As a teenager envisioning the vast world beyond her family’s small farm in Oregon, Dorothy Olsen was mesmerized by “The Red Knight of Germany,” Floyd Gibbons’s 1927 biography of Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the German World War I ace.

“Young blood, hot and daring, raced through their veins,” Gibbons wrote, “even as the winged steeds they rode raced on the wind to conquest or disaster.”

Dorothy dreamed of racing on the wind herself. Before she realized that dream, she accustomed herself to heights by leaping from the hayloft of the family barn onto the stacks below. She perfected her balance atop the wooden slats that flanked the manure pile. After graduating from high school, she used the money she made from teaching tap dance and ballet to take flying lessons.

When World War II began, she and 25,000 other women applied to the Army Air Forces for the only jobs open to female pilots: freeing men for combat by ferrying newly minted fighters and bombers from the factories to domestic embarkation points for service overseas.