Spitfire Women of World War II

Later ATA recruits found some of these pioneers downright imperious. Margaret Fairweather, the first woman to fly a Spitfire, was nicknamed the Cold Front. Lettice Curtis was known to everyone in the ATA but that did not mean she would talk to them. (One new arrival from South America remembers handing her a letter of introduction and being stunned when ‘she read it, said nothing and turned away’.) Another relative novice who had to spend a week at the first all-women’s ferry pool at Hamble, near Southampton, called it ‘the loneliest time I’ve ever spent’.

But the exigencies of war – and especially the worsening shortage of pilots as the air war intensified – meant that all-comers would eventually have to be accepted by the pioneers, just as the pioneers had been accepted by the men.

And this was why, towards the end of April 1942 (and four months after Pearl Harbor) two young women in ATA uniform set off from London for Liverpool docks to meet a converted coal carrier called the Beaver Hill. These women were Pauline Gower and the Hon. Mrs Kitty Farrer. Gower, the high-achieving daughter of Sir Robert Gower, MP for Gillingham, had been appointed head of the women’s section of the ATA in September 1939. Farrer was her adjutant. The ship they were meeting had had a rough and dangerous crossing from Montreal. The last convoy to have sailed this route had lost six of its ten vessels to U-boats, but the Beaver Hill somehow made it through both the German blockade and a ferocious three-day storm. On it were five unusual guests of the British government – the first five of twenty-five American women pilots to cross the Atlantic that year to join the ATA.

They cannot have been hard to pick out on the gangplank. In the tide of over a million Americans who came ashore at Liverpool to help Churchill reverse the catastrophe of Nazism only a few handfuls were women. Even so, Commander Gower and Executive Officer Farrer did not get to them first. As the ship’s passengers disembarked, the Englishwomen were dismayed to see the captain and crew, formed up in a ragged line at the end of the gang-plank, surround their charges and smother them in what appeared to be drunken kisses. ‘They grabbed each one of us and hugged us and kissed us on both cheeks,’ one of those women remembered. ‘Pauline Gower was so prim, I can just imagine her thinking, “Oh my god, what are these Americans doing?”’

Miss Gower and Mrs Farrer waited for the raucousness to end. Then they stepped forward to shake hands. By their own account they invited their visitors to dinner at the nearby Adelphi Hotel, and the new arrivals appeared to accept. In fact the Americans were exhausted and went off to sleep. Not one of them showed up at the appointed time, leaving Gower and Farrer to dine alone at a table for seven. They were so affronted that they left on the night train and suggested their American ‘cousins’ make their own way to London in the morning.

That suited Dorothy Furey perfectly.

Furey was the bewitching, violet-eyed daughter of a New Orleans banana importer, and she had already decided that Pauline Gower was uptight. Her father had lost a large fortune in the crash of 1929, and since then she had gained wide experience of the susceptibilities of men. She had also nearly killed herself looping over Lake Ponchartrain in an open cockpit Arrowsport biplane. She was twenty-four when the Beaver Hill docked in Liverpool, and the only one of the five women in her group to have packed an evening gown with her flying gear. She called it her Gone With The Wind dress. It was red and not especially long, and she would use it to spectacular effect before the war was out. Some of the other Americans called her the seductress. Not all were proud of her. For her own part, when Furey looked back on her fellow women pilots at the end of her life she stated quietly: ‘There wasn’t anybody to compare with me.’

Not that her hosts were quick to notice. On arriving in London, Furey and company were escorted directly to a meeting room near the Grosvenor House Hotel and made to listen to a schoolmasterly talk by Pop d’Erlanger on ‘ill-mannered Americans’ and how not to be counted among them. Pop was popular, especially among his peers in the British boardroom class, but he irritated Furey no end.

‘They called him the man with the runways on his shoulder because we all had stripes but he had gold, like an admiral,’ she remembered. ‘And he greeted us with a lecture on ill-mannered Americans. Yes he did. Because they had had some young men who had come over to help and they had, I guess, got drunk and behaved badly. So that was our greeting. I was so furious I nearly got up and walked out, except I didn’t know where I was or where I would go.’

In the event the five Americans were taken to Austin Reed’s on Regent Street to be measured for their uniforms. From there they went to Paddington to catch the train to White Waltham, thirty miles to the west. It was a journey that would become as familiar as ration coupons over the next three years, but it must have seemed unutterably strange that first time – to be trapped in the gaze of English fellow-passengers too war weary and curious to lower their eyes, to stare out at suburbs vast enough to swallow whole a New York borough, and then at ‘countryside’ too thick with roads and villages to count as countryside except on such a crowded island, as the aerodrome that was to be their gateway to a new life of heroic and unprecedented flying clanked closer by the minute.

Cars met the Americans at Maidenhead station. From here they were ferried to ATA headquarters, a flat-roofed, two-storey brick building next to the operations room. As the new arrivals clambered out they realised at once that the aerodrome’s entire male pilot contingent had downed tools to size them up. Faces filled every window; they made a peculiar reception committee. Its members included the gruff and jowly Norman Shelley, an actor who would disappear without explanation for days at a time for what turned out to be stints impersonating Winston Churchill on the radio during the Prime Minister’s secret absences abroad. There were also no fewer than three fully functioning one-armed pilots based there, among them the terrifying Stewart Keith-Jopp, Betty’s uncle, who was also missing an eye. (‘I was told he lost the arm on a bombing run in World War One,’ Betty told me, miming the awkward business of hand-delivering high explosives from the cockpit of a Sopwith Camel. ‘Apparently it went off in his hand, but he never talked about it.’)

The other one-armed men were First Officer R. A. Corrie and the Honourable Charles Dutton, later Lord Sherborne, who was once interrupted by a woman pilot in the White Waltham common room arguing over which arm it was better for a pilot to be without. The answer was not clear, but Dutton did explain that he could take off in a Spitfire only with the control column clenched between his legs. And he could land only with the throttle pulled right back in advance. Every landing was effectively a forced one, with no second chances.

The most discerning judge of the new arrivals was probably Dr Arthur ‘Doc’ Barbour, White Waltham’s chief medic. Barbour was Scottish, single, dedicated to his pilots’ welfare and ‘perfect for the ATA’, according to a colleague who knew him well. He also had a fondness for grainy 16-mm ‘adult films’ that might have got him into trouble in another age, and he insisted that all new pilots, male or female, present themselves unclothed for their medical examinations. Barbour saw no reason to make an exception for the Americans on account of their gender or their nationality. In fact he seems to have relished forcing the issue, which is why one of the first orders given to the women of the Beaver Hill by their new employer was to strip. But by this time they had been joined in London by a mercurial millionairess from Manhattan’s Upper East Side who considered herself their guardian angel – and she was having none of it.

Jacqueline Odlum Cochran, born Bessie Lee Pitman, had first delivered herself to Britain at the controls of a twin-engined Lock-heed Hudson bomber the previous summer. Her many British critics called the trip a publicity stunt, which it was. Publicity had served Cochran well on her journey from shoeless orphan to cosmetics millionairess and daredevil air racer, and she was addicted to it. She was also married to an industrialist who was a friend of President and Mrs Roosevelt and a dependable donor to their Democratic Party. They in turn supported her idea of drawing attention to the work being done by women pilots in war-ravaged Britain. Hence the night crossing from Gander, Newfoundland, to Carlisle and on to Prestwick; nineteen hours in all, which she survived despite acts of sabotage by mutinous ground crews and mysterious tracer bullets fired up at her from the middle of the Atlantic.

Given only a little more luck, Jackie Cochran might have become a thoroughgoing megalomaniac. She had grand visions of an all-female US military flying force answering to none other than Jackie Cochran, and throughout the war she worked tirelessly to make this vision a reality. But first she had to settle for hiring twenty-five competent women pilots with at least 350 hours’ flying experience to help ferry planes round Britain. By the time she started welcoming them to London she had travelled the length and breadth of North America to interview candidates whom she had canvassed in advance with long, excited telegrams.

‘CONFIDENTIAL,’ one of them began.

ON BEHALF OF BRITISH AIR TRANSPORT AUXILIARY I AM WIRING ALL THE WOMEN PILOTS WHOSE ADDRESSES AVAILABLE TO ASK IF YOU WOULD BE WILLING TO VOLUNTEER FOR SERVICE … EVERY FRONT NOW OUR FRONT AND FOR THOSE DESIRING QUICK ACTIVE SERVICE SHORT OF ACTUAL COMBAT BUT INCLUDING FLIGHT EXPERIENCE WITH COMBAT PLANES THIS SERVICE ABROAD SEEMS IDEAL CHANCE … WIRE ME 630 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK CITY AND YOU WILL RECEIVE LETTER WITH MORE DETAILS … RELEASE NO PUBLICITY AS A RESULT OF THIS TELEGRAM.

When Cochran’s gals started arriving in England she was ready for them, at the Savoy. White Waltham must have seemed terribly humdrum by comparison, but when she drove down there, at the wheel of a borrowed Daimler, it was not so much the shortage of glamour that irked her. It was ‘Doc’ Barbour’s order to get undressed.

Cochran was livid. She was a bit of a prude, and she fancied herself as defender-in-chief of the good name of her handpicked representatives of dynamic American womanhood. ‘There he is,’ she wrote of Barbour, ‘adamant about his damn procedures. There I am – not about to take off all my clothes or let the other American girls be subjected to such ridiculous procedures. Where was it stated that England needed its pilots to be examined in the buff?’

In the end it didn’t matter. For both the British and the American governments, Cochran was an unclassifiable anomaly whose personal contacts and sheer force of will demanded attention. A pal of Roosevelt’s – blonde, rich, short-fused, married but without her husband in attendance – had taken up residence at the Savoy. She could not be allowed to storm home firing off tirades to the White House about British ingratitude. Instead, when she stormed back to London and started complaining to Pop d’Erlanger’s paymasters at the Air Ministry, he caved in. The message was passed to Doc Barbour at White Waltham that he would have to satisfy himself with stethoscope and tongue depressor. Dorothy Furey and her fellow Americans entered the Air Transport Auxiliary with their clothes on.

Cochran had won her first pitched battle with England’s ‘damn procedures’. But she had lost any hope of being accepted by the British Establishment into which she had barged. According to the splendidly sober Lettice Curtis, Cochran had ‘entirely misjudged the wartime mood of the British people’. And it was true. Ground down by rationing – of clothes as well as food – and with little first-hand experience of the United States, most Britons bought into the stereotype of American women as movie stars or gold diggers more readily than they let on. And Cochran’s presence only reinforced it.

American men were not much more graciously received. When GIs started arriving in numbers later in 1942 they looked so healthy that Londoners started calling them ‘pussies’. Margaret Fairweather was even blunter. ‘What a strange, barbaric lot,’ she sighed in a letter to her brother about the ‘cousins’. ‘So well up in bodily civilization and so dismally lacking in mind. They are really – the ones we contact at least – great over-grown wild adolescents.’

The disappointment was mutual. Ann Wood arrived in England as a twenty-four-year-old flying instructor infused with transatlantic solidarity by what she had seen in newsreels and heard in the CBS radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow. But the Brits and Britishness quickly drove her nuts. At first she gave them the benefit of the doubt. Landing in Liverpool a month after Dorothy Furey, she was impressed by the sight of ‘fifty cheery little men’ from HM Customs and Excise who came aboard her ship, a French Canadian freighter called the Indochinois. They were ‘wonderful – didn’t open a thing’. But once ashore she was immediately struck by ‘the blackness and dirt … and then the poverty’ of Britain.

She was unimpressed by the ‘pretence’ of the British labourer in his shirt and tie and ‘inevitable tan raincoat which is black and shiny with grease’; by the ‘puny moustaches’ on so many supposedly stiff upper lips; by the lack of variety on the BBC, not just compared with back home but also with German radio, to which she also listened; by the ‘utter and complete mess’ of the White Waltham canteen; and above all by the unwarranted superiority complex of the British officer class, which was happy to blame America for anything and everything while its members blithely gamed the system for a few extra petrol coupons. As she wrote more than once during her first British summer, when rain and mandatory navigation classes kept her grounded for days at a time, ‘sometimes I wonder about this war’.

The British, it seems, wondered less. (This, too, exasperated Wood. Her diary is peppered with pleas to her hard-pressed hosts to ‘sacrifice less and THINK more’.) But then, for the British, the war was a much simpler matter of life and death.

A few weeks after Ann Wood disembarked at Liverpool, another smart young woman took off from White Waltham in a strong crosswind. She was flying a low-winged monoplane with an open cockpit called a Miles Magister, and her assignment was to familiarise herself with southern England. She was to land at Henlow, then fly over RAF Debden in Essex, head north towards Wattisham in Suffolk, land again at Sywell near Northampton and be back at White Waltham in time for tea. That day, she got no further than Debden.

Diana Barnato was an exceptional, intuitive pilot who once landed a Typhoon at 230 mph with a clear view of the runway beneath her feet because the underside of the plane had been torn off in mid-air. She was also lucky, and very rich. The daughter of British motor-racing champion Woolf Barnato, and granddaughter of a South African diamond tycoon who had provided amply for his descendants before being ‘lost’ over the side of the SS Christiana somewhere off Namibia, Diana felt just enough fear to survive. But not much more.

High over Debden that April morning the wind began to throw the Magister around as if preparing to snap its fabric wings in two. She decided to land, and made her way unannounced towards the aerodrome buildings.

Thanks to her parallel existence as a socialite it was rare for Miss Barnato to enter an RAF mess and not know a face or two, and Debden did not disappoint. She immediately recognised Sas de Mier, a Mexican air gunner then flying with the RAF in Bristol Blenheims over northern Germany. He introduced her over lunch to ‘a well-built, thickset young man, dark with blue eyes [and] one of the worst haircuts I had ever seen’. This was Squadron Leader Humphrey Gilbert of the Humphrey Gilberts of Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire. ‘We got along fine,’ Diana recalled.

Gilbert had the Magister’s spark plugs removed and Diana was forced to spend three days at Debden, in which time she and Gilbert fell in love. Within three weeks they were engaged. Within a month, Gilbert was dead. He had survived the Battle of Britain to be killed giving a corpulent air traffic controller a lift in his Spitfire. As the ATA women were soon to learn, there was no spare room in a Spitfire cockpit even for the slimmest of them. Humphrey Gilbert, with a whole extra body in his lap, had found out too late that he couldn’t pull the stick back. The aircraft barely left the ground.

Diana mourned Humphrey for many years, but not to the exclusion of pleasure or excitement or the company of other men. Life was too short – and too ethereal – for that, and the importance of filling every unforgiving minute with excitement was something on which all the early ATA women could agree. These included a willowy blonde ski champion called Audrey Sale-Barker (better known for most of her life as the Countess of Selkirk); the ice hockey international Mona Friedlander, whom the Fleet Street diarists quickly nicknamed ‘the Mayfair Minx’; and Lois Butler, wife of the chairman of the De Havilland Aircraft Company, and former captain of the Canadian women’s ski team.

Pauline Gower, who as Commander of the ATA women’s section was queen bee of British women pilots in the war, had first excelled as the perfect schoolgirl at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Tunbridge Wells. She was the Mother Superior’s pet: bright, bouncy, diligent and fizzing with ideas. One of these, while still a teenager, was to follow her father into the Conservative party as an MP. But then an infection that required surgery almost killed her at seventeen, and permanently weakened her health. So she took up flying as ‘the perfect sedentary occupation’. Mary de Bunsen, who was seldom photographed without thick glasses and a furrowed brow, found it a thrilling distraction from ‘the ghastly importance of a good marriage’.

When these young ladies landed at stately homes and castles converted for use as Satellite Landing Grounds, they would often recognise the great lawns from weekend house parties. When they first flew Hurricanes, they celebrated with a sumptuous dinner at the Ecu de France in St James’s – for who knew what tomorrow would bring?

The weather was always the decisive factor. When the sun shone at White Waltham, and the great Flight Captain Frankie Francis set hearts aflutter by removing his shirt and flexing his muscles, and the spire of the Collegial Church of St John the Baptist at Shottesbrooke could be seen beyond the trees at the western end of the runway, that meant good flying weather; at least two miles’ visibility. The Shottesbrooke spire in plain view meant ferry chits at nine o’clock and long days in the air. It meant butterflies, because no good pilot ever assumed fog would not rear up out of a cloudless sky and grab her; but more than that it held the prospect of total gratification.

No women in Britain in the war were more admired for doing their bit – nor for their uniform – than those who flew with the ATA. But in doing so they partook of a very private pleasure. ‘Our happiness was almost indecently visible in time of trouble and distress,’ Mary de Bunsen fretted – unnecessarily. As Lettice Curtis knew, no-one ever saw these women at their happiest. To be airborne over the Pennines on a clear spring morning with a delivery to Colerne, Kirkbride or even Lossiemouth, jumping-off point for Scapa Flow and the murderous North Atlantic, was to be ‘blissfully cut off from the rest of the world’. Alone in the cockpit, ‘past and present would recede until existence became once more a pinpoint in time, concerned solely with the immediate present of gauges, weather, navigation and finding that next landmark’.

But when the cloud came down, so did the dreadful pall of death. Ferrying aircraft around well-defended Britain was, bizarrely, one of the most lethal activities on offer to either men or women in this war. Nearly one in ten of the ATA’s women pilots died. None of them ever fired a shot in anger because they flew unarmed, so they were sitting ducks should the Luftwaffe happen on them. They could also be shot at by friendly ack-ack units, ensnared by barrage balloons and, at any moment, ambushed by the weather. They flew without radio, and this was tightrope-walking without a safety net: no weather ‘actuals’, no check calls to the nearest RAF or met station, no radio beam to home in on.

Immediately in front of their joysticks, on Spitfires and almost every other class of aircraft used by the RAF, was the same six-instrument panel: air speed indicator, altimeter, gyro compass, attitude indicator, turn-and-slip gauge and artificial horizon. ATA pilots knew what each instrument did and they used them separately every time they flew. But in the alchemic business of saving their own lives by using these instruments together to work out where they were going when the gloom outside their canopies was thick as concrete – in blind flying – they had no formal training at all. They were told this was to discourage going ‘over the top’ of cloud and generally ugly weather; and they were told this despite the fact that getting down through generally ugly weather is what instrument flying is for. The real reason seems to have been to save time and money, and the cost would be in lives.

When the Shottesbrooke spire was lost in cloud ATA pilots were not obliged to fly, but they still did. Out of boredom, rivalry, the pressure to deliver aircraft, or sometimes needling from operations officers who were themselves being needled by a chain of command that stretched directly to the Ministry of Aircraft Production and Churchill, they flew in all weathers, convincing themselves that holes would open up and let them down through the great blankets of condensation that kept England so green. They also flew every type of aircraft produced by the Allies. There were nearly 200 of them, from lumbering amphibian Supermarine Walruses to high-altitude reconnaissance Spitfires; from Blenheims and Beaufighters to Mitchells and Mosquitoes, from unsinkable old Tiger Moths to half-baked experiments like the Airacobra, with a rear-mounted engine and a transmission shaft that spun furiously between the pilot’s legs.

What training the ATA pilots did have was thorough, and they were justly proud of it. It consisted of ground school in meteorology, map-reading, navigation and mechanics, with special classes on where to expect barrage balloons; then dual and solo flights in docile Moths to build confidence for the marginally faster Miles Magisters. In these, recruits were expected to complete no fewer than thirty long cross-country flights along fixed routes, intended to imprint on pilots’ minds a giant aerial picture of England, with particular attention paid to railway lines and Roman roads since these were often the best guides out of trouble. Finally, pilots were assigned to ferry pools for ‘Class I’ ferrying, of light, single-engined planes. For promotion to faster Class II machines and above, all the way up to Class V four-engined bombers, conversion courses were eventually offered at the RAF’s Central Flying School at Upavon in Wiltshire.

No training programme could familiarise every pilot with every type of plane in the sky. So they familiarised themselves, using a ring-bound set of handling notes prepared by Flight Engineer Bob Morgan of the British Overseas Airways Corporation. Twenty minutes with Morgan’s notes was usually enough to work out what made a Walrus different from a Wellington, but not always, especially if the Walrus had been shot up or marked down as unserviceable. The ATA would still fly it to the wrecker’s yard.

For combat pilots, the risks of flying varied from intense, in battle, to non-existent, on leave. For ferry pilots they were virtually constant. The weather never went away, and they (almost) never stopped flying. They worked thirteen days a fortnight and died steadily, on hillsides, in the Irish Sea, when their engines failed or blew up or their undercarriage refused to come down. The casualties’ names were posted on the ferry pool notice board every morning, and everyone knew the dead as well as it was possible to get to know someone who might be gone at any moment. One notice at White Waltham read: