Galina Brok-Beltsova, who has died aged 99, was the last survivor of Stalin’s three female air regiments. She enlisted in the Red Army aged 16 in 1941 and flew 36 combat missions as a bomber-navigator with the 587th Bomber Regiment, starting in June 1944 with Operation Bagration to liberate Belorussia, a decisive victory that paved the way for the invasion of Germany; she also took part in the storming of Königsberg and the capture of the Baltic ports of Pillau (now Baltiysk, in Kaliningrad Oblast) and Libow (now Liepāja in Latvia). Galina Brok-Beltsova was one of more than 800,000 women who served in the Red Army, of whom roughly 1,000 were aviators.
The three women’s regiments – the 586th Fighter Regiment, the 587th Bomber Regiment and, most famously, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, nicknamed “the Night Witches” – had been formed by Stalin in 1941 at the behest of the record-breaking long-distance aviator Marina Raskova, a Soviet celebrity comparable to Amelia Earhart in the West. Whereas in the US Air Force women were barred from combat missions until 1993, and in the RAF until 1994, the Russian attitude to this question had been avant-garde even before communism. At least two women had been given special dispensation by the Tsar to fly reconnaissance missions in the Imperial Russian Air Service in the First World War; another had fought dogfights illicitly in male drag.
By end of the 1930s, women accounted for nearly a third of all the pilots trained in U.