At about seven thousand five hundred feet over the swamp forests of the Soviet Far East, a young woman clipped on a parachute, opened a hatch in the glazed nose of a bomber, and jumped out into freezing air because the alternative was to be crushed when the aircraft hit the ground.

She landed hurt, with no water, no survival kit and two bars of chocolate in her flying suit. It took her ten days to walk out.

Marina Raskova was 26 years old. Within five years she would talk Stalin into letting women fly in combat, command a bomber regiment, die at the controls of a Pe-2, and be buried in the wall of the Kremlin.

The chemist who became a navigator

Nothing about Raskova’s childhood pointed at aviation. Her father was an opera singer and voice teacher, her mother a schoolteacher, and Marina wanted to sing. Her father’s death when she was a child left the family badly off, and a middle-ear infection ended her voice. She turned to chemistry, took a job in a dye factory, married an engineer named Sergei Raskov, and had a daughter.

In 1931 she took a job at the Zhukovsky Air Force Engineering Academy in Moscow as a draughtswoman and laboratory assistant to A. V. Belyakov — a navigator who would later cross the North Pole to America with Chkalov. Navigation caught her, completely. By 1933 she was the first woman qualified as a navigator in the Soviet Air Force. By 1934 she was teaching the subject at the Academy, to men who did not expect to be taught it by a woman.

Moscow to the Pacific, in one go

The Rodina flight was Valentina Grizodubova’s idea. Valeriy Chkalov had flown non-stop from the Soviet Union to the United States over the pole in 1937, and Grizodubova asked Stalin to let an all-female crew repeat it. Stalin agreed to the flight but changed the destination: not New York, but Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in the Far East. A Soviet achievement, contained inside the Soviet Union.

The aircraft was a Tupolev ANT-37, a twin-engined long-range type also designated DB-2, named Rodina — Motherland. Grizodubova flew as commander, Polina Osipenko as co-pilot, Raskova as navigator, alone in the glazed nose with no connection to the rest of the aeroplane.

It went wrong almost immediately. Raskova had developed appendicitis, pushing the departure into late September. A state commission recommended cancelling because of the weather in the Far East. Stalin overruled it. The Rodina lifted off at 08:16 on 24 September 1938.

About 150 kilometres out they entered cloud and lost all visual reference. The radio failed, most likely because of the cold — around minus 36 Celsius inside the cabin, minus 37 outside. They flew on, blind, for a further day.

The Rodina flight and Raskova’s survival in the taiga, told in detail.

Thirty minutes of fuel

On the second day, near the destination and still unable to see it, a warning light told them they had about half an hour of fuel left. Grizodubova decided to put the aircraft down wherever she could — and ordered Raskova out, because the navigator’s glass nose would be the first thing destroyed.

Raskova jumped. Grizodubova and Osipenko belly-landed the Rodina in swampy ground and, once down, checked their watches and realised they had the record: 26 hours and 29 minutes, roughly 6,450 kilometres flown.

Then they waited to find out whether their navigator was alive.

She was, just. Bruised legs, no emergency kit, no water, two chocolate bars. Ten days of walking through taiga in near-freezing conditions, living on berries and melted snow. A large air search found the Rodina first; Raskova walked up to her own aeroplane days later and found rescuers already there.

The Soviet public, raised on Jack London and survival stories, lost its mind. The three women were driven through Moscow in open cars to a Kremlin reception. On 2 November 1938 they became the first women ever made Hero of the Soviet Union — and the only ones before the war.

The regiments Raskova created, and the war they flew.

The regiments

When Germany invaded in June 1941, Soviet women who could fly volunteered and were quietly blocked. Raskova, by then a household name, used her access to Stalin. In a speech in Moscow in September 1941 she said Soviet women were “ready at any moment to sit down in a combat machine and plunge into battle,” and urged them to “stand in the ranks of the warriors for freedom.”

On 8 October she had approval to form the 122nd Aviation Group. She began interviews on 10 October. By 17 October the entire organisation was on a train to Engels, several hundred kilometres east — a nine-day journey during which she worked her way through every carriage.

Out of it came three regiments: the 586th Fighter Regiment on Yaks, the 587th Bomber Regiment on Pe-2s, which she commanded herself, and the 588th Night Bomber Regiment on Po-2 biplanes, which the Germans came to call the Night Witches.

Her aide described her as gentle and tactful, and said she could not remember a single occasion when Raskova raised her voice or rudely interrupted a subordinate. Her method, the aide wrote, was persuasion.

Four January 1943

She never flew a combat mission. On 4 January 1943, leading three Pe-2 dive bombers to the 587th’s first operational airfield near Stalingrad, Raskova ran into a winter storm. With darkness coming and no airfield in sight, the formation had to go down. Two aircraft landed safely in a field. Raskova’s did not.

Everyone aboard was killed: Raskova, the regimental navigator, the gunner, and a mechanic who had hitched a ride. She was thirty.

The Soviet Union gave her the first state funeral of the war. For ten days the newspapers ran tributes and letters, including from Stalin and from Grizodubova. Her ashes were placed in the Kremlin Wall on Red Square, next to Polina Osipenko, who had been killed in a training accident in 1939. Within the regiments, many feared that without her they would simply be disbanded.

They were not. The 588th alone flew more than 24,000 sorties and produced 24 Heroes of the Soviet Union. The 587th became the 125th Guards, and carried her name.

The Night Witches — the best known of the three regiments Raskova founded.

There is a temptation to make Raskova a symbol and leave it there. The more interesting thing about her is how ordinary the beginning was. A chemist in a dye factory, a broken singing voice, a job as a draughtswoman in a navigation laboratory. Then somebody handed her a chart and everything else followed — including ten days alone in the taiga, and a place in the Kremlin wall.

Sources: Reina Pennington, Wings, Women and War (University Press of Kansas); Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, The Ohio State University; Kazimiera Cottam, Women in War and Resistance; Henry Sakaida, Heroines of the Soviet Union; Wikipedia; Wikimedia Commons.