Spitfire Women of World War II (13 page)

At 9 a.m. on 19 July 1941, the day's assignments went up in chalk as usual on a blackboard outside the Hatfield operations room. In one column were the pilots' names; in the next, the types of aircraft they would be flying. After ‘Miss Crossley', written in capitals, was the word ‘HURRICANE'. Shortly afterwards, a Captain R. H. Henderson of the ATA's technical department at White Waltham flew over in the department's own Hurricane. Four women flew the plane that day, all from the First Eight. They were Winnie Crossley, Margie Fairweather, Joan Hughes and Rosemary Rees. They were no more experienced than Cunnison, Patterson, Wilberforce or Friedlander; just lucky to find themselves at Hatfield on the appointed day. Crossley went first, with the fate
of the women pilots depending on her. The others watched, too anxious and excited to talk, as she climbed in, buckled on her parachute and harness and taxied away. Take-off, circuit and three-point landing were all perfect, and were over in minutes. The Hurricane rumbled back to the spectators. ‘It's lovely, darlings,' Winnie smiled as she stepped out onto the wing. ‘A beautiful little aeroplane.'

After a brief tour of the cockpit from Captain Henderson, the other three followed. No-one put a foot wrong. One of those watching was Alison King, who was too timid to fly for the ATA but experienced the pilots' entire war vicariously as an operations officer. ‘Afterwards there was much laughter and celebration and we eyed each other with furtive, unspoken delight,' she wrote, ‘for we knew that that afternoon something momentous had happened.'

To mark that something the women pooled their petrol coupons and drove into London for dinner in St James's at the Ecu de France. Their excitement was at what they had proved, and what they would prove. Because it meant that Spitfires would be next.

In January 1942, the Ministry of Information's Crown Film Unit released to cinemas a short documentary called
Ferry Pilot
. The film was about the ATA, and it proved a minor hit. Part of the appeal lay in Captain F. D. Bradbrooke's starring role. He was a senior ATA pilot with a short haircut and a voice indistinguishable from Cary Grant's, and he gave a relaxed and personable depiction of himself as a fatherly jack-of-all-aerial-trades. Part of the appeal lay in the heavy ledgers and clouds of pipesmoke behind which two slightly effete operations officers masterminded a typical day's flying from White Waltham; and part in the unique talent of the chief Spitfire test pilot at Castle Bromwich, Alex Henshaw.

Early in the film, Bradbrooke and an American pilot nicknamed Alabam stride into the Castle Bromwich operations room brandishing ‘chits': ‘Two Spitfires, please,' Bradbrooke says cheerfully, placing his bits of paper on the ops officer's desk. He has jumped a short queue – two young women are already there – but they don't seem to mind. They are easily recognisable as the tiny Joan Hughes, and the willowy, mysterious Audrey Sale-Barker, even though when Bradbrooke addresses Sale-Barker it's as ‘Betty'.

‘What have you got today, Betty?'

‘Trainers,' she mumbles, and leaves the room.

Joan Hughes follows, saying much more brightly: ‘Yes, 200 miles an hour's our limit, I'm afraid.'

Outside, a Spitfire hurtles past at shoulder-height. The all-knowing Bradbrooke announces it's Alex Henshaw at the stick: ‘Should be worth watching'. Henshaw climbs near-vertically into the sun, twists at the top to give a flash of the Spitfire's elliptical wings, then dives back towards the ground. Alabam can scarcely contain himself; he says he's heard all about Henshaw and sure enough he ‘ain't never seen anything quite this'.

Henshaw roars by again, close enough, it seems, to touch. Then he recedes to a faint line against a wash of stratocumulus, and dives again. This time the camera picks out a gentle rise on the ground beyond the aerodrome. Henshaw keeps diving until he disappears behind it. When he re-emerges, much closer and louder, he rolls the Spitfire lazily onto its back, so low that its tail appears to brush the grass.

Hughes and Sale-Barker let their awestruck faces do the talking. Their necks twist sharply as if at Wimbledon. Henshaw's gravity-fed carburettors begin to dry up and his engine sputters, but somehow the Spitfire stays upside down and rock-steady. Alabam promises not to ape the master and he and Bradbrooke head for two Spitfires of their own. The camera lingers on them as they taxi and take off, leaving the ladies firmly on the ground.

Six months before the film was screened in cinemas, Captain Bradbrooke flew into a mountain on the Isle of Arran in a Consolidated Liberator. Newly assigned to BOAC's Atlantic Return Ferry Service, he was killed instantly along with twenty other male ferry pilots, most of them Americans returning home after bringing bombers over from Newfoundland.

Meanwhile, ATA women had been flying Spitfires for five of those six months, even if, as far as the Crown Film Unit was concerned, their speed limit was still a deferential 200 mph. Spitfires were capable of more than double that. They were happy cruising at 300 mph, but were unhappy waiting on the tarmac with their engines idling for more than a few minutes. The American Colonel Jim Goodson, who flew for the RAF from early 1941 onwards, explained somewhat heretically what this could mean for a pilot:

Spitfires belonged in the air. Up there, their pilots didn't see the aeroplane that had stolen most of the limelight in the Battle of Britain from the manlier Hurricane (responsible for 80 per cent of that battle's kills). They didn't see the plane that Harold Balfour described in 1938 as ‘slimly built with a beautifully proportioned body and graceful curves just where they should be'. They saw a big, black, semicircular instrument panel, a dome of sky around it, and a rearview mirror.

The six central instruments – airspeed indicator, artificial horizon, rate of climb indicator, altimeter, turn indicator and gyroscopic compass – were the same as on any operational plane. Everything else was more cramped if you were big or heavyset; more snug if you were small. For women, the whole package was perfect. Without exception, the women aviators of the ATA longed to fly Spitfires because of what they'd seen and heard, but they loved them when they got their hands on them because of how they felt.

First there was the power that kicked them in the back when they released the brakes. It has taken engineers seventy years to work out how to cram as much muscle into a road-going car as was crammed into a 1938 Mark I Spitfire. Later Spitfire marks were vastly more powerful again. The 1,600-horsepower Rolls-Royce Merlin-powered Mark IXs and 2,300-horsepower Griffon-powered F24s spoilt pilots who moved on from them to early jets and found some sluggish by comparison.

After the power, they felt the lift generated by a wing with a slower stalling speed at its tips than close in to the fuselage. This meant that just before it fell out of the sky – in a vertically banked
turn, say, or on a misjudged final approach – a Spitfire would shudder. It was a uniquely generous final warning that saved the lives of aces and novices alike.

And finally: the responsiveness that gave meaning to the cliché that you didn't fly a Spitfire at all; you wore it. Or, as Diana Barnato put it: ‘You moved, it moved.' This was largely a product of Reginald Mitchell's long experience designing airborne thoroughbreds, and of his intuitive genius. The Spitfire was nose-heavy on the ground and would tip forward if braked harshly, but it was perfectly balanced in flight. It also had an unusual joystick that pivoted forwards and backwards from a fulcrum on the floor but left and right from the neck between the spade-style handle and the stick itself, much higher up. To turn, in other words, you only had to twist your wrist. In skirts or slacks, a pilot's knees never had to be more than 6 inches apart.

The Spitfire is the only fighter plane to have been honoured with a full-length literary biography. Paraphrasing the lustier fighter boys who flew it, its author, Jonathan Glancey, calls the Spitfire ‘aerial totty'; a ‘mechanical Lady Hamilton'. Certainly, none of the women who flew it thought it masculine. To the contrary, it was every inch the boyish Hawker Hurricane's desirable sister, though the women's feelings for it were more sisterly than carnal, or like those of a teenager with a crush on her pony. But they were no less ardent for that. It was, according to Katie Hirsch, one of the last ATA women to learn to fly it, ‘simply bliss'.

‘Everyone loved them,' Jadwiga Pilsudska recalled, ‘but especially the women.' Some recorded their first Spitfire experiences in quasi-sexual language. ‘It seemed the most natural thing in the world to be sitting there in the cockpit,' wrote the South African Jackie Sorour, ‘as though my entire life had led to this moment':

For Helen Richey the Spitfire was ‘a fish through water, a sharp knife through butter, a bullet through the sky'. For Veronica Volkersz this was, quite simply, ‘the perfect lady's aeroplane'.

The only woman pilot who categorically refused to get carried away by the Spitfire was the very first of the ATA women to fly it. In a letter to her father, Lord Runciman, dated 8 October 1941, Margie Fairweather devoted five paragraphs to thanking him for a gift of money, to news of her and her husband's new life at the Prestwick ferry pool and to her daughter's gratifying enjoyment of her new Oxford boarding school. She then added: ‘Knowing your great love of aeroplanes I am sure you will appreciate the great honour [I] have brought to the family by being the first woman to fly in a Spitfire.' She then asked her father to thank her mother for her letters, and signed off.

If the ATA had wanted to keep this latest small step for womankind a secret it could not have chosen a more discreet trailblazer. But any idea that news of the flight would not spread far and fast was ludicrous. By the time Margie Fairweather had written her letter, that news had already reached New York, Pretoria, Santiago and, as we shall see, the scarcely populated estancias of Patagonia.

Statistically, it was unusual for a woman in wartime Britain to set out to fly fighters and bombers and succeed. One hundred and seventeen British women managed it, or about one in every 200,000. But this ratio represented a positive avalanche compared with the number of women pilots who came from the rest of the world. Of these there were forty-seven (or roughly one in 29 million based on 1941 world population figures). These women were not representative of their gender or their times, except in so far as their times were cataclysmic. They were originals.

Twenty-five came from the United States, too enthralled by the idea of flying combat planes in England to wait and see if they would be allowed to do the same at home. They came from every corner of the country: Maine, Chicago, Kansas City, California, Louisiana and the foothills of the Kettle River range in northern Washington. Others, motivated at least partly by loyalty to Britain and the Empire, came from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and – that great ‘forgotten colony' – Argentina.

One, Margot Duhalde, came from Chile. Margot had never left the country until she squeezed into a car to drive over the Andes to Mendoza, bound for England and the war, in April 1941. She spoke no English and had no English relatives. What she did have was a commercial pilot's licence – the first ever awarded to a Chilean woman – and a nineteen-year-old's unshaken self-belief.

Duhalde was born in 1921 on a farm near Rio Bueno, 500 miles south of Santiago, the second of twelve children and the oldest of six sisters. She would later write of her difficulty in finding a flying instructor willing to spend time on someone so young who was a woman and ‘half-peasant' into the bargain, but in truth the family farm – sitting directly beneath the airmail route from Temuco in the north to Puerto Montt – was prosperous and its owners middle class.

Now in her early eighties, Margot lives in Santiago's diplomatic district. She greeted me at the door of her comfortable apartment in dark red lipstick, aviator sunglasses and a lime green trouser suit. We descended immediately to street level, where the doorman had brought round a shiny silver Peugeot with red seatbelts and racing trim. Weaving past cars that dared to brake in front of her, we drove first to the Air Force Officers' Club for lunch (they knew her here as ‘Commandante') and then to the Aeroclub de Santiago at the foot of the Andes. Here Margot found a table on a large, shaded terrace, ordered beer, and talked.

‘I dreamed of flying – I wanted to be up there with these dots in the sky,' she said, recalling her childhood memory of the mail planes. Too much dreaming was one of the reasons she was thrown out of school in Rio Bueno and sent as a boarder to the Santiago Lyceo when she was twelve. From there, most days, she would escape to watch the flying at the Aeroclub de Chile.

At sixteen, Duhalde was given a flying lesson for her birthday. With her father's blessing and money, she worked for a year towards her commercial licence and then smuggled herself into El Bosque, the country's top military flying school and a citadel of elitist machismo. As a woman she could never have set foot there officially, so she went as a protégée of Cesar Copeto, the school's maintenance chief. Copeto was something of a national treasure having been, in 1909, the first Chilean to fly. For two years Duhalde came and went as his accessory, learning mechanics and aerodynamics on the Gipsy Moths that he maintained. When the war in Europe came she wanted to be involved, but her
only connection to it was her grandfather, who had grown up in the French Basque village of Louhossoa.

Logistically, at least, it was enough. When de Gaulle issued his call to the Free French in June 1940, Margot Duhalde presented herself at the French consulate in Santiago and volunteered. How could she get from there to Europe? ‘That was de Gaulle's problem,' she said.

Margot went home to pack and bid a tearful farewell to her mother, whom she tried to reassure with the white lie that she would probably only be sent to Québec or Montreal as a flight instructor. Her father, whose favourite she was, then travelled with her as far as Santiago.

I asked her how much she knew about the war for which she had volunteered. ‘Nothing. Just that it had been declared,' she said. ‘And the Germans were winning.' She told a little story about a friend and fellow woman pilot of German extraction who warned her just before she left that Britain would be overrun by the time she got there. ‘But it's okay,' the friend had said. ‘I'll come and rescue you.'

In the end, Margot said, she had made her decision to volunteer for the Allied war effort on instinct – ‘an instinct to learn more about France and where I came from, and to find out why my blood wasn't totally Chilean'. She knew what she was doing was unusual, but saw no mystery in it.

In April 1941, 139 Chileans left to join the French, divided into groups according to which force they hoped to join. There were thirteen in the air force group, including one other woman, a nurse. Some went by ship from Valparaiso via Panama. Duhalde, the nurse and two young Basque men were assigned a car to Argentina. They drove north from Santiago, then east up the Valle de Aconcagua beneath South America's highest mountain, to Mendoza. From there they went by train across the Pampas to Buenos Aires, and from there by the
Rangitata
, a Norwegian-registered freighter, to Liverpool.

Duhalde's first impressions of Britain were that it was
‘horrible'. Like the Americans who followed her, she was profoundly shocked by the effects of bombing on the fabric of the country, and of rationing on its pinched and pallid people. But there was an additional difficulty for Duhalde. Relations between Churchill and de Gaulle were less than cordial. Despite having ordered the destruction of the French fleet at Oran the previous year, the Prime Minister's strategy towards Marshal Pétain and the collaborators was to keep talking; he could not risk an official state of war with Vichy. And this de Gaulle could not be seen to stomach. He had spent much of 1940 in Libreville, the capital of French Gabon, fuming at perfidious Albion. Churchill was also refusing to take at face value the bona fides of the polyglot volunteer army arriving at British ports under the auspices of the Free French. Who knew where their true allegiances lay? What better cover story for a dedicated Nazi agent than to have come from South America to the defence of France? The result for the thirteen Chileans disembarking from the
Rangitata
in May 1941 was that instead of being welcomed, they were arrested and interned.

‘Scotland Yard was waiting for us,' Duhalde remembered. She was taken to London and spent five days in jail there while her story was checked. Only then was she handed over to the Free French, who, unsure what to do with her, put her up in the Morton Hotel on Russell Square.

As she killed time in London, it quickly became clear to Duhalde that in her place de Gaulle's London-based staff had been expecting a man. There was no flying of any sort by women under French command in the war. Margot now believes that her name, in the chaos of setting up a government in exile and communicating with a consulate 8,000 miles away, had become abbreviated and confused with Marcel, or simply reduced to ‘M'.

She stayed at the hotel for three miserable months before being sent to Wellingborough in the smog-choked East Midlands to cook and clean for a French woman running a convalescent home for injured pilots. ‘I came to work in the war and found myself working as a maid,' she recalled with dismay. In London,
she had been scared and lonely. Now she was bored and lonely, and angry with herself for entrusting so much to hope and her imagination.

And then what she describes as ‘a miracle' helped her escape Wellingborough. A French military chaplain attached to the Free French in London had noticed her at the hotel in Russell Square, and asked her story. He passed it on to a French pilot, Pierre Orlemans, who happened to have been in Chile three years earlier when Duhalde's success in earning a commercial licence had briefly made the news. Orlemans wrote to her in Wellingborough, telling her about the ATA and offering to arrange an introduction. He spoke little English and no Spanish. Margot spoke neither French nor English. They met in London and continued, largely mute, to Hatfield, Duhalde clutching a letter that Orlemans had written for her and addressed to the only ATA name he knew. That name was Lettice Curtis.

On being presented with Orlemans's letter, the magnificent Lettice, according to Duhalde, read it, said ‘not a word' and waved in the direction of Pauline Gower's office. She then disappeared.

Gower received them more warmly and found a French-speaking cadet to translate. Margot was soon airborne again for the first time since leaving Chile four months earlier, this time in a Tiger Moth, which was substantially more powerful than the Gipsy Moths she was used to. A Mrs Ebbage in the front seat issued instructions by means of hand signals.

‘I had never seen so many planes in the sky,' Duhalde recalled. ‘There was a Dutch elementary flying school in the circuit in some early Mosquitoes and when I made a reasonable landing no-one was more surprised than me.' Accepted in principle by the ATA, she was eventually released from her commitment to the Free French after the intervention of the Chilean ambassador. She reported for duty at Hatfield on 1 September 1941.

Her comrades, Curtis apart, were mildly amused. They nicknamed her ‘Chile'. She still spoke virtually no English and knew the layout of England from the air no better than from the ground.
On her first solo cross-country flight, not helped by snow covering most roads and railway lines, she became hopelessly lost among barrage balloons over North London. She eventually decided to force land in a field near Enfield. Duhalde described what happened next with an indulgent grin:

Onlookers who had watched her descent ran to find her conscious but with blood on her face, no papers, and no command of English. She was arrested. The bemused Enfield police allowed her a telephone call, but when she asked for the ATA she was put through to headquarters at White Waltham rather than the women's pool at Hatfield. They sent a car for her but the driver neither recognised nor understood her and would not vouch for her. ‘No-one knew who I was or where Chile was,' she said. ‘In the end I just said, “Pauline Gower”. And they phoned her and let me go.'

Gower was still acutely sensitive to bad publicity. At this point she seems to have begun to see ‘Chile' more as a liability than a brave new pilot heaven-sent from the far end of the world. Duhalde was dispatched to Luton to complete her training. When Luton pointed out that it was hard to teach her anything when she spoke no English, a make-or-break meeting was arranged at White Waltham to decide her fate, to which Duhalde was invited.

‘Pauline Gower threw me out,' she said. ‘“You can't fly; it's not possible,” she told me. But I insisted that I could.' In the end, compromise won out. Captain A. R. O. MacMillan, the softhearted chief instructor who had agreed to give Diana Barnato a flight test with only ten hours under her belt, listened to Duhalde's pleas in private and then suggested to Gower that she be allowed to spend three months in the hangars brushing up on Tiger Moth mechanics
and, more especially, on her English. Gower agreed. ‘But it was MacMillan who gave me that chance,' she said firmly. ‘I'd gone into his office and cried like the Magdalena, and no-one tried to stop me after that.'

They all remember the names of the ships that brought them – the
Rangitata
, the
Avila Star
, the
Julius Caesar
, the
Beaver Hill
– and they all kept the tickets of their voyages to England as souvenirs. The
Rangitata
brought Margot Duhalde: a month of zigzagging out of the River Plate and northward round the great bulge of Brazil, two weeks after the scuttling of the
Graf Spee
. The wolf packs had never been further from home, nor more vengeful.

The
Avila Star
had set sail only a few months earlier, in the winter of 1940/41, also from Buenos Aires. It carried only a few passengers bound for England (its captain joked that even the fish were swimming in the opposite direction), but among them were Maureen and Joan Dunlop, sisters travelling without chaperones, which had occasioned a good deal of adverse comment in polite Anglo-Argentine society. They had no idea when or if they would return home, but promised their parents they would write three times a week.

Maureen and Joan had started their journey nearly 1,000 miles south-west of Buenos Aires on a ranch not far from San Carlos de Bariloche, capital of Argentina's Andean Lake District (and ironically a magnet for Nazi fugitives after the war). The ranch was not far, either, from Margot Duhalde's mother and eleven siblings on their Rio Bueno farm in Chile; perhaps a day and a half through the mountains by horse and canoe. But it was an awfully long way from Australia, where Joan and Maureen's father had been born.

Eric Chase Dunlop was ‘an amazing man, very tall, terrifically energetic', Maureen recalled, and, like her, he hated being surrounded by people. He had travelled to Patagonia on spec after being wounded three times while serving with the Royal Field
Artillery in the First World War. The vastness and the emptiness suited him and his new English wife, and the Merino sheep he'd imported from his native New South Wales. He worked for the Argentine Southern Land Company. His ‘office' was a pair of highland estancias straddling the Maquinchao River and the mountains either side of it. When Maureen said she'd sooner stay there with him than follow her sister to Cheltenham Ladies' College, he entirely understood. So Joan continued her education at boarding school alone, training afterwards to be a nurse. For young Maureen, meanwhile, a governess was hired who in due course was required to leave gaps in her timetables to enable her charge to disappear for flying lessons.