in uniform at the beginning of war, but they were still handmaidens to war.

They weren't actually ever really meant to be in danger, and they certainly were never allowed to kill, please bear that in mind -- noncombatants.

I know there is a certain irony there.

It's even more ironic because if you're working on an operational gunsight, you're a noncombatant, i.e., you can't shoot the enemy, but the enemy can still shoot you.

Narrator: Grace was one of those in danger.

She spent weeks learning to identify the many different types of aircraft.

It was crucial training.

Lives depended on it.

You had to know the English planes, whether they be fighters or twin engines or bombers.

And of course you needed to know the German planes, too.

Narrator: The ATS women calculated the height, angle, and bearing of the enemy aircraft.

We had to make sure that the right information was passed to the guns because they could only fire where we told them.

Being a gunner girl was inherently dangerous.

They are working with munitions, which is always dangerous.

And then there's the searchlights.

The searchlights are so bright that these women have to wear special glasses just to protect their eyes.

But they're also a beacon, which light up the anti-aircraft battery for incoming Luftwaffe planes to see, which makes them even more of a target.

Narrator: In early 1942, Grace was sent to an anti-aircraft battery protecting Plymouth.

Luftwaffe attacks were frequent and deadly.

Grace was in the thick of it.

We were up all night, and we were firing, and lots of other gunsights were firing, too.

And, of course, the bombs were dropping, so it was a terrible noise.

That's really what stands out more in your mind is the noise of the guns firing and not just your guns, other guns that were even a little way away.

They're still very loud.

In actual fact, they flattened Plymouth.

It was terrible.

Narrator: The mixed-sex batteries proved to be more effective than men-only gun units.

One colonel said... Taylor: You know it's important, and you know you've got to be quick, and you've got to be thorough, and you've gotta concentrate on making sure that you do the right thing.

You follow orders, and you give out the right reports.

You don't stop and think, "Is it safe?"

It doesn't enter your mind.

Narrator: Grace survived the dangers of the gun batteries and after the war went on to work as a GPO telephonist.

But not all the women who served in this frontline role were so lucky.

They were so instrumental in our nation's story in the 20th century, and very few of them have been properly recognized.

In the ATS, I think it was about 750 girls lost their lives.

But just hold onto that figure because it's almost double the number of British military servicemen and women who died in a 10-year-long war in Afghanistan.

It's a number that we wouldn't consider acceptable today.

Narrator: The stories and the sacrifice of the women who fought the war in the air have long been overlooked.

Mulley: Without women like this willing to put their lives on the line, the outcome of the war might have been very different.

Woman: ♪ I am woman, and I am strong ♪ ♪ And of this earth, I belong ♪ ♪ Oh, I am ♪ ♪ Here I am woman ♪ ♪ And I am strong ♪ ♪ And I whisper the echoes all by myself ♪