Spitfire Women of World War II (9 page)

The transition from peace to war could be complicated as well as wrenching. For Rosemary Rees, a life of abundance became one of rationing. Her social status, which had been a security blanket, suddenly guaranteed neither security nor comfort. Flying, which had been pure adventure, was deadly serious. And Germans, who had been friends, were enemies.

Rees had given up professional performing after a couple of seasons. Then she circled the globe with an older brother (by accident: the Manchurian war had ruled out their planned return from Peking on the Trans-Siberian Express). She intended to resume dancing in 1932, but instead fell under the influence of an old Cambridge friend of her brother's, Gordon Selfridge Jr, who happened to be heir to London's biggest retail fortune.

‘He had an aeroplane,' she wrote. ‘He set out to persuade me that I wanted to fly. I thought “Whatever for? Who wants to fly?” But then he stood me a trial lesson with Baker at Heston and I was hooked.'

‘Baker' was Captain Valentyne Baker, always charming, always immaculate, and one of the Mayfair set's most sought-after instructors. A softly-spoken Welshman, he had fought at Gallipoli and then taken up flying despite being gravely wounded there. (A bullet had lodged too close to his spine to be removed.) He was credited with shooting down fifteen German aircraft by the end of the First World War, and went on to become Amy Johnson's
favourite teacher. He died test-piloting a prototype fighter that he had designed with James ‘Jimmy' Martin and built with funds invested by the future ATA heartthrob Frankie Francis.

Rees sailed through her pilot's apprenticeship with barely a scratch. She then did as Gordon Selfridge told her; she bought herself a plane.

It was a handsome, two-seater Miles Hawk Major, one of the new, low-winged monoplanes that were puny by Spitfire standards but impressive for their time and enhanced by ultra-modern streamlining. For a girl from ‘poor but honest parents' (poor, she explained, in that they were not among ‘the rich'), it was the perfect European party plane.

Gordon Selfridge's rationale for urging Rees to buy her own aeroplane, as opposed to renting one, was that with a machine of one's own it was possible to enjoy extended continental air safaris without worrying about having to be back at Stag Lane by Sunday night. ‘You won't have any fun without one,' he told his protégée. Rees would have had plenty of fun anywhere, but her Hawk lifted life onto a giddy new level. The aircraft that made this gallivanting possible were already being adapted to bomb Europe's industrial centres. This was clear enough to anyone who read the newspapers, but it only made these recreational pilots more determined to make the most of their peaceable versions while they could.

‘All over Europe, the air was free,' the young Rees exalted, as she recalled the world opened to her by a private licence and a pair of wings:

On her annual ski trips to Switzerland and Austria, Rees made friends with fellow skiers from throughout Europe. When they learned she was a flyer, they would invariably invite her to visit them in warmer weather.

Rees was a regular at the ‘Magyar Pilots' Picnic', held annually at an airfield outside Budapest. She delivered Christmas presents to the Czechs in 1938, almost had her plane impounded in Berlin on her way home, and made frequent flying visits to the Adriatic ‘because the Selfridges had bought a little island called Hvar there, off the coast'.

In Germany, the Nazis were not coy about proselytising; nor did the typical visiting British aviatrix go out of her way to avoid them. On the contrary, she seems, not unlike the Lindberghs at the same time, to have been fascinated. Rees describes an excursion laid on by the Düsseldorf Aero Club in a balloon:

The young Nazis were ardent evangelists, and there was no more lavish set-piece for their evangelising than the 1936 Olympics. Freydis Leaf, who went on to fly every class of aircraft except four-engined bombers with the ATA, travelled to Kiel that year as a teenager for the sailing events of the Olympics in which her father and her brother, John, were both medal prospects in the 6-metre class. While they were there the
Graf Spee
had pride of place in Kiel harbour – a silent, garlanded precursor of shock and awe – and three new U-boats were launched, which Leaf remembers thinking ‘was a funny thing to do in the middle of the Olympics'. Even so, brother John, Aryan-looking and bilingual after a year in a German boarding school, became such fast friends with a group of young German naval officers that they made him a blood brother. And when the Führer himself came to host a rally, ‘everyone said Heil Hitler and I terribly wanted to say Heil Hitler too because you got this sort of feeling with the whole crowd going …' (Leaf winces as she looks back across the decades from her Oxfordshire cottage); ‘but my mother looked at me in fury, and my father was of course terribly anti-Hitler, and wouldn't go to Berlin to collect his medal.' (He won the gold.)

Hitler delighted in publicly tearing up the conditions imposed on Germany at Versailles. At the same time, he pretended to uphold them. Hence the brazen show of brand new naval steel at Kiel; hence also the German mania for gliding. It looked wholesome, poetic, and of course uplifting, this soaring exploitation of the stiff breezes and rounded hills of Thuringia and the Czech frontierlands. In reality it was a massively subsidised way of training pilots without putting them in banned fighter aircraft.

Rosemary Rees stuck to powered flight and in the winter of 1938/9 was advised to leave Berlin quickly, lest war be declared while she was there and she be impounded along with her beloved Hawk.

Naomi Heron-Maxwell, the granddaughter of the Earl of Macclesfield and sometime parachutist for the Alan Cobham Flying Circus, took up gliding in Hesselberg in 1935. She became friendly with Wolf Hirth, a one-legged German glider ace, and in due course became a regular at German gliding contests. When war broke out her initial reaction was to leave Europe for India, on foot. (She appears to have got no further than Egypt, where she spent the early part of the war before returning to England to join the ATA in February 1942.)

Ann Welch became so obsessed with gliding that she once drove 540 miles overnight in an MG Midget to get a spare part for her tailplane. At Dunstable in Bedfordshire in 1937 she met none other than Hanna Reitsch, Hitler's favourite pilot and one of the most deluded zealots of the Third Reich. Starting in 1943, Reitsch pleaded in vain with Hitler to let her set up an elite corps of kamikaze rocketplane pilots. But on her brief appearance at the Dunstable International Summer Gliding Camp six years earlier she seems to have been charm itself: ‘Then Hanna Reitsch arrived,' Welch wrote by way of a caption to round off a strip cartoon she drew to commemorate the event. ‘After an extremely good farewell party, the camp broke up. It was great fun. We hope the Germans enjoyed their stay with us, as much as we did having them.'

Welch also met Rudolf Hess, the Führer's deputy, in a ski hut above the Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden. She was on a skiing holiday arranged by a young German she had met at a party in London. This ‘friend' – a Nazi PR functionary with a budget, she realised later – led her and the rest of a large Anglo-German group on foot up the snowbound alp from Hitler's eyrie to a Bavarian hut near the Austrian border. The plan had been to introduce them to the man himself, but this was January 1938, and Hitler was indisposed (presumably planning the annexation of the Sudetenland). Instead, Rudolf Hess wandered up to see them towards the end of their stay. Welch described the evening:

Ann Welch died in 2002. Her daughter, a consultant at a London teaching hospital, told me her mother always reckoned the ATA's women were better pilots than its men. In Welch's case this was definitely true. She was a world-class glider pilot for many years after the war, and exuded an uncompromising, special forces-style rigour in everything she did.

The other ATA woman who glided before the war could neither rival Welch for warrior toughness, nor Naomi Heron-Maxwell for chutzpah. But she matched them both for inner steel. Mary de Bunsen, she of the polio-stricken leg, weak heart and poor eyesight, knew Germany well because she had relatives in Leipzig. Under her own steam – which was strictly limited: she would feel her heart strain walking up a gentle hill – she enrolled in a beginner's gliding course at Grunau in the Reisengebirge south of Dresden in the summer of 1939. By day she let her hosts hurl her into the air with giant catapults in ‘Grunau baby' gliders with swastikas emblazoned on their tailplanes. In the evenings they would talk about the gathering storm ‘without restraint, just as if we were going to be on the same side in it'.

‘There was a certain amount of clicking of heels and heiling Hitler down in the village,' de Bunsen remembered, ‘but most of it was shed like a cloak in the relaxed atmosphere on the hilltop. They didn't take Goebbels very seriously, but they were ready to follow to the bitter end a government which promised to restore, by whatever means, the greatness and independence of Germany.'

To her surprise and delight, de Bunsen won her elementary gliding certificate for a five-minute flight on the last day of the
course. A mighty updraft sprang suddenly from the valley beneath the Reisengebirge, and the Germans insisted that the English Fräulein take full advantage of it. On her way home she called on her cousins in Leipzig, where they all drank champagne with whole peaches in each glass. But ‘we knew that war was coming, and that it was the last time we should meet for many years,' de Bunsen wrote. ‘It was a sad parting.'

Germany invaded Poland the following month. For Rosemary Rees, the party was over. For all those who had sampled German hospitality during the slide towards war, the strangeness of consorting with the future enemy was replaced by the business of preparing in earnest to fight him. But for Anna Leska, Barbara Wojtulanis and Jadwiga Pilsudska the invasion was an immediate catastrophe. Their country was being overrun by panzers advancing on Warsaw on three separate fronts. On 17 September 1939, Stalin invaded from the east. Poland's short-lived independence was being unmercifully strangled, and for any Pole hoping one day to help revive it there was only one rational course open – to escape.

In the autumn of 2006 the curator of the Museum of Polish Aviation, on the outskirts of Kraków, organised a modest exhibition of memorabilia. It was displayed in three glass cases in the middle of a hangar full of ageing aeroplanes. The captions were in Polish, but much of the contents consisted of yellowing sheets of British wartime paperwork: an ID card (ht: 5 foot 6 inches, bld: ‘slight', eyes: grey, hair: brown); an Aviator's Certificate issued by the Royal Aero Club, 119 Piccadilly; a note dated July 1947 accompanying fifty-seven emergency clothing coupons – ‘To enable you to buy civilian clothing on your resignation from the Polish Resettlement Section, Women's Auxiliary Air Force'; and an insistent letter from Colonel Mitkiewitcz-Zoltek of the Polish General HQ (London) to Flying Officer Cummings of the Air Ministry, written in November 1940:

There were also a couple of leather flying helmets, a pair of split-lens Protector brand goggles and, etched with the initials RAF, something that looked like a silver powder compact.

Each of the Misses Leska, Wojtulanis and Pilsudska were
allocated one glass case in the exhibition, but nothing in them explained how they had made their way from Poland to Piccadilly despite the best efforts of the Gestapo. The only real clue to this was an unremarkable three-seater single-engined Polish-built RWD 13 monoplane parked next to the exhibit cases. This was not the exact plane in which Anna Leska escaped, but it was identical in everything except livery and markings. Leska's call sign, SP-WDL, was in the blue and grey colours of the Wedel Chocolate factory of Warsaw. It had scratchy beige elephant-cord upholstery and, for joysticks, two aluminium prongs, unadorned except for a black Bakelite knob on top of each – not much against the Luftwaffe, but it served a purpose.

Anna Leska's experiences of the first months of the war were to leave her, as one American friend put it, ‘deeply and permanently upset'. She told parts of her story to various people but it is quite possible that she never told all of it to anyone. She could be famously short-tempered. On ‘washout' days at Hamble ferry pool she would chain smoke through bridge hands, cursing her lousy cards. She scowled even when telling jokes in her bad English, and she pursued a feud with one of her fellow pilots that had to be settled by the commanding officer before it ended in a mid-air collision.

In September 1939 Leska was twenty-nine, the daughter of an army colonel and a doyenne of the Warsaw Aero Club. Stefania Wojtulanis – known to her friends as Barbara – was two years younger and popular as an air racer. She was also Poland's first female parachutist and licensed balloonist. As women, both had been turned down by the Polish Air Force, but the war changed that. Within days of the invasion they were attached as couriers to the personal flight of General Jozef Zajac, Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Air Force. This did not make them Air Force pilots – women in armed aircraft was still a step too far – but it did enable them to commandeer unarmed planes to keep ahead of the advancing Wehrmacht, hiding them under the cover of trees each night to prevent them being bombed by the morning.

In one incident that Leska described later to Alison King, her favourite confidante at Hamble, she could see German troops destroying a bridge barely a mile away as she wheeled her plane out of the woods and unfolded its wings. She took off down a sloping potato field, potato plants tugging at her undercarriage, as a column of panzers swept into plain view along a road at the bottom of the field.

The Polish army surrendered on 27 September – but the air force did not. General Zajac ordered his staff to rendezvous outside Czernowice in Poland's extreme south-eastern corner (now in the Ukraine). It was from here, at the foot of the northern slopes of the Carpathians, that Leska flew to freedom with four passengers crammed into the Wedel Chocolate Company's tiny grey three-seater. But it was a strange sort of freedom that awaited them.

Pouring south over the mountains, by air or bullock cart if they were lucky but otherwise on foot, were tens of thousands of Europe's most motivated enemies of Nazism. Hitler made it clear to the Romanian government that if it wanted to avoid Poland's fate it should intern its Polish refugees. Romania obliged. Leska landed at an aerodrome where her compatriots were sleeping head-to-toe in the hangars and all other available space was occupied by Polish aircraft. These would be confiscated. The luckier Polish officers found refuge in Romanian homes, sparing them the internment camps where perhaps 100,000 refugees spent that winter, many of them dying of a combination of malaria, cold and malnutrition. Leska was eventually taken in by a local police chief and his wife.

Britain's ‘guarantee' of Poland's territorial integrity turned out, in the face of blitzkrieg, to have been more of an open-dated IOU. But certain individual Britons had the wit and compassion to advocate swift action to help those Poles stuck in Romania. One of these was Group Captain A. P. Davidson, former air attaché to the British Embassy in Warsaw, where he had been impressed by the Polish Air Force's professionalism. Hurriedly evacuated to London, Davidson urged the French and British legations in
Bucharest to help General Zajac spring his people from Romania on the grounds that they were a key strategic asset. He knew that extricating them would not be easy. There was no question of enlisting Stalin's help; those Polish officers who had fled east had been shipped to the Gulag or executed in the forests of Katyn. Nor was there any hope of an amnesty from Hitler. He might still have been hoping to avoid war with Britain, but his chosen method of dealing with the Polish military – to crush it – had served him well so far and he saw no reason to change it.

Romania was thoroughly infiltrated by the Gestapo and its informers. In the mountains, where unauthorised possession of skis was punishable by death, refugees were liable to be hunted like animals and shot on sight. In homes like the one where Leska found herself a lodger, who was she to know which side her hosts were on?

After a week she received a message from her squadron leader. She was to meet him at seven that evening at a crossroads near the house. There would be a car, and she was to wear a skirt. It took them a week to reach Bucharest and once there seven months to get visas for France.

By the time she arrived in the south of France in May 1940, Anna Leska had had no contact with her family since her escape from Poland. Her mother and sisters, as far as she knew, had stayed behind. Her father might have tried to escape, like her, to join the Polish forces gathering in exile, but by what route and with what success? Dozens of routes were being tried, some via South Africa to avoid the North African war, some ending in the gold mines of Kolyma, in the Soviet Far East.

As she checked into a hotel in Menton her own family name, in familiar handwriting, jumped out at her from the guests' register. Her father had stayed there two days earlier on his way to England. Rather than follow him, she continued to Paris, where the Polish Air Force was still technically headquartered, and where Wojtulanis and two other Polish women pilots had already arrived by different escape routes. For a few weeks, these four became
much admired oddities. They would be the only women from the Western allies to wear full air force pilots' uniforms in the entire war. It was General Sikorski's idea, and militarily inconsequential since the fall of France was imminent and the Polish Air Force was in no position to prevent it. ‘All four women were commissioned as pilot officers,' Wojtulanis wrote of her group. ‘In steel-blue uniforms with a single star on each epaulette, they became a sensation on the streets of Paris.'

When Pétain capitulated in June 1940, Leska was bundled onto a boat from St Jean de Luz to Plymouth. From there, she went immediately to London and the Polish General Staff building on Buckingham Palace Road. A Polish officer whom she happened to know saw her as she was waiting, exhausted and more rootless than ever, in the lobby. He advised her to report to Room 303, without explaining why. She set off up several flights of stairs and then followed a series of dimly lit corridors, eventually knocking on door 303. It was opened by her father.

In the late summer of 2006, I took an evening train up the West Bank of the Vistula from Kraków to Warsaw to meet the last surviving Polish woman pilot of the ATA, Jadwiga Pilsudska. I asked her what she knew of Anna Leska's journey from the Warsaw Aero Club to Buckingham Palace Road. She thought for a while, then said apologetically that ‘there were so many stories, things that happened that you were interested in, that somehow either she told me and I can't remember, or we never talked about it'.

Had Leska been reluctant to talk about it?

‘No, it just didn't happen.'

Pilsudska and Leska had kept in touch in England after the war and lived close to each other in Warsaw for ten years after the fall of communism. Not for the first time I got the sense of memories carefully compartmentalised to prevent one set contaminating another.

For Jadwiga Pilsudska herself, the process of reaching England after the invasion had been accelerated by the fact that she was the daughter of the founder of modern Poland. Her father, Marshal
Jozef Pilsudski, had conceived a new Polish nationalism for the twentieth century and used it to weld together the Greater Poland bequeathed to Europe by the First World War. He had died in 1935, but his spirit, the spirit of Poland, seemed to live on in his daughter. The press would turn out to watch her glide at weekends at Sokola Gora. Here was the new-model Pilsudski, as brave as the Marshal; and as air-minded as she was beautiful. She was modest, yet self-assured, youthful, yet somehow wise.

When Colonel General Heinz Guderian and the XIX Army Corps rolled in to Poland Jadwiga and her family fled with her father's uniform in a black leather suitcase.

While those of her uncles who had stayed in Warsaw were arrested and thrown in the Lyubianka, Pilsudska and her mother and sisters stayed with the Polish ambassador in London. They did what they could for less fortunate children of the diaspora. One, a medical student and friend of Jadwiga's, had been an intern on a cruise ship bound for South America when the country was overrun. She returned to Southampton instead of Gdansk and started a new life with nothing but the trunk she had taken on the cruise.

It was not impossible to go back, not if you had the desire and a purpose and the right connections in the underground.
Pilsudska wanted to, she told me, but it seems she was dissuaded from doing so partly because the loss of Marshal Pilsudski's daughter would have been too great a blow for the morale of the Home Army and the government and armed forces in exile. But she would sooner not talk about it. The explanation is the compartment wall across her memory: ‘My life stopped on the 17th of September,' she told me with sudden clarity. ‘I left everything behind and had to start something completely fresh.'

That something would be flying, but she did not know it yet.