Spitfire Women of World War II (27 page)

She stood the Spitfire on its wingtip to peer through the gap. No land. Now her brain began rewinding involuntarily to what she thought had been the French coast. If that had been east of the Cap, not south – Belgium, not France – she might already be over the North Sea rather than the English Channel, with no hope of a landfall unless she turned west. But if it had been where she thought it was and she turned west too soon, she'd fly straight down the Channel and run out of fuel somewhere over Cornwall. With one half of her mind racing, the other half hammered out a practicable compromise. After twenty-two minutes flying northwest with no sight of land she reasoned that she must have crossed the French coast further south than she thought, putting her over the Channel now rather than the North Sea. She dived to 200 feet and turned right, skimming over the water on a bearing of ten degrees.

Diana was 100 miles west of where she'd meant to be, but no longer lost. Flooded with relief, she circled the huge gas cylinder like a cat thankful for another life. Then she picked her way up the Pagham Rife River to Chichester and the approach to RAF Tangmere. The runway lights were on and green and white flares were fizzing up into the murk. Diana hung back, assuming the flares meant an entire squadron was on its way in. When nothing joined her in the circuit above the airfield she abandoned etiquette and landed. Derek's Spitfire was already parked outside the watch office. He ran out, pale, astonished and so thankful that he was almost angry. Where had she been? How the devil had she got here? The flares and lights had been for her, but it was a miracle that she'd seen them. Tangmere was the only airfield still open that afternoon in the whole of southern England.

It turned out there was no such thing as a free trip to Brussels. When the
Mail
ran a story two weeks later on ‘the beautiful daughter of the millionaire racing motorist' and her belated European honeymoon, Derek had to forfeit three months' pay. But Diana had shown that French and Flemish fog did not discriminate against women any more than British fog did, and her precedent proved irreversible. By early 1945 ATA women were flying regularly to the Continent.

Diana, naturally, was one of them. She regularly smuggled cocoa from Belgium in her parachute pack, and almost collided with a Lancaster while co-piloting an Anson full of oranges to RAF Buckeberg near Hanover. After VE Day a tall and ‘interestingly handsome' pilot called Zita Irwin made it to Berlin and came back
with a grainy picture of herself outside the wrecked Chancellery building in the company of half a dozen Red Army soldiers. Rosemary Rees went furthest east – to Prague, which she had last visited in her own plane in a blizzard in December 1938, laden with gifts for refugees. That year, the ghost of Good King Wenceslas would have looked out on snow that was deep and crisp and might even have held out some hope of appeasement. In 1945 Rees found the place sad, grey and depressing after six winters under the Gestapo.

‘But I was the first,' Diana Barnato Walker noted crisply. ‘That was the point.' And it was. Had she crashed or ditched or disappeared, even ‘Mary' Coningham would have been hard put to make the case for women in Europe. As it was, her survival instinct prevailed and clung on for the rest of the war; a case study in the usefulness of quick thinking and adrenalin when in a frightful fix. Diana was already the only ATA woman pilot to have been shot at by the Luftwaffe. She had not been at the controls herself, but strapped into the co-pilot's seat of a taxi Anson being flown by Jim Mollison, Amy Johnson's ex-husband, when a Messerschmitt 110 popped out of low cloud over Reading and squeezed off a few tracer rounds as it flashed past in the opposite direction. According to ATA legend, Diana's role in the encounter was to spot the swastika on the enemy tailplane and yell to Mollison, ‘Jimmy, it's a Jerry!' just in time for him to pull the Anson's nose up into the cloud. In fact, from her own account, it seems that she kept quiet. If anyone did any yelling it was Jimmy.

Barnato Walker was similarly calm when it mattered in a Mitchell bomber over Cheshire, three days after Germany's surrender. It was the type of plane in which Jackie Sorour had crabbed into Dunsfold on one engine shortly after D-Day. Though smaller than a Halifax or a Lancaster, it felt heavier to fly, with two hands needed on the control column for take-off and landing and a flight engineer essential to operate the far-flung fuel cocks and undercarriage levers.

Half-way up England, somewhere over Worcestershire in
deteriorating visibility, there was a bang in the cockpit and every instrument except Diana's compass died. She could steer a course for Hawarden, her destination, but no longer had any clear idea how fast or high she was flying. Her first approach to Hawarden was too fast and too high. She went round again and landed expertly, in the circumstances, but was surprised to find her engineer – whom she knew well but not intimately – fiddling urgently with the parachute release between her breasts the moment the Mitchell touched the ground. As soon as it came to a stop he threw her out of the plane, jumped after her and set off running, dragging her behind him. He did not stop until it was safe to turn and watch the Hawarden fire engine smother the Mitchell's burning starboard engine in foam.

The millionaire racing motorist's daughter had been concentrating so hard on compensating for her defunct instruments that she had failed to notice that one of the two engines was about to explode. It was probably a good thing; had she throttled it back in a hurry the likelihood of engine failure, stall, spin and fiery death did not bear contemplating.

Diana Barnato Walker's guardian angel had been busy. She always attributed her knack for getting out of scrapes to the constant presence in her mind's eye of the melted face and clawlike hands of the dreadfully burned man who had appeared beside her Tiger Moth at Brooklands before her first solo at the start of the war, begging her not to try it. It was her way of deflecting the idea that she might have a skill, a sixth sense – or even an appetite for life – that others lacked. Yet she undoubtedly had something that she could call on when it suddenly looked as if her future might have to be measured in milliseconds. It was partly an all-or-nothing fixation; a dread of being maimed or disfigured. That was far more real than any fear of death. And it was partly a deep, unspoken conviction that in any case death ‘happened to other people'. Either way, panic never quite took over, and in the space it might have filled under her red woollen pixie hat, or her helmet if it hadn't blown away, best-and worst-case scenarios would
compare notes and offer up survival strategies, calmly recalibrating them as the world hurtled past beneath the cockpit. As long as she was two feet off the ground and in one piece there was always something left to try.

To wit, 30 April 1945, in Typhoon EK 347. ‘Now that was interesting,' she said when reminded of it. ‘That was the nearest miss. You see, the whole thing fell apart.'

Typhoon EK 347 had had a tough life, though Barnato Walker didn't know this until later. It had been used first by a detachment of New Zealand pilots and then by a Belgian squadron as an interim buzz-bomb chaser pending delivery of new Tempests. After Barnato Walker took it for a spin up the A4, it never flew again.

Like the early Tempests, Typhoons were powered by the temperamental Sabre engine and cooled by a scoop air intake below the propeller; the same scoop that had consigned Lettice Curtis to hospital the year before when it dug into a furrow in a field near Slough.

Barnato Walker was 2,000 feet over Wiltshire, en route from Lasham to RAF Kemble in Gloucestershire, when most of the underside of the plane peeled away, scoop first. Luckily the detached portion did not rip off the elevator flaps on the trailing edge of the tailplane as they flew past, leaving the Typhoon unstable but still viable.

The scoop had gone with a bang. At first, Diana had assumed engine failure and started mental preparations for a forced landing, but that was before she looked down to see nothing between her and the White Horse Hills apart from some fuel lines and electrical wiring. The next thing she noticed was the wind, a freezing, trouser-snapping tornado round her legs. At 300 mph there was not much she could do about the cold. The question was whether she could fly any slower without the Typhoon's ragged new aerodynamic profile causing it to stall. She climbed to experiment, and worked out that her new stalling speed was 230 mph, nearly three times faster than the 88 mph indicated in her Ferry
Pilot's Notes. That was too fast to lower her flaps or attempt a wheels-up landing. With so much of the underside of the plane already missing, the rest of it might disintegrate. As she put it later, ‘I thought it might hurt.'

She needed an airport. Conscious that her teeth were chattering uncontrollably, she tightened her straps and flew on to Kemble. As she entered the circuit (still more than twice as fast as recommended in the Notes), her undercarriage failed to lock. For this situation the Notes advised:

Barnato Walker followed the instructions as best she could, but at over 230 mph. At that speed the yawing felt especially violent, but three green lights came on. She made several low passes over the airfield to alert the ground crew to a potential problem. They registered that she was flying too fast to land and switched on a red light on the watch office roof to indicate that she should go away and come back slower. Rosemary Rees was also there, waiting to take an Anson-load of pilots back to Hamble. Eventually someone suggested that a fire truck get ready. A few spectators gathered. Diana climbed again to check her stalling speed once more and give herself a moment to think clearly about landing with no floor at over 200 mph. There was no guarantee she would make it. In fact, she found out later, there was an overwhelming probability that she wouldn't. Twenty-six Typhoons including hers were lost to structural failure in the course of the war. Twenty-five of their pilots died.

In the end she made survival look easy. She came in very low to make sure she didn't waste a yard of runway. ‘I landed without flaps, keeping the speed just above 230, squeezed the brakes on
for a second touchdown, then took them off again quickly so I wouldn't turn over.' At the far end of the runway she applied full brake, turned smartly and taxied to dispersal in search of a cup of tea. No-one offered. The duty airman came out and chided her gently for bringing only half an aeroplane. He gave her a snag sheet to fill out so that no-one else would try to fly it.

The Anson was ticking over. As Diana climbed in, Rees paid her the compliment of asking what the devil had taken her so long, and then rolled her eyes at the audacity of the line-shoot when she tried to explain. It was time to go home.

‘I would say that every woman should learn to fly,' Pauline Gower had told
Woman's Journal
in 1942, when her own women flyers were proving themselves capable of anything. ‘Psychologically, it is the best antidote to the manifold neuroses which beset modern women.'

By ‘neuroses' Gower seems to have meant whatever had been holding women back in the prewar world where men still thought they could assign women their roles and temper their ambitions. The brute imperatives of war had already taken a good swipe at these neuroses, she continued. ‘But with the return of peace my advice to all women will still be – “Learn to fly”… I feel confident that when this war is finally won, aviation will be considered as a normal and satisfying career for young girls leaving school as well as for older women.'

How right she was, and how wrong. Aviation would offer women a career – as air stewardesses. Some of the ATA women found work as pilots, but only those with still-untapped reserves of the bloody-minded tenacity that made them ATA women in the first place. Meanwhile, the swing back to patriarchy became unstoppable. So did the swing forward to the cult of the laconic ex-RAF, 110 per cent male airline captain. Gower, as a BOAC board member, saw it coming as clearly as anyone. In 1944, the brave new world of international air travel was carved up at a Chicago conference attended by fifty-four nations. Once Nazi
Germany and Japan had been dealt with there would be dozens of new airlines and hundreds of new routes – but thousands upon thousands of military pilots angling for work and striding in and out of interviews with combat records almost as impressive as their sense of entitlement.

In March 1945, Gower was interviewed in London by the
Daily Sketch
. She received hundreds of letters every month, she said, from land girls, girl guides, secretaries and housewives, all asking how they could get jobs in flying come the peace. ‘Well,' she told them, ‘my answer is a brutally frank one. You can't!'

If that seemed unfair, it seemed much more so to those who had been through the wringer of six years' continuous service flying more than a hundred aircraft types, many of which RAF recruits had been leery of trying until embarrassed into doing so by the sight of an ATA girl climbing out of one. Among the men who worked with that tight cadre of veterans, overt chauvinism had long since been ridiculous. ‘It came down to men and women becoming just people,' Rosemary Rees would write. ‘All those pretty little barriers that are put up in peacetime melt away and life becomes a grim struggle of tired, grey people all doing whatever it is they can do.'

The war was supposed to have gone a good way towards demolishing class and national barriers as well as gender ones, at least according to Pinewood.
The Way Ahead
was the way taken by David Niven and his men when they managed to forget they came into the war from parallel social worlds.
The Way to the Stars
was the way shown by British and American pilots when at last they stopped giving into mutual bafflement and started speaking the parts of the English language that they had in common.

The final measure of the barriers that Pauline Gower's girls demolished came a month into the post-war era. It was thirty-two days, to be precise, after General MacArthur received Japan's unconditional surrender on the foredeck of the USS
Missouri
, that Veronica Volkersz, the girl from Srinagar and Windsor, was handed a ferry chit by Flight Captain William Cuthbert of No. 2
Ferry Pool at Whitchurch to which she had been posted from Hamble. Throughout the war, Whitchurch had been an all-male pool. Its men tried to observe a ‘no fraternising' rule for a few days when women were first foisted on them, but Volkersz and two others thawed them out by beating them at bridge.

Too late to help with any war except the Cold one to come, Whitchurch had started ferrying some of the RAF's first jets. After a couple of weeks there, Volkersz asked if she could fly one. Cuthbert waited until his commanding officer and second-in-command were unavoidably elsewhere, then quietly instructed Flight Captain Volkersz – who held the same rank as he did, after all – to take Meteor III EE 386 from the Gloster Meteor plant at Morton Vallence to RAF 124 Squadron at Molesworth.

She was offered no conversion course, no cockpit inspection, no helpful hints, no comment. Just a new four by five inch card to be inserted in her ringbound Ferry Pilot's Notes in alphabetical order between Martinet and Oxford, to be glanced at on her way out to dispersal.

It is worth pausing to digest what was happening. A pilot (who happened to be one of around twenty women still flying operationally outside Russia) was climbing into a brand-new jet fighter, the shape and high-pitched scream of the future, with orders to take off, fly across England and land in one piece after as much instruction as she might get nowadays renting a car from Avis.

Inside the cockpit, the main piece of evidence that aeroplanes were changing was the rev counter. Flight Captain Volkersz had to have her two Derwents spinning at 16,500 times a minute – compared with about 2,700 for a Spitfire – before she even released the brakes. There would be no pistons, plugs or propellers; just Frank Whittle's invisible compressors, sheathed in smooth aluminium. Volkersz wound them up, took her feet off the brakes and ‘seemed to hurtle away like a shot from a gun'.

The Meteor drank 160 gallons of fuel per engine per hour, more than ten times as much as the Airspeed Oxford that jettisoned Amy Johnson when she ran out. (Was it any wonder that the post-war West developed a peculiar fixation with the Middle East?) The Notes said both tanks should be full before takeoff. Flight Captain Volkersz's were not. She had just enough for a twenty-five-minute hop at 270 mph with a reserve for one overshoot on landing, but only one. So she kept things simple: took off to the west, turned at once, set course for Molesworth, streaked across England's green and pleasant hips and was on the ground again by lunchtime. ‘It was really no different from any other delivery,' she would tell people when asked about it. Except that she was the first British woman to fly a jet, and possibly only the second in the world after the German test pilot Hanna Reitsch. She would have liked to mark the occasion by bumping into a friend and shooting a line, but friends were already scarce a month after VJ Day, and anyway, the officers of RAF Molesworth were at lunch. She handed her chit to the watch officer, climbed into the waiting Anson and flew back to Whitchurch.

Volkersz had been assigned to Whitchurch not for special training but because Hamble had closed down. ‘For all the women, as far as they knew, it would mean going back to marriage and jobs, and paying for flying,' Alison King wrote glumly. ‘It seemed a terrible waste of such hard-earned experience.' But time, which had seemed to crawl through the lean and deadly years between Dunkirk and D-Day, was now racing. Peace was rearranging lives as jarringly as war had. Mussolini was shot by Italian Communists. Hitler dispatched himself and Eva Braun. (Reitsch, his favourite pilot, accepted a cyanide pill from her beloved Führer in the bunker, but didn't use it – at least not at once. She lived until 1979, and there is evidence that she took it then.) Roosevelt was already gone. Churchill had been humiliated in the polls by Labour in July. And on 6 August Hiroshima was obliterated.

Compared with which, the memo from an assistant secretary at the Ministry of Aircraft Production to the Secretary of the Board of BOAC on 2 June 1945, on ‘methods which will permit the gradual contraction of [the ATA] and its ultimate winding up' was less than momentous.

Still, winding up was hard to do. Lettice Curtis's mother had died during the war, and her family home had ‘broken up'. She had not found love, not that she had looked particularly hard for it. Neither did she sense that finding work was going to be straightforward. In short, ‘to those of us who had nothing to go back to and nowhere particular to go … the end of the war was about as climacteric an experience as the outbreak'.

Ann Wood was just as driven as Curtis, but more adept as a mover and a shaker. In April 1945 she wrote to her mother in phlegmatic mood: ‘[I] will be really sorry when I have to stop flying the world's loveliest aeroplanes … but all good things must end.' By the time the end came she had resolved to stay in England if she could. The country of powdered eggs and puny moustaches had got under her freckled skin, and she pinned her hopes on landing a job as assistant to the air attaché at the US Embassy. His name was Tony Satterthwaite. He was a friend, and generally
‘pro-women'. Even better, he had his own Spitfire that often needed ferrying. There was only one problem, he told Ann apologetically as Washington writhed through the summer in the bureaucratic frenzy entailed by switching from warring behemoth to peacetime superpower: the State Department was dubious about the appointment, on account of her being a woman.

‘Winding up' was effected in as gentlemanly and civilised a manner as possible. The ATA organisation simply shrank back to its original two pools at White Waltham and Whitchurch, and then to White Waltham alone. Pilots who wanted to stay on to the bitter end were accommodated if possible. Those who left received a note of thanks from Pop d'Erlanger and a Certificate of Service. They were also allowed to buy their uniform at a steep discount. Those who stayed felt the pace of work slacken steadily. Weekends were weekends; long, empty invitations to fret about the future. When the weather closed in there was no pressure to fly, and when it cleared most of the ferrying was to storage depots in Scotland or Wales – or breakers' yards. Margaret Frost found these depressing. ‘This is a beautiful aeroplane and should not be broken up,' she wrote on the fuselage of one Spitfire that she was assigned to deliver to its final, oily resting place.

On 29 September, 12,000 members of the public paid to attend a pageant at White Waltham organised to raise money for the families of the 170 dead ATA ferry pilots, and to show off the planes they flew. Lord Beaverbrook was guest of honour. He chipped in £5,000 of his own towards the new benevolent fund and thanked from his heart a group of aviators who ‘were soldiers fighting in the struggle just as completely as if they had been engaged on the battle front'. He concluded with a plea for generosity to ensure ‘now and in the years to come, the education and the upbringing of the orphans of the men who were too old to fly and fight, but not too old to fall'.

He made no mention of the women. Many of them were not there in any case. Jackie Moggridge, recently married to Reg, had broken a cardinal ATA rule in not telling Pauline Gower as soon
as she became pregnant; but after seven months she could conceal it no longer and had quit to go and live in Taunton, near her in-laws. Ann Welch, Bobby Leveaux (née Sandoz) and Katie Hirsch (née Stanley Smith) were likewise spoken for. Jadwiga Pilsudska was at Liverpool University studying architecture. Betty Lussier was in Spain being romanced by Ricardo Sicre, her partner in espionage, through whom she would become friends with the movie star Ava Gardner and with whom she had four sons. Emily Chapin and Helen Richey were long gone. They had accepted Jackie Cochran's standing offer of a place among the WASPs. Helen Harrison was home in Canada. Opal Anderson was back in Chicago with her boy, now six years old. Maureen Dunlop and her sister, Joan, who had spent the war as a nurse, had been reunited with their parents on the tarmac at Buenos Aires International Airport. Margot Duhalde was, at last, in France.

At least the weather rose to the occasion for the pageant at White Waltham. In glorious autumn sunshine, Alex Henshaw, the Castle Bromwich test pilot, who knew the ATA as well as any outsider, roared in over the Shottesbrooke church spire in an overpowered Seafire F4 and strained every neck on the ground with the kind of solo display not seen in these parts since 1940. Lettice Curtis was there, and remembered the occasion as ‘bittersweet', the end of flying for many of the pilots present, the end of the best years of her life. But the organisers did her the honour of asking her to bring in the biggest plane on show that day, a Consolidated Liberator. A film crew caught her climbing out of it, and caught her smiling.

A month later, Lettice delivered her last plane for the ATA, a Tempest from Langley to Aston Down. The next day, she emptied her locker at White Waltham, said goodbye to friends, and left. ‘Already the days filled with flying were assuming a dreamlike quality,' she wrote. ‘It was almost as if they had never been.' Already, Pop d'Erlanger had relinquished command of his valiant invention to one W. D Kemp, Officer in Charge of Winding Up. Already, those who had left were finding the privations of peace
harder to endure than those of war. Rationing was still in force, jobs were rarer than butter, and of those who were still single only the wealthiest could afford to ignore the question of how to make ends meet once their ATA pay stopped. Small wonder that a few clung on to the very end.

At around 4.30 on the afternoon of Friday, 30 November, six months after VE Day and six years after Pauline Gower started recruiting women flyers for the ATA, three of those women were in a tiny gaggle of spectators on the roof of the White Waltham watch office, looking west towards the darkening horizon. ‘The sun went down in a blaze of crimson and gold,' one of those present wrote. As it did, a lone Anson appeared and circled the airfield once, and landed. A handful of men climbed out, walked across the dispersal area to the watch office and handed in their parachutes. They joined the spectators at the flagpole at the entrance to the aerodrome. Ann Wood, Diana Barnato Walker and Audrey Sale-Barker were among them. Audrey stepped forward and lowered the ATA flag in the fast-fading light.