January 4, 1943
В Saratov region a 30-year-old girl crashed Marina Raskova — Soviet pilot-navigator. One of the first female Heroes of the USSR. "Stalin's swallow."
Women in our country can be pilots no worse than men.
She was born in Moscow in 1912, née Malinina. Her father, an opera singer and vocal coach, died when she was seven. Her mother was a schoolteacher.
She studied at the Moscow Conservatory and worked as an intern in the laboratory of an aniline dye plant.
At 17, she married a fellow engineer and gave birth to a daughter. At 19, after maternity leave, she got a job as a lab assistant in the aeronautical laboratory at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy. She worked as a navigator on the Black Sea Aerographic Expedition.
At first, I was off by tens of kilometers, but then the errors became fewer and fewer. Persistent, long-term training in navigation is the same as practicing for a musician.
At 22, she graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Civil Aviation Engineers as an external student. A year later, she completed pilot training at Tushino Airfield.
She taught at the Air Academy as a blind-flying instructor and served as a full-time consultant for the NKVD.
She participated as a navigator in setting four world records for women's flight distances, including a nonstop flight from Moscow to the Far East in 1938 (along with female pilots). Valentina Grizodubova и Polina Osipenko). They flew a converted bomber 6450 km, spending 26 hours and 29 minutes in the air. The flight took place at minus 35 degrees Celsius, the aircraft's instruments failed, and they ran out of fuel.
When icing began, Marina opened the window to clear the frost from the glass, and… all the flight charts blew overboard. So our plane became not only deaf, but also blind.
(from the memoirs of Grizo-Dubova)
Despite this, they managed to land with minimal damage to the plane (Raskova had to parachute and walk for 10 days through the taiga). This flight earned all three pilots—for the first time in history—the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.
Even before the war, she rose to the rank of senior lieutenant in state security. Later, the press quoted Valentina Grizodubova, who used her authority at Kremlin receptions to help those repressed:
We had, so to speak, a “role distribution”: she was the one who put them in jail, and I was running around the authorities and trying to get them out.
When the Great Patriotic War began, she was transferred from the NKVD to the Red Army.
She used her personal connections with Stalin to secure permission to form women's combat units. Thus, an air group consisting of three all-female air regiments was established in Engels: a fighter regiment, a bomber regiment, and a night bomber regiment ("Night Witches").
She taught us: “A woman can do anything!”
(pilot Irina Rakobolskaya)
She prepared women's squadrons for Stalingrad.
On January 4, 1943, one of the flights was scheduled—from the Samara air hub via Saratov to the front lines. Due to strong winds and a snowstorm, Raskova's crew and two other bombers were only able to take off at 2:00 PM. En route, the group encountered thick, low clouds.
By 18:00 PM, Raskova gave the signal to break through the clouds and was the first to enter them. Two other aircraft following behind decided to make an emergency landing and survived. Raskova's Pe-2 bomber was discovered only on January 7, near the Saratov village of Mikhailovka (now Konstantinovka). The entire crew perished.
The Main Military Prosecutor's Office of the Red Army investigated the plane crash. The commission found that Raskova was an inexperienced pilot: her total flight time was only 30 hours in flight school and 30 hours in the regiment.
They tell her: it's impossible. But she was a people's favorite and a heroine. Her book, "Notes of a Navigator," sold millions of copies.
(historian Vladimir Pryamitsyn)
One of the causes of the tragedy was "poor flight organization" by Air Force Headquarters. But the primary blame for the incident fell on Major Raskova: not only did she decide to fly in adverse weather conditions (bypassing the duty officer's orders, having obtained permission through Moscow), but she also violated her own flight plan by deciding to return to the airfield when the weather worsened.
