War Stories III (9 page)

The Kremlin, Moscow, USSR
12 October 1941

I was sent to London during the Battle of Britain, to assist in training RAF pilots. We had secretly set up a mission there immediately after the Lend-Lease Agreement was signed in September of 1940—even though no aid could theoretically be delivered until Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act in March of '41. Our job was to make sure that the RAF pilots and mechanics knew how to fly and maintain the aircraft we would be sending under Lend-Lease.

When Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of '41, President Roosevelt started making plans right away to help keep Russia from being knocked out of the war. FDR correctly anticipated that sooner or later,
we
were going to be involved. Immediately after the Germans started Barbarossa, the president sent Harry Hopkins, probably FDR's closest advisor, on a secret mission to Moscow. Hopkins took me with him, to help him find out from the Russians what they really needed and to offer Lend-Lease aid to the Soviets.

We left London in the middle of the night aboard a five-car train and we were the only passengers. This train went from London nonstop to northern Scotland. There, we boarded an RAF flying boat. Twenty-four hours later we were in Archangel, just south of the Arctic Circle. It was 30 July 1941.

The Russians met us with motor launches and took us ashore. A Russian general and a colonel were our hosts. I met with the Russian generals and Hopkins met with Stalin. But the Russian generals didn't want to tell me anything. I tried to find out about their tanks—whether we
could improve on what they had. Their flat answer was, “No, we have a good tank.”

And they did. Their T-34 was based on an American design that our military had rejected. They eventually made tens of thousands of them.

I asked about artillery pieces—they replied, “We have good artillery.” Airplanes? “We have good airplanes.” But they knew that they didn't have any fighters to match the Me-109—or that could climb fast enough to take on the German bombers. They finally agreed that we'd send P-40 aircraft to Russia. I think there were forty-eight airplanes to be in the first shipment to Russia. Then we had to figure how to get them there.

I was in Moscow in when the Germans got to the city and we had to evacuate with the rest of Stalin's government. The provisional capital had been moved from Moscow toward the Caucuses, and right about the time we were moving there, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Washington then decided that we were losing too many ships trying to get cargo across the North Atlantic and into Murmansk and Archangel. The German U-boats were sending so many to the bottom that the aid just wasn't getting through. I was told to find a different way to get the planes delivered to our Soviet “allies.”

Somebody back in the Washington decided that the best way to deliver airplanes was for American pilots to pick them up at the factories and fly them to where they were needed. By the winter of '41–'42 that's how we delivered planes to the British—up through Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Northern Ireland—then to England.

But the best route for deliveries to Russia would be to fly them to Alaska and then across the Bering Strait into Siberia. Well, that just wasn't realistic because the Russians weren't about to let American pilots land in Siberia. As a rule they wouldn't even let Americans into the
country
—they were too suspicious.

But Washington wanted to know what airports were available and what facilities were there so that they could plan getting the planes to Russia. We went over to the Russian foreign office and met this very suave
Russian colonel. We told him the message we got from Washington and said, “We want to get this information.”

The Russian colonel said, “Well, we're at war and this will take a little time.” The Russians stalled as the wires went back and forth between Washington and the Russian capital. Finally, someone figured out a way to do it. If the Russians wouldn't let our people fly the planes into Siberia—let's have the Russian pilots pick up the planes in Alaska.

And it worked! One afternoon in September '42, a P-40 fighter landed in Moscow. By October, there were P-39s, B-25s, and A-20s flying in—we really flooded them with equipment. The Russians wouldn't allow Americans to fly into Russia, but American ingenuity found a way to get the planes to 'em anyway.

Bell Aircraft Factory, Buffalo, New York
24 November 1941

Flying had been my dream since I was a little girl. The government started the CPT—the Civilian Pilot Training program—in 1938. I got in during'39 while I was in college and got my private pilot's license. As soon as I could, I signed up for the WASP program, took a test, and was accepted. It was perfect for me—I was from Buffalo and I had been around Bell aircraft since I started flying.

I was only in my very early twenties when I became a ferry pilot. We weren't trained in formation flying so we generally flew on our own. I was a loner and liked to have that airplane—with a red star, the Russian emblem, on it—out there by myself. The plane was essentially ours until we got it to Great Falls—about a twelve- to fourteen-hour flight—depending on the weather. A typical route: Buffalo to Niagara Falls to South Bend to remain overnight—then the next day to Bismarck and on to Great Falls, where the men would take them to Alaska for turnover to the Russians.

Once, one of the girls crashed and burned at Bismarck. There was a lot of suspicion that it was sabotage. The FBI, the Flight Safety people—everybody came to Bismarck to try and figure it out. I was pretty sure that the airplanes were all right but there was a lot of apprehension. I guess that's understandable after a friend goes down and nobody can find out why. It's a terrible thing.

A few weeks after the crash, I was in a flight of two—about twenty minutes out of Great Falls. I was tucked under the wing of my flight
leader and he had just called me on the radio to tell me that there was thunderstorm activity in the Great Falls area—when my engine suddenly quit.

Afterwards, someone asked me, “Weren't you afraid?” The answer to that is no. It gets your attention pretty fast, but we were well trained in emergency procedures, and in that kind of a situation, you just start doing what you have to do in the cockpit. I was working trying to get the engine restarted but it just didn't catch. I didn't want to lose the plane so by trying to start it I ended up waiting a little too long to get out.

Just before bailing out I grabbed ten bucks out of my purse and jammed it in my pocket. I also had a little compass in my purse, but it was left in the airplane.

When I was a little girl, my uncle, a pilot, had told me, “If you have to bail out, after you jump, count to three—one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three. Then pull your ripcord. That way your parachute won't get caught by the plane on the way down.”

I remember jumping out of the airplane and counting, “one thousand one, one thousand two,” and some inner voice said, “Pull it!” So I pulled the D-ring on the parachute. It deployed and I swung once and came down in what is now a lake outside of Hobson, Montana, at six o'clock at night on June 19. I got out pretty late, but safely.

I was down in this big crater, so I picked myself up, rolled up the parachute, climbed up to a road, and waited for someone to come by to take me into Hobson, Montana, and then to Great Falls.

As to my airplane, it could have been sabotage. Flight Safety investigators said that it looked as if someone had put impurities in the gasoline. But I was flying again a week later.