Spitfire Women of World War II (2 page)

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 actually 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:

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.

The first beneficiaries of this desperate need for ferry pilots were, inevitably, men. Thirty of them had been recruited in September 1939 on the initiative of Gerard ‘Pop' d'Erlanger, an air-minded young merchant banker with an immaculate parting and a strong sense of duty. D'Erlanger was also a director of British Airways and a keen private pilot, and had been worrying for at least a year that hostilities in Europe would bring an acute pilot shortage if flyers like himself could not be used.

‘Dear Balfour,' he had written in May 1938 to Harold Balfour, then Parliamentary Under Secretary for Air, ‘I know how busy you must be and therefore have hesitated in worrying you, but there is a question which for some time has been puzzling me …'. Was there a reservists' Air Force in which people like him could enlist? The answer was no, and so, in August 1939, d'Erlanger suggested forming such a unit from holders of private licences with at least 250 hours in the air. The Director General of Civil Aviation, Sir Francis Shelmerdine, agreed, and put d'Erlanger in charge of it. One thousand licence-holders were contacted. One hundred of them replied, and thirty were selected after interviews and flight tests held at British Airways' wartime base at Whitchurch, outside Bristol. The first intake included a publican, a motorcycling champion and an animal lover who had recently flown back from Africa with two new pets – a cheetah and a chimpanzee.

D'Erlanger had envisaged the ATA as an aerial courier service for VIPs, medicines and the wounded, but even in the Phoney War his pilots were more in demand for ferrying. They called themselves the Ancient and Tattered Airmen because it was a more
amusing explanation for their ATA badges than the official one, and because, to a great extent, it was true. In a rumpled sort of way, the ATA was the most exclusive flying outfit of the war. The name was an anomaly,
The Times
' aeronautical correspondent noted in 1941, and ‘the body itself one of those curious, almost romantic improvisations which the special demands of war sometimes call into existence'.

To be eligible for membership you had to be ineligible for the RAF but still able to fly. That ruled out clear-eyed, coordinated, brave young men; but it ruled in a different sort of elite; one of oddballs, intellectuals, artists, bank managers, civil servants, wounded veterans and Francis ‘Frankie' Francis – flying ace, backgammon ace, ex-Guards officer and raven-headed millionaire from the north shore of Lake Geneva. There, in peacetime, he had maintained his own Sikorsky biplane for joyrides over Gstaad and the Haute-Savoie. Come the war, he would have chafed at returning to a military hierarchy but among fellow civilians anxious only to fly, he was adored. It did his reputation no harm that he had the looks and torso of a film star and would strip to the waist for physical jerks whenever the sun came out.

For the winter of 1939–40 the men were seconded to existing RAF ferry ‘pools' at Hucknall, near Nottingham, and Filton, east of Bristol – the future birthplace of Concorde. Here they got their hands on operational aircraft and were even permitted to ferry them to France. Women, by contrast, were considered by the RAF's top brass to be unworthy of either privilege, physically or temperamentally. They were never formally attached to RAF units and were based in their own all-civilian pools from the start, which came with the recruitment of the first eight pilots in January 1940. At first the only RAF machines they were allowed to fly were trainers – open cockpit De Havilland Moths, and, later, Miles Magisters (with a blistering top speed of just 132 mph).

The women had to struggle for nearly two years to be allowed in fighters, and five before they started flying them to Europe. Yet it was clear from the outset that despite their relative youth and
their nickname (the ‘Always Terrified Airwomen'), they were altogether more formidable than the Ancient and Tattered.

The simple fact of having learned to fly before the war made them an elite within an elite. Their eventual success in flying operational aircraft in the teeth of RAF resistance only compounded their kudos. They were marshalled by the daughter of a prominent Tory MP, championed by a powerful handful of ‘pro-women men', and led through the air by the likes of Lettice Curtis. They were a close-knit group, barely twenty-strong. Many knew each other from Stag Lane, Heston and Brooklands – London's most famous pre-war flying clubs. Most were from monied backgrounds, with accents and assumptions to match. Those that were not were ruthlessly frugal. Some were well known, especially to the society editors of the
Daily Sketch
and the
Picture
Post
. They were ‘It Girls' doing their bit, but there was nothing remotely superficial about their courage or their motivation. On the contrary, their defining traits were inner steel and a fierce if usually unspoken patriotism.

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.'