Spitfire Women of World War II Read online

  SPITFIRE WOMEN OF WORLD WAR II

  Giles Whittell

  For Karen

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1 Encounter

  2 No Way Down

  3 Queen Bee

  4 The First Eight

  5 All Over Europe the Air Was Free

  6 Escape From Poland

  7 None of Us Is Snobbish

  8 We LIKE You In Your Harness!

  9 Brab’s Beauties

  10 The Perfect Lady’s Aeroplane

  11 The Originals

  12 Team Cochran

  13 Over Here

  14 Flygirls in London

  15 Hamble

  16 Heroines

  17 Girl Flies Halifax

  18 Mayfair 120

  19 Over The Top

  20 Eyes Wide Shut?

  21 Women of the World

  22 Left Behind

  23 Honeymoon in Belgium

  24 Better To Have Lived

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on Sources

  Index

  By the same Author

  Copyright

  About The Publisher

  List of Illustrations

  Amy Johnson RAF Museum

  Gordon Selfridge and Rosemary Rees From ATA Girl, Memoirs of A

  Wartime Ferry Pilot by Rosemary du Cros

  Rosemary Rees with a Miles Hawk Major From ATA Girl, Memoirs of

  A Wartime Ferry Pilot by Rosemary du Cros

  Audrey Sale-Barker Courtesy Lord James Douglas-Hamilton

  Sale-Barker and Joan Page Courtesy Lord James Douglas-Hamilton

  Gerard d’Erlanger Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

  Pauline Gower in a Tiger Moth Imperial War Museum

  Lt. Col. J.T. Moore-Brabazon Imperial War Museum

  The ‘First Eight’ Eric Viles/ATA Association

  The men of the ATA Imperial War Museum

  Lettice Curtis climbing into a Spitfire Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

  Curtis and Gower in the cockpit of an Anson Imperial War Museum

  Gabrielle Patterson climbing out of an Avro Anson Imperial War Museum

  Diana Barnato Walker Courtesy the collection of Diana Barnato Walker

  Derek Walker Courtesy the collection of Diana Barnato Walker

  Joan Hughes Imperial War Museum

  Jackie Sorour Hulton Getty

  Mary de Bunsen Photograph by J.D.H. Radford, from Mount Up With Wings by Mary de Bunsen

  Freydis Leaf Courtesy Freydis Sharland

  Joan Hughes standing with a Short Stirling Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

  Maureen Dunlop Hulton Getty

  Ann Wood Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

  Ann Wood with her fellow flying pupils Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

  Waiting to be cleared for take-off in a Spitfire Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

  An ATA Anson Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

  Ann Blackwell in a Typhoon Imperial War Museum

  Jackie Cochran Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

  Helen Harrison, Ann Wood and Suzanne Ford Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

  Pauline Gower at White Waltham Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

  Cochran and Gower Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

  King George VI and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

  Eleanor Roosevelt at White Waltham Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

  Helen Richey Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

  Flt. Capt. Francis ‘Frankie’ Francis Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

  Bobby Sandoz, Opal Anderson, Jadwiga Pilsudska and Mary Zerbel-Ford Imperial War Museum

  ‘A tough bunch of babies’ Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

  Stewart Keith-Jopp Courtesy Robin d’Erlanger/British Airways Museum

  Betty Keith-Jopp Courtesy Katie Hirsch

  Lowering the flag A.G. Head/ATA Association

  Dorothy Hewitt with Lord Beatty Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

  Ann Wood on Remembrance Sunday in London Courtesy the Collection of Ann Wood-Kelly

  ‘Under the bridge goes Lady Penelope’, Daily Express, 21st March 1968 Express Newspapers

  Margot Duhalde Courtesy author

  Diana Barnato Walker in 1963 Popperfoto

  ‘Everyone is equal before the machine … There is no tradition in technology, no class-consciousness.’

  Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

  Prologue

  ‘Indaba’ is Zulu for ‘conversation’, and at the Indaba Hotel on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg a conversation is what I hoped for. If it materialised it would be with an elderly lady who had insisted several times on the telephone that she really had nothing to say. But we both knew this was not quite true, and now, as she walked carefully down the steps to the hotel entrance, with a grandson hovering at her shoulder, she looked up with a smile.

  ‘You must be Betty,’ I said.

  She was easily recognisable from the one blurred picture I’d seen of her in a smart blue uniform, leaning on the wing of a Fairey Barracuda over sixty years earlier. Now she wore a gold-coloured woollen shawl and carried a stick. She was tall and alert, and gave the impression she might even be looking forward to our meeting. Her name was Betty Keith-Jopp.

  Soon after that photograph was taken in late May 1945, Betty and a fellow pilot named Barbara Lankshear took off from Prestwick on the west coast of Scotland, the eastern terminus of the great Atlantic air bridge that had kept Britain supplied with bombers since before Pearl Harbor. They were both ferry pilots, unarmed and untrained to fly on instruments, with less than eighteen months’ flying experience between them. Both were in Barracudas – lumpy, underpowered torpedo bombers with unusually large cockpits and a history of unexplained crashes. They were bound for Lossiemouth, 200 miles to the north on the rugged Moray Coast.

  ‘Shall we sit outside?’ Betty asked. She led the way through the hotel lobby and out onto a shaded terrace where we found a table and talked briefly about the weather. Then she ordered a large glass of wine and returned to 1945.

  She would never have taken off that day if there had been even a hint of menace in the weather report, she insisted, and initially the sunny forecast seemed to have been accurate. ‘We were flying along perfectly happily. It was a lovely, lovely day.’ But their route took them south of Glasgow, between Dunfermline and Edinburgh and into thick cloud over the northern edge of the Firth of Forth.

  As ferry pilots, Third Officers Lankshear and Keith-Jopp had standing orders never to fly over the top of cloud as a way out of trouble. Barbara disobeyed those orders and was lucky to find a way down; she landed safely soon afterwards. But Betty decided discretion was the better part of valour and turned back. She knew there was rising ground behind the coast to her left, so began a slow turn to the right, unaware that she was losing height.

  She saw the water a second before hitting it.

  ‘I made a good landing, all things considered,’ she told me, still quietly astonished at the memory. ‘I just managed to get my nose up and the plane landed gently. It sat there on the surface for a few moments, then started sinking. I must have gone down quite decently, like in a lift.’

  Still level, the aircraft settled on the bottom of the firth. Water began squirting into the cockpit from cracks between the canopy and fuselage. At first, not being a strong swimmer, Betty
made little effort to get out. She thought of the life insurance payment that her death would trigger; of how her mother would be able to make good use of it caring for her brother, who had recently contracted polio. She thought of Amy Johnson, one of her heroes, dying in similar circumstances four years earlier despite vastly more experience in the air. ‘I can’t remember being frightened,’ she said. ‘I can remember more or less accepting it.’

  Then instinct took over. She reached up, took a last breath and pulled the red canopy release lever above her head. A giant bubble from the Barracuda’s oversized cockpit would then have headed for the surface. It could have taken her with it if she had unclipped her straps and parachute harness – but she hadn’t. ‘I wouldn’t have had the intelligence to have worked those things out,’ she said. ‘I was working on reflexes. I was acting purely like an animal. I must have bashed the thing that released the harness once the water had come in. It took forever to get to the top.’

  Even so, Betty was alive when she bobbed to the surface. There was a strong swell and the water was bitterly cold. She had no life jacket and the cloud that had engulfed her aeroplane now enveloped her. She had no way of knowing how far she was from the shore until a wave lifted her and she glimpsed it for an instant, too far to swim to but close enough to let her hope. She started to shout.

  John Morris, skipper of the trawler Providence from the port of St Monans, would never have been anywhere near Betty had he not developed engine trouble earlier that morning. Nor would he have paid much attention to what sounded at first like a seal if it hadn’t been so persistent. He altered course towards the barking, and Betty’s head appeared out of the mist.

  ‘All I can remember after that are the words “Hang on, laddie”,’ she said, sixty-one years later, sipping her chenin blanc on a cool South African afternoon. ‘And everything going black, and tea being poured over my hands to warm them up.’ She paused, blinking and smiling almost apologetically as if still unable to fathom her good fortune. ‘Why that dear little fishing boat should have come chugging along just then … really and truly, it was a miracle.’

  Yet it was not a miracle that she has often spoken about since. The stories of why Betty Keith-Jopp is so reluctant to talk about her escape from the bottom of the sea, and how she came to be flying into a cloudbank in a Barracuda in the first place, are among those this book tries to tell. They are part of the larger tale of a unique sisterhood of flying addicts – young, hopeful and ridiculously brave – who came to England from five continents to ferry combat aircraft for the Air Transport Auxiliary in the war. There were 164 of them in all, and they were the only women from among the Western Allies who flew in the war. (The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in Britain stayed firmly on the ground and in America the Women’s Air Service Pilots – or WASPs – flew too, but never less than 3,000 miles from a war zone.) They flew torpedo bombers if they had to and Lancasters if they lasted long enough; but they had eyes mainly for the fastest aerial hot-rods of the age – Hurricanes, Mosquitoes and the plane that many of these ATA women came to feel had been designed especially for them, the Spitfire.

  One of these pilots, Margaret Frost, lived for many years in an ancient half-timbered cottage on the far side of my grandmother’s favourite flower bed in Sussex. I’d always known she flew Spitfires in the war, and occasionally she would appear on television on Remembrance Sunday in her best grey overcoat, dwarfed by Guards officers, laying a wreath at the Cenotaph. But I never asked about her flying – that might have been indelicate; and then she moved to Wales.

  About twenty years later another ATA pilot, Ann Wood, walked up and introduced herself to me outside the old town hall in Newcastle, New Hampshire. She looked and talked like Katharine Hepburn in her septuagenarian prime, and the only reason I had her attention was that the occasion was my wedding. She had been my wife’s neighbour in Massachusetts for twenty years, and a friend of Margaret Frost’s since 1942.

  In that absurd understatement of the war years, they had both ‘done their bit’. Margaret would only venture that she had done her bit for England – and then only if pushed. But Ann was quite comfortable with the idea that she’d done hers for freedom; for a way of life she consciously held dear. She arrived in Liverpool in May 1942, one of twenty-five American women to join the ATA. She flew warplanes continuously until the end of 1945 and she told stories of craziness and courage that I had never heard from our side of the flower bed in Sussex; stories of upside-down engine failure and squeezing under bridges at high tide; of dodging U-boats and romancing Earls and cooling beer down for the Atlantic ferry boys by flying it to 10,000 feet. It turned out that she had also kept a meticulous, clear-eyed diary that serves as a case study of fearlessness, and of mutual Anglo-American incomprehension.

  Ann died as this book was being written, and it would have benefited from her criticism. But she and her fellow Spitfire women still deserve to be remembered for the quiet revolutionaries they were; I hope this helps.

  1

  Encounter

  Monday, 22 September 1941 was a miserable day for flying. Low cloud covered England from Bristol to the Scottish borders. Where the overcast thinned an opaque autumn haze still blurred the horizon in every direction, and over the Midlands it mixed with smog from the munitions factories, turning the barrage balloons from a deterrent into an almighty trap. Even so, at about three in the afternoon, a lone Spitfire took off from Prestwick and headed south.

  It climbed over the Ayrshire hills, then sped down the Nith valley to Dumfries and crossed the Solway Firth. It picked up the main west coast railway line at Carlisle and followed it past Oxenholme to Appleby, then headed east through the Pennines in search of clearer skies. Visibility did improve, but not by much. Reaching the London-to-Edinburgh line just south of Darlington, the plane turned south again and pressed on through the murk, England slipping beneath it as the enormous Merlin engine in its nose steadily drained its 90-gallon tanks.

  The Spitfire was running almost on empty when, soon after 5 p. m., it descended towards Maidenhead and landed safely at what had been the peacetime home of the De Havilland School of Flying at White Waltham in the Berkshire countryside. It was now headquarters of the ATA. The figure who eased herself out of the cockpit once she had taxied to the dispersal area and cut the engine was perhaps the finest woman pilot then flying for the Western Allies. There was no shortage of contenders in both Britain and America, and as Mother Russia fought for survival against the Nazi onslaught the following year her daughters excelled in the air, even in combat. But they had no-one quite like Lettice Curtis.

  She was tall and slim, with angular features and a tentative smile. She was a triple Oxford blue (in tennis, swimming and lacrosse) with a degree in mathematics and a reputation, even at twenty-three, for extreme impatience with anyone she thought deserved it. Stepping off the wing of her Spitfire in the dark blue uniform of the Air Transport Auxiliary, she took her delivery chit to the operations room beside White Waltham’s grass airstrip and handed it over with nothing much to report. No-one had been killed. No aircraft had been damaged. There had been no sightings of the enemy even though the entire route was within range of the Luftwaffe and bombing raids were still routine a year after the Battle of Britain. No-one had even tried a loop or a roll for the hell of it – and that was the point. No-one else had been flying.

  For most pilots the day had been a washout. That meant unflyable; not worth the risk of ditching in the Wash or sudden death on the slopes of Black Cwm or Shap Fell. In particular, a group of American pilots based at White Waltham, all of them men, had tried taking off that morning. Every one of them turned back.

  ‘It was many weeks later that I learned this, and of the consternation caused by the arrival of a female in a Spit’,’ Lettice Curtis wrote, and the sentence is laden with meaning. ‘Consternation’ is an exquisite understatement for the pique that a group of pilots apprenticed in barnstorming and crop-dusting across the American mid-west would a
ctually have felt. And Curtis’s satisfaction at having pulled off what the Yanks had balked at may simply have been too intense to put into words. For she was a remorseless competitor despite an expensive education in schools that valued refinement above all, and she had an unhappy knack of seeming less than cordial to Americans. Most of a lifetime later I sat down with another woman pilot in a retirement home in Oregon to talk about her wartime flying. On most subjects she was thoughtful and diplomatic, but when I mentioned Curtis her first words were: ‘Lettice always looked on Americans as if they were a bad smell.’ Which was unfortunate, because more were on their way.

  The war by this time was two years old; two years in which tenacity in the air had saved Britain from an invasion across the Channel, and superiority in the air had become Churchill’s obsession. On 12 July 1941 he had sent a note to Sir Charles Craven, Secretary of State for Air, under the command ‘Action this day’. It ended with this peroration:

  We must aim at nothing less than having an Air Force twice as strong as the German Air Force by the end of 1942. This ought not to be impossible if a renewed vast effort is made now. It is the very least that can be contemplated, since no other way of winning the war has yet been proposed.

  As a direct result of this memo, a gigantic chain of production was willed into being that would eventually rain fire on Dresden and give Eisenhower the air support without which D-Day would have been in vain. At one end of this chain were the bauxite mines of the British Empire and the Americas, from which the raw material for aluminium was dug in ever-increasing quantities. The next link was one of the great flukes of economic history – the astonishing potential for aluminium production created by the building of the huge Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams across the Columbia River in the American north-west in the depths of the Depression. Aluminium is produced by electrolysis; without the dams the Allies would have been hard-pressed to build the air force Churchill was demanding. As it was, from Everett in Washington state, now home town to the Boeing 747, to Castle Bromwich and Southampton, the miraculous silver metal, which in the nineteenth century had been as costly as gold, was banged and moulded into more aircraft in 1944 alone than Germany could produce in the entire war. Initially their cost was met from the Lend Lease loans signed by Roosevelt from October 1941 onwards as a way of aiding Britain without violating US neutrality. Then Pearl Harbor consigned that neutrality to history and rendered the whole question of payment secondary. Pilots were queuing up to fly the aircraft into combat. All that was missing were people to deliver them to the front line.