In September 1938 a young woman parachuted into the Siberian taiga because the plane she was flying in had a design flaw that would have killed her on landing. Her station as navigator was a glass bubble in the nose of a converted bomber, structurally sealed off from the cockpit, so when the Rodina ran low on fuel in heavy cloud with no airfield in sight, the pilots ordered her out. She jumped, landed alone, and only then realized she had left her emergency rations aboard. She spent ten days in the forest on berries and whatever water she found before stumbling onto the wreck of her own aircraft, where rescuers had already arrived. Marina Raskova had no wilderness training whatsoever.

She was supposed to be an opera singer. Her father sang and taught voice, her aunt was a celebrated vocalist, and the path was laid out for her until a severe middle ear infection permanently damaged her hearing and ended it. She pivoted to chemistry and engineering, took a job at a dye factory, and in 1931 got hired as a draftswoman at the Air Force Academy’s aeronavigation laboratory. Two years later she became the first woman in the Soviet Union to earn a professional air navigator’s diploma, working in an era with no GPS: a compass, the stars, a drift meter, a stopwatch, and trigonometry done in your head in the freezing dark. By 1934 she was teaching military navigation to skeptical male pilots, before she had ever learned to fly a plane herself.

• Navigating was not a lesser job than piloting. The pilot was the muscle. She mastered the brain of the operation first, and out-calculated every student who doubted her.
• The Rodina flight took 26 hours and covered roughly 6,000 kilometers, and made her, Polina Osipenko and Valentina Grizodubova the first women named Hero of the Soviet Union.
• When military bureaucrats buried women’s combat applications in red tape, she used that fame to go over the generals directly to Stalin, a genuinely dangerous move so soon after the purges, and won three all-female air regiments in October 1941. Every mechanic, armorer and engineer was to be a woman too.
• Her own unit got new Pe-2 dive bombers because she had the political capital to demand them. The Night Witches got obsolete wood-and-canvas biplanes, which turned out to fly slower than a Messerschmitt’s stall speed and barely register on radar. She died in a crash near Stalingrad in January 1943, aged 30, and received the war’s first state funeral.