Galina Brok-Beltsova was a Soviet bomber navigator. She was one of more than 8,00,000 women who served in the Red Army, of whom around 1,000 were aviators. Three women’s air regiments had been authorised by Joseph Stalin in 1941 at the urging of the record-breaking, long-distance aviator Marina Raskova – the Soviet answer to America’s Amelia Earhart. Raskova told Stalin that women could fight as well as men. Whether or not Stalin was convinced, he had no choice but to agree, because the Soviet Union was fast running out of young men who could fight. The three women’s regiments that Marina Raskova founded were the 586th Fighter Regiment, the 587th Bomber Regiment and, most famously, the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, nicknamed “the Night Witches”. Galina belonged to the 587th Bomber Regiment.

Galina Pavlovna Brok-Beltsova was born in Moscow on February 12, 1925. As a child she actively participated in athletics, volleyball, swimming, skating and skiing. She had planned to go to university but her plans were dashed by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. It so happened that Galina and some of her girlfriends were emerging from a cinema when an air raid siren went off. The people on the streets were rushed into an underground station. But the girls, unfazed by the air raid, went to a nearby office to sign up for military service. Galina who was just 16 years old at the time, later said, “We were athletic and strong and very brave. We were maybe too brave – showing off.”

Galina was accepted into the all-female 122nd Composite Air Group, along with hundreds of other women. She immediately had her head shaved. She was given men’s military boots and a man’s jacket several sizes too large for her. The women were transported east to Samara, on the banks of the Volga, where they lived in primitive conditions, at temperatures of minus 30 degrees. Galina’s billet was a stable full of frozen horse manure. Undeterred, she found shovels and crowbars and organised a work party to get rid of the filth and make their surroundings liveable. By 1943, so many Soviet pilots were being killed, that a few women began to be trained on the Petlyakov Pe-2 twin-engine dive bomber, the pride of the Soviet Air Force. Galina was one of just nine women selected. The Pe-2 was designed for a crew of three, but severe shortages of trained personnel meant that two crewmembers was the norm. Although Galina was trained as a navigator, she had to multitask as the radio operator as well as the bombardier, which could prove dangerous whilst attacking enemy forces. An added problem was that their aviation maps were practically useless since the invading Nazis had razed villages and forests across the captured territories.

On June 23, 1944, Galina Brok-Beltsova flew her first combat mission as navigator in the Belarusian campaign. The pilot was Antonia Bondareva-Spitsina. By then, the 587th Bomber Regiment had been renamed the 125th Guards Bomber Aviation Regiment. In all the pair flew 36 combat missions starting with Operation Bagration. On one occasion the two women smelled petrol in the cockpit. Just as Antonia bent down to examine a hole in a fuel tank, a German shell shot through the plane, right where her head had been. The shell barely missed Galina too. Another time, their engine cut out. A couple of German fighters harried them aggressively, “With terrible smiles on their faces.” However, the German pilots were gallant enough to let them get away safely. Galina’s final mission was the bombing of Konisberg (present-day Kalingrad), which the Germans surrendered on April 9, 1945, with the city in ruins.

Galina was demobilised from the Soviet Air Force, when she was just twenty. She had been awarded six state honours and 18 medals. In a later interview she said, “I was young. We were sent to the military, and we went to funeral after funeral. We were jumping from our planes.” She added, “We were burning. Women died.” She married Georgy Beltsov, a fellow air force officer, who had been courting her for years. She was able to go to university as she had intended. She eventually fulfilled her dream by acquiring a PhD in History in 1960, and taught at several universities thereafter.

Galina Brok-Beltsova died on August 15, 2024, aged 99. Her death marked the end of an era, because she was the last member of Marina Raskova’s force to pass away. Indeed these three all-female air regiments were decades ahead of their time, considering that the US Air Force only allowed women to fly in combat missions in 1993, and the Royal Air Force in 1994. The Indian Air Force began inducting women into combat roles in 2015, and made the system permanent in 2022.