Spitfire Women of World War II (15 page)

‘They became a most unusual duet,' a mutual friend said later. ‘He was enthralled with her accomplishments and wanted to keep her going.' Not that this was hard – he owned several large aircraft factories.

Once married, Jackie and Floyd combined the two ranches they had each bought separately in Southern California's blistering Coachella Valley, and held court there to anyone who could withstand the heat and Jackie's hyperactivity. They siphoned water from the Colorado River to create a defiant twentieth-century Eden, heady with citrus and exotic blooms. One regular visitor was Amelia Earhart, who relaxed beside the Cochran-Odlum swimming pool before her final flight in 1937. Another was Howard Hughes, whom Odlum remembered as permanently short of cash.

In the tight and sometimes fetid circles that adjudicate on the competing claims of twentieth-century aviators, there is an enduring fashion for rubbishing Jackie Cochran. She was gauche, it is said. She was brash. She fetishised beauty and elegance but lacked either. She browbeat her critics, overwhelmed her admirers, appalled the British, invented large chunks of her autobiography, sponged off her sugar daddy and could only ever see the big picture if she was in the middle of it.

Some of this is true, but it misses the point that the core of the Cochran legend – that of a penniless orphan with the name chosen from a phone book, who married a millionaire, took a bomber and a group of women pilots to wartime Britain,
founded the WASP and after the war broke the sound barrier – is undisputed and remarkable by anyone's standards. It is also easy to forget that Cochran would have been unlikely to achieve anything without the sort of self-belief from which timider souls tend to recoil. She was, apart from anything else, a thrill-seeker. ‘To live without risk would have been tantamount to death,' she said, and this helps explain her manic enthusiasm for air racing.

When Cochran followed Amy Johnson into the clouds above Mildenhall in 1934, she was hoping to win the inaugural air race from England to Australia. But she was in a death trap called a Gee Bee, made by the Granville Brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts. Not only did the Gee Bee stall at the slightest excuse, the secondary fuel tank switch on Cochran's aircraft had been connected upside down. She and her co-pilot were about to bale out over the snowbound Carpathians when she realised ‘off' meant ‘on'.

After her marriage, instead of settling down she spent her summers screaming across the American heartland in sleek silver prototypes in pursuit of the Bendix Trophy for the fastest flight from Long Beach to Cleveland. She eventually won it in 1938 against an otherwise all-male field. When the world went off to war, it was no surprise that she wanted to join in. When her own best contacts in Washington had declined her offers, and when Air Marshal Arthur T. Harris of the RAF said that actually he could use some of her pilots, it was no surprise that she practically mugged him.

In the summer of 1941, Harris was based in Washington as head of the RAF delegation. Soon after Cochran's luncheon with Roosevelt on her return from England in June, Harris, too, was summoned to see the President, this time at the White House. Roosevelt asked what the RAF and British aviation in general needed most urgently, and Harris mentioned ferry pilots. ‘My request was forlorn,' he wrote.

She introduced herself as Jackie Cochran and offered ‘maybe six' women pilots at once – ‘but I could soon make it 60, and later maybe 600'.

Cochran was trying to be helpful to Britain, but most of all she was out to confound the sceptics at home: ‘I went to England to prove to General Arnold and others in Washington, DC, that American women pilots were just as capable as English women pilots, ‘she said. ‘Twenty-five young American women and I did it to prove a large point to the folks back home.'

The announcement that Miss Cochran (she was Mrs Odlum only in private life) would be recruiting women for the ATA was made at a dinner she hosted at the St Regis Hotel in New York on 23 January 1942. The details had been ironed out at the White House the week before with Eleanor Roosevelt, ever the friend of women flyers, and a Captain Norman Edgar of the ATA. Cochran received him at her apartment before the dinner for cocktails and for photographs – which were released to the press that day and showed him looking variously condescending and bemused. In one of them either Cochran or the photographer persuaded Captain Edgar to join her at the globe in her trophy room and stare down at it, lit from below, as if planning to take over the world. Edgar earned his supper at the St Regis, however, thrilling his female audience with the news that some of the aircraft the Americans would be flying would have guns loaded and ready to fire; and predicting that if ‘Jerry' sprang a surprise attack on any of them, they'd shoot back ‘just as fast as a man'.

Cochran was desperate to retain sole charge of the project. Her husband's friend and publicist, Harry Bruno, who was also a neighbour of theirs in California, released a statement the same
day outlining the recruitment plan and asking that applications for service in ‘the Cochran unit' be sent to her newly established headquarters in Rockefeller Plaza. In fact, 125 women whom she considered prime candidates on the strength of flying records lodged with the Civil Aeronautics Administration in Washington had already received telegrams before the next day's papers hit the streets. But Cochran would soon find that she had no monopoly on initiative.

Five months earlier, the spectacular Dorothy Furey had been killing time and hoping for stray joyride passengers at the airport outside New Orleans where she had learnt to fly. She was surprised to see two uniformed British officers walk in out of the sun. They had been observing US war games on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, but Furey was more interested in the rumour they passed on that a British air organisation might soon be flight-testing women in Montreal. Furey instantly ingratiated herself with these unlikely messengers. ‘I said, “Well, what are your plans?” And they said, “We have to go to Washington, and we have to be there about a week, and then we're going over to Montreal.” So I said, “How about if I pick you up in Washington?”'

The two men accepted this remarkable offer. That gave Furey about four days to quit her job, pack up her New Orleans life and head north for the nation's capital in a nearly-new Studebaker she had picked up for interest-only payments of just $25 a month, and of which she was immensely proud. She kept her rendezvous with her new British friends and drove them to Montreal. There she became, by several months, the first American woman to be cleared to ferry British warplanes, and the only one to do so before Pearl Harbor.

In a sense this was only fair. Though a regular truant from high school, Furey had always been ahead of the game: she read
Mein Kampf
at seventeen, and when Hitler invaded the Rhineland the following year she wrote an editorial in the
Louisiana Women's
Weekly
forecasting war. But her speed off the mark infuriated Cochran.

‘She [Cochran] was livid with the way I went to Montreal without her stamp of approval,' Furey recalled shortly before her death sixty-five years later. Then she told a story about how Jackie Cochran had faked an application form from Furey in her anxiety to show history that every last one of her twenty-five pilots was really ‘hers':

Furey never liked Cochran. She felt she owed her nothing and she disowned her as soon as she arrived in Britain. But others owed Cochran the defining years of their lives, and never forgot it.

Ann Wood was one. Cochran's telegram found her at home in Waldeboro, Maine, where she was living with her widowed mother while teaching cadets to fly in Piper Cub seaplanes as part of a government pilot training scheme. She had wanted to go to war as a reporter – and had written to all the names she admired in the
New York Times
to find out how to go about it. They had not been particularly helpful, and flying seemed a perfectly suitable alternative. Ann telephoned New York immediately and was summoned to the Cochran-Odlum apartment at River House. A Northeast Airlines Dakota from Portland and a taxi from La Guardia put her outside Cochran's front door feeling, unusually for Wood, ‘a little timid'.

Inside, like Captain Edgar before her, she was invited to admire the trophy room. It had a giant inlaid marble compass on the floor and a glass screen shielding a wall of memorabilia that
included a cigarette case encrusted with rubies and emeralds (a gift from Floyd). The emeralds formed Jackie's winning route across America in the Bendix Trophy race; the rubies were her refuelling stops.

The whole place was humming. Odlum and Cochran each had separate staffs and tended to work from home. Wood struck Cochran as sufficiently presentable – each of her girls would have to serve as ambassadors as well as pilots – but insufficiently experienced in the air. Cochran said she'd be in touch. But it would only take a few candidates to fail the flight test in Montreal for Wood's name to get to the top of Cochran's list. When in May it did, she bade farewell to her mother and left for Canada: ‘My mother was very pleased that I'd managed to get going, that I was accepted and that I was going to do a useful job,' Wood later reflected; ‘she was very keen about the war. She believed in it. She hated Hitler.'

Roberta Sandoz's telegram had to be redirected in order to reach her. It was sent to the address she gave as home – Evans, a place twenty miles from the Canadian border in north-eastern Washington state. Evans was the last town on the Columbia River before the river slowed and broadened to fill its own valley along 120 miles of its length, held back by the Grand Coulee Dam. On reaching Evans, the telegram had to go upriver to a giant plant run by the Spokane-Portland Cement Company, just south of the border, where Roberta Sandoz's Swiss stepfather was chief engineer. His status meant that she was not raised in Cochran-style destitution, but she still rode to school on a horse and the camp was still a hard day's drive on unmetalled roads to the nearest sidewalk, in Spokane.

‘We lived at a great excavation place where limestone was dug out of the mountain and shipped to Spokane, where it was crushed up,' she told me. ‘It wasn't a town. There were three houses – a bunkhouse for the men who worked there, a cookhouse to feed them, our house and that was it.' That was the isolation from which Roberta's first real escape came, aged ten, in a barnstormer's aeroplane above a little town called Marcus that has since been
drowned by the Grand Coulee Dam. Before then she had paid annual visits to Spokane with her family to buy new shoes, but this was different: ‘It changes your perspective of the world, once you see it from the air. This was the sensation that interested me: a wonderful feeling of expansion.'

Sandoz left the camp to go to college – having dashed her mother's hopes of making ‘a little Lady' out of her – and set her heart on seeing the world. Her first job was as a San Francisco social worker, near Chinatown on Telegraph Hill. ‘Life began for me in San Francisco,' she said. She led gymnastics classes for immigrant children, and broke up their fights, and in her spare time made a nuisance of herself among the window dressers of the Gump department store on Post Street, pestering them with questions about flower preserving and English country life. She also took an evening class in aeronautics and was rewarded for her diligence by being recommended for the cut-price Civilian Pilot Training Programme.

Talking in her room in a bustling high-rise retirement community in Oregon, Sandoz sounded a little dreamy. She had ventured to suggest on the telephone that she still had all her marbles, and she had a bucketful: a steel-trap mind that might have been inclined to rage against the dying of the light but for a rather humbling wisdom. Recalling her pilot training she laughed and rubbed her hands involuntarily. ‘Oh!' she said, as if about to sing:

That gift took her to Belmont, a grass airfield halfway to San Jose. When she completed her training she went looking for any paid employment that would keep her in the air. She found a job in Corcoran in the Great Central Valley, where a farmer took her on to crop-dust and scare off pests in an old Porterfield Tandem that she had had to buy herself. It was in Corcoran – best known today for its exceptionally brutal penitentiary – that the Cochran telegram caught up with her.

‘Those were the days when you received a telegram, you sat down before you opened it,' Sandoz recalled. ‘Telegrams were a couple of lines, usually bad news. Well, in Cochran style this was a page and a half. The stuff that really thrilled was the word “secret” in there: “Do not contact the press.” This was undercover stuff.'