Spitfire Women of World War II

Accident Report. 12 September 1942. Hurricane JS346. Prince Chirasakti.

Near Langholm 11.30 hours; aircraft flew into hill, the pilot having persisted too far into hilly country contrary to orders …

Thus perished the ATA’s only Siamese royal. Diana Barnato remembered him fondly. ‘Keen type,’ she wrote. ‘Pressed on too long. I shed a tear.’

By the time the Americans arrived, everyone who greeted them already understood what they had yet to learn. This flying lark was not a lark. The previous November Lettice Curtis had taken off from the Kirkbride (No. 16) Ferry Pool minutes before one of her most illustrious superiors, Captain Walter Handley of pre-war motorbike racing fame and the ferry pool at Hawarden, tried to do the same in a dreaded Airacobra. The engine over-revved and belched black smoke on the take-off run, but by that time Wally was committed. Seconds after leaving the ground his aircraft exploded.

Bridget Hill and Betty Sayer, the first women pilots to die, did not have the luxury of wondering in their final seconds what they could do to save themselves. They were passengers in a taxi plane that crashed through the roof of a house on the edge of the White Waltham aerodrome on 18 March 1942. Hill’s closest friend from school was another ATA girl, Honor Salmon. She, too, was dead by summer.

When Diana Barnato’s fiancé died, she cried briefly, in a phone box, until First Officer Corrie, one of the White Waltham one-armers, lost patience waiting for the phone and banged to be let in. But on the whole her compatriots conformed to stereotype. On hearing that a friend had died, they went quiet, pale, and after a while reached for the sherry.

This inordinate self-control impressed some of the visitors. Roberta Sandoz, one of the last Americans to arrive in 1942, eventually became friends with several of the earliest women recruits, including one who, she recalled, ‘had already lost her first husband and while she was flying with me her son was killed in the air force. I think she missed two days’ work. There was not a lot of embracing and sobbing and commiserating, and I admired that.’

Sandoz herself kept flying through the grief of losing her fiancé, a US Navy cadet who was killed in the Pacific shortly after her arrival in England. She was every bit as stoic as the British, but that did not stop the steely Lettice Curtis remarking that the Americans were much more outspoken than their European counterparts, ‘and more emotional when their fellow pilots were killed’.

Whether the stiff upper lip extinguished fear or hid it was a personal thing, but there is evidence that the ATA’s women may have coped better than its men with the imminence of death. There are repeated references in diaries and memoirs to men sitting around in common rooms on ‘washout’ days content to leave the verdict of the weather people unchallenged, while women took off into the murk on the off-chance of getting through. There was Betty Keith-Jopp, who remembered her lift-like descent to the bottom of the Firth of Forth six decades later with undimmed amazement – not so much at her escape as at thinking calmly of the insurance payment her mother would receive. There was Mary de Bunsen, lame from childhood polio and with a congenital heart defect that left her breathless every time she climbed into a Hurricane. ‘You know,’ she told a fellow pilot towards the end of the war, ‘when I was in training pool I was so certain that I was going to be killed within the next few weeks that I didn’t bother much.’ By morbid contrast there was Flying Officer W. F. Castle, married with a son, from Birmingham. He had arrived at White Waltham in November 1941 with both arms and both eyes but precious little confidence – which the ATA training staff proceeded to undermine.

Castle brooded nightly in his diary:

November 8th. Our instructors are forever emphasizing the lethal nature of the forces which will soon be under our control if misused. This point is pressed home as every subject is taken.

November 19th. Now that I have started flying it is being brought home to me very clearly that this is not what you would call a particularly safe job … Although we are not required to fly in bad weather it often seems to happen that someone has flown into a hillside during bad visibility. Three deaths are reported this week, and there must have been two or three others besides since I have been here. I dread to think of leaving Peg and Daniel alone … the thought of Daniel, my son, being brought up without me chills my heart. I am determined to take every precaution possible.’

The next day, after stalling on take-off in a Magister, Castle was close to desperate:

It is being borne in on me more and more that if I am to preserve my skin I must quickly develop a sound flying sense and take no chances whatever … The sooner I can get away from the congested area of White Waltham the better it will suit me.

As long as the very human Castle pondered his mortality, and the ice cool Lettice Curtis flew in and out of White Waltham, rain or shine, as if on auto pilot, there could be no room for overt male chauvinism within the ranks of the ATA.

In the wider world, it was a different story. From the moment Pauline Gower had first talked to Sir Francis Shelmerdine about hiring women pilots at government expense to help mobilise for war, those who considered flying somehow intrinsically male began to vent. And no-one gave them more space to do so than C.G. Grey, editor of Aeroplane magazine and an old friend of Betty Keith-Jopp’s uncle, Stewart. Early on, Grey weighed in himself. ‘We quite agree that there are millions of women in the country who could do useful jobs in the war,’ he wrote in reply to a letter Mary Bailey had sent in support of Gower. (Lady Bailey had flown from London to South Africa in a Tiger Moth in 1929, pausing only to attend a reception in her honour in Khartoum in a tweed flying suit.)

But the trouble is that so many of them insist on wanting to do jobs which they are quite incapable of doing. The menace is the woman who thinks that she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly, or who wants to nose round as an Air Raid Warden and yet can’t cook her husband’s dinner.

Grey was right about the dinner, wrong about the menace. Lettice Curtis was a consummate flyer and completely uninterested in cooking. To be obsessive about flying and deliberately careless about anything conventionally ‘female’ was, in fact, the norm for ATA girls. This infuriated Harold Collings (Aeroplane, 5 January, 1940):

Women are not seeking this job for the sake of doing something for their country … Women who are anxious to serve their country should take on work more befitting their sex instead of encroaching on a man’s occupation. Men have made aviation reach its present perfection.

Some of Aeroplane’s female readers agreed: ‘I think the whole affair of engaging women pilots to fly aeroplanes when there are so many men fully qualified to do the work is disgusting!’ one wrote. ‘The women themselves are only doing it more or less as a hobby, and should be ashamed of themselves!’

She was not entirely wrong. Some of the women had taken up flying strictly for practical reasons. Lettice Curtis and Ann Wood, for instance, insisted that at first they saw it simply as a livelihood. But for most it was indeed a hobby, and one that often deepened into an obsession. And why not? What self-respecting pilot would not have grown obsessional about the prospect, however remote, of flying something as fast and glamorous and responsive – and as feminine – as a Spitfire?

Nothing parked these days on the grass apron at White Waltham comes close to the sheer power of a Spitfire. Even the Mark 1, with its bashful two-bladed propeller, had the thrust equivalent of six supercharged racing Bentleys crammed into its nose. At 16,000 feet its 27-litre Merlin II engine could generate more than 1,000 horsepower; enough to pull the pilot wedged behind it through the air at more than half the speed of sound.

Spitfires were so streamlined that when taxiing the heat produced by their engines had nowhere to go. Reginald Mitchell had removed the side-mounted radiators on the Supermarine seaplane on which he based his new design, replacing it with ineffectual slimline air intakes under the wings. If Spitfires weren’t released quickly into the air, the glycol in their cooling systems would boil. They hated sitting around once started up, but once off the ground they made their pilots sing.

Even four-engined bombers proved easily handled by the tiniest women pilots. But the Spitfire, without exception, was their favourite. Mary de Bunsen would rejoice when let loose in one by humming fugues from Bach’s B Minor Mass. Lettice Curtis warbled in prose: ‘To sit in the cockpit of a Spitfire, barely wider than one’s shoulders, with the power of the Merlin at one’s fingertips, was a poetry of its own,’ she wrote. ‘The long, flat-topped cowling and the pop-popping stub exhausts gave an almost breathtaking feeling of power, and the exhilaration of throwing it around, chasing clouds or low flying – strictly unauthorised in our case – was something never to be forgotten by those who experienced it.’

And who would experience it? The arrival of the Americans risked dividing the women of the ATA. Would they all be as bumptious as Jackie Cochran? Could they fly? Were they really needed? But the yearning to fly Spitfires, and to a lesser extent Hurricanes, was something they all shared. This, no less than their desire to be involved in the war, was what accounted for their steady convergence on southern England, not just from across Britain and the United States but from Poland, Chile, Argentina and the Dominions.

Most of them believed passionately in the Allied cause, but all could have served it elsewhere and less dangerously had they not become smitten with the idea of flying the most thrilling aeroplane yet built. And verdant, crowded, hungry England was the only place in the world where they would be allowed to do it.

For the pilots, the war meant virtual parity of opportunity with men, eventual parity of pay, and all the flying they could handle. For their mentors, Pauline Gower and Jackie Cochran, it seemed to be a stepping-stone to an elevated yet egalitarian future. ‘I would say that every woman should learn to fly,’ Gower declared in an interview for the April 1942 issue of Woman’s Journal. ‘Psychologically, it is the best antidote to the manifold neuroses which beset modern women. The war has already accomplished much in this regard, but with the return of peace my advice to all women will still be – “Learn to fly”.’

Jackie Cochran would have seconded that, but she wanted to do more than liberate modern women from their ‘neuroses’. She wanted to change men’s minds about women. The spring of 1942 found them both shuttling between White Waltham and London, politicking while their protégées hurtled round the skies above them. Their styles were diametrically opposite, but their goals were complementary. In a world turned upside-down, they even seemed achievable.

On the evening of 30 March that year, a rare joint appearance by Gower and Cochran set off an explosion of flashbulbs in Leicester Square. They had arrived together for the première of They Flew Alone, a hastily shot feature starring Anna Neagle about a woman pilot more famous than either of them would ever be. Her life had inspired many of the Spitfire women, but her death the previous year, at this point still shrouded in mystery, had prefigured many of their disappointments. Her name was Amy Johnson.

2

No Way Down

The film playing at Leicester Square that March night in 1942 depicted one of the most spectacular lives of the thirties, and one of the more mysterious deaths of the war. Towards the end of the film there is a scene set at Squire’s Gate aerodrome outside Blackpool.

The date is 4 January 1941. The time is 11.45 a.m. Mist shrouds the aerodrome buildings, but within sight of them a bulky twin-engined Airspeed Oxford, both propellers spinning, sits on the concrete apron. In the cockpit is Amy Johnson, Hull fish merchant’s daughter, ferry pilot and celebrity. Without her example of reckless daring over the previous ten years it is doubtful that the ATA would have had a pool of trained women pilots to call on, let alone an army of women volunteers hoping to be trained from scratch. As she waits she smokes a cigarette and chats to a refueller who has climbed into the co-pilot’s seat to keep her company; she is hoping for better weather.

The scene unfolds on film as in life, except that in They Flew Alone Amy Johnson’s face is Anna Neagle’s – a thing of perfect skin and symmetry, and pluck shining from her very eyes. In real life the face was longer; a mournful-looking oval. Even so, despite a washed-out Christmas at Prestwick’s Orangefield Hotel, with nothing to stare at for six days but fog, everyone Amy Johnson talked to over those last few days recalled that she seemed unusually content.

In the film she talks like Eliza Doolittle after Professor Higgins’s ministrations. In life, a trace of a Hull accent lingered despite years of elocution lessons. In the film, when a third figure emerges from the mist to report that the weather’s just as bad right down to Oxfordshire, she glances up at him and makes the only decision that was in fact imaginable for Amy Johnson. She says she will ‘crack through and fly over the top’. In reality she said something very similar.

For most of the 164 women who ferried planes for the ATA during the war it was the pinnacle of their flying careers, unrepeatable after the war even as men went supersonic, into orbit and to the moon. For Amy Johnson it was something of a come-down, and a point of realisation that her celebrity could no longer cleave a path through Britain’s hidebound bureaucracy. She had wanted a wartime role crafted specially for her, pioneering fast new airline routes to bind beleaguered Britain closer to her colonies, or swooping into northern France (before it fell) to keep young Tommy chipper. She offered to advise the Air Ministry – on what she wasn’t sure. As it turned out, the Air Ministry had plenty of advisors.

Johnson had been overlooked for head of the ATA’s women’s section in favour of Pauline Gower, and even when Gower begged her to join she had to take a test. Once a ferry pilot, she had to leave her Astrakhan-collared flying coats in storage and wear navy worsted and a forage cap. And she had to share common rooms and taxi planes with the other girls even though, as she commented to her father, they practically worshipped her. Was this any way to treat the most famous woman pilot in the world?

Eleven years before that dank morning at Squire’s Gate, Johnson had been sitting in another cockpit waiting for another weather window. This time the aircraft was a De Havilland Gipsy Moth, the Morris Traveller of the skies, a dope-and-canvas biplane built to cruise at 90 mph. Amy had named it Jason, which was the telegraphic address of her father’s fish business. The venue was Croydon Airport. She had tried once already to take off but had failed to get the throttle forward fast enough to compensate for the weight of two extra fuel tanks and had pulled up a few feet from the perimeter fence. Now she tried again. Her father and a small group of friends watched from the tarmac in front of the aerodrome hotel. Jack Humphreys, her mentor and engineering tutor, had a sense of what she was getting into and was rigid with tension. William Johnson, down from Hull specially for this, had even less idea than his daughter of the risks she was running.

This time the Moth just cleared the fence. It staggered over the rows of houses beyond, its tiny engine (one tenth as powerful as the least powerful Spitfire’s) hammering up into the westerly wind. Johnson climbed over Purley Rise and the Selsden Park golf course and levelled out over the waking villages of Kent. She set course for Vienna.

Virtually unknown, she was airborne thanks to her father’s patronage and a modest fuel sponsorship arrangement with Charles ‘Cheers’ Wakefield, father of the Castrol brand of engine oil. But what made the combination combustible, and almost fatal, was her own searing ambition to be someone special. And three short weeks later she had realised that ambition. She was being mobbed by crowds of Australians wherever she put down, and bombarded with telegrams from Blériot, Einstein and King George V.

Amy Johnson was the first woman to fly solo to Australia. In the cockpit she wore leather when it was cold and cotton when it was hot, and she depended throughout her twenty-day flight on a four-cylinder, 110-horsepower engine pulling an aircraft with a spare propeller strapped to the outside of its fuselage. It was a breathtakingly modern thing to do. A handful of men had squeezed the 11,000 miles from Southampton to Sydney into a journey measured in days rather than weeks, but for a woman to attempt it – less than half a generation after being given the vote – was practically unthinkable. She had beaten Bert Hinkler’s record as far as Delhi, but it was not for speed that Australia adored her. It was for having shrunk the world more vividly and definitively than a strutting male action hero could ever have. Here was the girl next door (sunburned and overtired, it was true), whose next door was in Hull. She had a toothy smile, a perpetually awed voice and actually seemed to like Australia. She also had the strange aura of someone who had cheated death.

Johnson’s strategy for beating Hinkler’s record rested on the idea of flying in a straight line. As far as she could tell from the primitive maps that were all Stanford’s bookshop had for most of the journey, this would shave 700 miles off his route. Hinkler had looped south through Rome to Malta to maximise, he hoped, his number of nights on British imperial soil. Johnson headed straight for Constantinople via Austria. On the way, an overbearing crew of Viennese mechanics insisted on overhauling her engine but succeeded only in gumming up a spark plug. (This may never have come entirely ungummed; despite Johnson’s hard-won engineering certificate and her meticulous filtering of all the fuel that entered Jason’s engine, one of the male pilots deputed to escort her on her victory lap of Australia wrote later, with ill-disguised satisfaction, that he had never seen ‘an engine in such appalling condition’ as hers.)

From Constantinople, Johnson had to find a way through Anatolia’s forbidding Taurus Mountains, and this is where her straight line became sinuous. As she approached the mountains around lunchtime on 7 May, they were covered by cloud. She climbed to stay in clear air, as she would years later with much less reason to be scared. But at 11,000 feet her ‘engine started an ominous coughing and spitting’, she wrote afterwards:

I descended to 10,000 feet and decided to try to follow the railway through its winding gorges … I had one very unpleasant moment when threading my way through an exceptionally narrow gorge with the mountains rising sheer on either side of me only a few feet from my wings and towering high above. Rounding a corner I ran straight into a bank of low clouds, and for an awful minute could see nothing at all. In desperation I pushed down the nose of the machine to try to dive below them, and in half a minute – which seemed to me an eternity – I emerged from the cloud at a speed of 120 with one wing down and aiming for a wall of rock. Once I could see where I was going it was easy to straighten the machine, but I was rather badly shaken.

Johnson’s passage through the Taurus Mountains was undoubtedly terrifying and it marked her graduation from suburban dilettante to Shackletonian adventurer.

From Aleppo she flew to Baghdad, with only one forced landing in the desert, then down the Tigris, over Basra and on to Bandar Abbas at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf, her journey advanced across the Middle East like a line on a map in a movie. It was followed with quietly mounting interest in newsrooms the length of Fleet Street.

On 10 May, Johnson flew clear over Baluchistan and into aviation legend. Landing that evening at Drigh Road aerodrome outside Karachi, she had beaten Hinkler’s Croydon-to-India record by two days and handed the papers an exquisitely constructed rolling news story. The tale of Britain’s lone girl flyer had been germinating nicely ever since a reporter for the London Evening News had chanced on her at the Stag Lane Flying Club’s hangar in North London five months earlier. He had written a prominent exclusive about a twenty-two-year-old blonde from the Midlands that was inaccurate in every detail except the headline: ‘Girl To Fly Alone To Australia’. The scoop was widely followed up. Then interest slumped. It began to return when she took off, and when she smashed her first record she was considerate enough to do so a short drive from a major node of the British Empire. Karachi had reliable telegraphic links to London and a surfeit of hungry stringers. Best of all, it was at least ten days from Australia, even in a Gipsy Moth. If this Johnson lass could only keep flying, her story had legs.

She obliged. She pressed on despite crash-landing on a playing field near Rangoon, impaling her wings on bamboo shoots on a sugar plantation in Java, going missing for twenty-four hours over the shark-infested waters of the Balinese archipelago and shuddering to a halt in the half-light among six-foot anthills near the Portuguese colonial outpost of Atamboea. Every night she threw herself on the mercy of those she found. Every day she fought fatigue, rain, heat, volcanic dust storms and a private catalogue of terrors including, but not limited to, cannibals, engine failure and death by corkscrew dive into the sea.

It made terrific copy. The News of the World wanted exclusive rights and opened the bidding at £500 while Johnson was in the air between Calcutta and Rangoon. Before she took off again, the Daily Mail had won the auction (which was handled by her father) for four times as much.

When she landed in Darwin on Empire Day, solid servants of that empire cried with joy from Hull to Canberra. One who confessed to tears was a retired naval rating who wrote to Johnson’s parents that ‘in all a long, adventurous life’ he’d seen nothing to compare with their daughter’s flight. ‘I was down the Java coast in 1858; you see I have been all that long journey myself and so have just a little idea of what it means. But then to do it alone, and in the air; it is more than wonderful, it is marvellous.’

The use of ‘wonderful’ was a reference to ‘Wonderful Amy’, an instant, cloying hit that played in music halls from Clapham to Llandudno all that summer. Not to be outdone, the pseudonymous Wilhelmina Stitch divided her ‘Fragrant Minute’ column in the Daily Sketch into four breathlessly worshipful stanzas, ending:

Amy! For ever more your name will stand synonymous with pluck;

And when we weary of life’s game, or when we whine and blame ‘our luck’;

We’ll think of your immortal plane and spread our wings and try again.

Johnson’s flight to Australia was a singular achievement: pure in conception, pure in execution and perfectly encapsulating the escapist yearnings of a nation ground down by the Depression. But it was conjured from a complicated life.

As a teenager Amy had been a tomboy and a rebel. When she ‘grew up’, which she never really did, she combined soaring ambition with morbid self-doubt, vanity with shyness and outward prudishness with a serious libido. At the Boulevard School in Hull she was the only girl who could bowl overarm in cricket, and she led two mutinies. One of these involved wearing soft straw Panamas instead of hard straw boaters because she hated straw boaters and because her more vivacious sister, Irene, had moved to the more exclusive Hull High School – where they wore Panamas.