Spitfire Women of World War II (16 page)

In fact Sandoz was one step ahead of Cochran. She had already made enquiries as to how she might use her flying skills in the war effort. As a child she had spent summers in British Columbia and grown fond of what she thought of as British orderliness and accents: ‘I suddenly began wanting to go and help them win their war. I made myself ridiculous writing to the Royal Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force and the British Air Ministry, and got no useful response until someone in Canada said get in touch with Jacqueline Cochran.'

She replied at once to the telegram and the madly mobile Cochran flew to the nearest respectable airport in Fresno, California, to meet her. Ann Wood, no stranger to East Coast glitz, had found herself swept along by Cochran's can-do, must-do dynamism; but Roberta Sandoz was less worldly and more inclined to doubt herself. Knowing something of Cochran's reputation, she had made an effort with her clothes and hair and even plastered on a layer of unfamiliar make-up. The result: ‘I think I impressed her as the wrong type of person – a floozy'. Cochran misread the bundle of nerves and curiosity in front of her and lectured her sternly on the cold and hunger that came with the work she had in mind. She promised nothing, and
Roberta Sandoz went back to inspecting crops in her Porterfield Tandem.

Luckily for her, Harry Smith, the check pilot whom Pop d'Erlanger had assigned to test the women Cochran was sending up to Montreal, was finding a lot of would-be recruits too bumptious for his taste. They had the hours – or they would never have made it onto Cochran's list – but he just wasn't passing them. Like the women climbing in and out of his big radial-engined Harvard AT6 trainer at Montreal's Dorval airport, Harry Smith was American. But this did not mean any special favours. On the contrary, he made no secret of his view that a woman's place was in the kitchen. If you were smart, you understood that arguing with him was likely to be construed as evidence of inability to fly. ‘He was not a monster,' Bobby recalled. ‘He just wasn't going to be pushed around by a lot of pushy women.'

Cochran had promised Sandoz nothing, but neither had she forgotten her. The invitation to meet Harry Smith came through in the spring of 1942, and with it a one-way train ticket for the Santa Fe Chief to New York, from where onward transport would be arranged to Montreal. By this time America had entered the war and Sandoz had become engaged to a navy cadet bound for the Pacific. She drove home with what possessions she could fit into his car, and told her parents she would write often and be careful. Then she drove back to California to catch her train.

Dorothy Furey cooled her heels in Montreal for the whole autumn of 1941. She had beaten all of Cochran's girls out there, but then had to wait for them before embarking for England. There were two consolations: an ex-boyfriend now based at Dorval with the Atlantic Ferry Command had managed to find her a smart apartment in the city, and the grateful British taxpayer was paying for it. Furey spent most of her time in the library, reading up on her new employers. ‘When I got to England I knew more British history than the Brits did,' she said proudly in her sunroom in Virginia,
looking west towards the Shenandoah Mountains. ‘I could tell you every King and Prime Minister from Alfred and the cakes right on up to the present time.' Little did she know then that one British Prime Minister not yet on the list would fall in love with her and in the process risk a career that took the world back to the brink of war at Suez. Meanwhile, she read history books and watched the leaves turn gold along the St Lawrence River, and waited.

In early January, Jackie Cochran set off from New York for England on a BOAC flying boat, travelling via Baltimore, Bermuda and Lisbon. She was determined to be in London before her charges and to meet them in style. Her trip was not a pleasant one, however. She had recently developed a suppurating leg ulcer which needed constant dressing and dousing with sulphur powder.

By February 1942, Cochran's girls had started arriving in Montreal in numbers. Depending on their staggered departure dates for England, which started in the spring, they stayed at the Mount Royal Hotel for weeks or even months. And they partied hard on expenses. There were tales of all-night benders with the Atlantic ferry boys, and of shower curtains filled with water and dropped bomb-like down the hotel stairwell. Not everyone took part. Ann Wood found the whole scene unedifying and went back to Maine to wait for her crossing, while Roberta Sandoz and her new friend Emily Chapin, a fellow recruit from Rye, New York, sensibly took Harry Smith out for a quiet drink and urged him to talk about himself. (He passed them both.)

In fairness to the young lady hooligans at the Mount Royal, they may have wanted to distract themselves from the fact that, unlike Cochran, they would be travelling to England by ship when there was no surer way of tempting fate. Dorothy Furey had been told that the transatlantic convoy before hers had lost six of its ten ships. She would also have known that eleven male pilots had drowned the previous year en route to the ATA when their ship, the SS
Nerissa
, was sunk 200 miles from the English coast. Furey
was told not to expect other ships to pick up survivors if her ship, the
Beaver Hill
, was hit, since that was what the U-boats would be waiting for. The ATA recruits were divided into four groups of five and one (the first) of four, so that they could not all be lost to one torpedo as on the
Nerissa
. In Furey's group were Louise Schuurman, a Dutch national also from New Orleans whose father was an honorary consul there; Winnie Pierce, from upstate New York; and Virginia Farr, from West Orange, New Jersey.

The
Beaver Hill
spent the final days of January mustering with the rest of its convoy in bitter cold in the relative safety of the river downstream of Quebec, waiting until Canadian submarine spotters judged it the least bad moment to make a dash through the blockade of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Furey was fatalistic. ‘I had no fear,' she said: the ship had carried coal and been converted to a troop carrier,

Ann Wood, likewise, gave little thought to the likelihood of drowning, even though three ships were lost in the Gulf of St Lawrence the week before her departure. She had been briefed on the shipboard routine – lifejackets at all times; no stopping if other ships in the convoy were torpedoed, even to pick up survivors. But she preferred to focus on the far horizon, and the business of pitching in as part of the war effort when she got there.

It was a fine day when at last the
Indochinois
, with twenty-three passengers and a ‘cherubic-looking Frenchman' for a captain, was cleared to head towards Quebec. It was delayed again at Trois-Rivières as the previous week's wrecks were hauled out of the shipping lanes downstream. Ann cabled her mother to let her know her ship was still afloat. After watching a group of Flying
Fortresses pass overhead, heading back towards Montreal, she wrote in her diary: ‘Perhaps some day it will be my chance to have a crack at one of those crates.'

The
Indochinois
passed the Heights of Abraham in a line of six ships late on 16 May 1942. It was another beautiful evening, and Ann had one final farewell to remember. She had a younger sister attending a convent in Quebec not far from the Château Frontenac, the city's most opulent hotel. The hotel rose like a citadel from the Heights on the north bank of the St Lawrence. Next to it was a lawn with a clear but distant view of anything passing along the great river below. ‘My sister was anxious to get to the Frontenac to wave to me as I went by,' Ann said. ‘I'm not sure she ever did, but we like to pretend we saw each other. I certainly was there, hoping she was there.'

The crossing to England took nine days. The food was good, plentiful (four meals a day) and French. The atmosphere was convivial, to put it mildly. Five days out, somewhere south of Iceland, a lady passenger celebrated her birthday with a cocktail party that Wood, a dedicated Catholic, considered ‘revoltingly wild'. Her cabin mate ‘went completely animalistic and was messing about with the captain', Ann wrote in her diary. ‘It makes me wonder whether my unawareness is due to a so-called protected life – or am I to find out that twenty-five people out of every hundred are utter fools?'

In the middle of the cocktail party the ship received an order to change course because of submarine activity, though the captain took three hours to find the code book to work out which way he was supposed to turn. Otherwise, the U-boats left the
Indochinois
alone. Indeed, they spared all the ships carrying Cochran's girls.

By the end of the voyage Dorothy Furey had become engaged to one of her fellow passengers – chiefly, she claimed, to keep the others at bay. ‘He wasn't handsome,' she said of Lieutenant Richard Bragg, a Canadian and the first of her four husbands, ‘but he was sweet and charming and well-educated and of all the men who would queue up to see who would take me to dinner, Rick
did it the most times. And I got to liking him.' They were married a month later.

On the
Mosdale
Roberta Sandoz – already engaged – romanced no-one, and neither was she romanced. But she did spend a night playing poker with Emily Chapin under a lifeboat, fearful that they might have to use it as their ship lurched and zigzagged across the ocean without explanation. She found out later that the point of the manoeuvres had been to avoid a convoy, not a U-boat; the Norwegians preferred to sail alone. The
Mosdale
was also carrying Mary Nicholson, of Greensboro, North Carolina, formerly Jackie Cochran's most trusted personal secretary and now her final ATA recruit. The ship was last of the five that brought Cochran's pilots from America. It arrived off Liverpool at dawn on 10 August, to be guided into port through thick fog along an avenue of upended wrecks. A breakfast of oily yellow kippers awaited the young women at the Adelphi Hotel.

After more than a year of planning and an exceptionally good few months for the bar at the Mount Royal Hotel in Montreal, Team Cochran had landed.

Several months after disembarking at Liverpool – possibly on 27 March 1943, but she was coy about it in her letters home out of respect for the censors – Ann Wood took off from Castle Bromwich in a Spitfire. By this time she had been posted to No. 6 Ferry Pool at Ratcliffe Hall in Leicestershire, a friendly, popular place owned by Sir Lindsay Everard, a brewing magnate and Conservative MP.

No. 6 Pool had been set up expressly to clear the great Castle Bromwich factory of its Spitfires before they could be bombed. Sir Lindsay was passionately air-minded. He had relinquished the use of his private aerodrome together with many of its outbuildings to the ATA for the duration of the war, and Ann was billeted above his eight-car garage in digs originally intended for visiting cricketers. She made good friends at Ratcliffe, and among them was Johnnie Jordan, the wealthy and strong-willed grandson of the Bedfordshire manufacturer of breakfast cereals.

Wood and Jordan would remain friends until their deaths within weeks of each other sixty-three years later, but even after that other ATA veterans were at pains to stress that Johnnie's flying style did not reflect that of his comrades. Most ATA types took their mission of delivering planes intact extremely seriously. Jordan was different. Though skilled as a pilot, he was utterly undisciplined. Having chafed at his grandfather's draconian way of running the family business, he had left the firm. He was later court-martialled
by the RAF for ‘borrowing' a Swordfish biplane in order to escape from his bomber squadron's base, to which he had been confined for hedge-hopping.

The ATA gave him much greater freedom ‘to express himself in the air' – and to lead other pilots astray. He loved the feel of his weight on his shoulder straps and blood rushing to his head so much that he once spent ten minutes inverted in a Spitfire before force-landing it at Edgefield when its engine failed. At Castle Bromwich it was said that Alex Henshaw, the test pilot, liked to hold his aircraft down until it gained enough speed to pull up into a half loop that left him upside down but above the barrage balloons and heading in the opposite direction. Henshaw denied the story, but the more exuberant Ratcliffe pilots liked to emulate what they had heard about him and Jordan surely would not have missed the opportunity. (Wood was not averse to the occasional loop, either. ‘I always believed that aerobatics was a good way to familiarise yourself with your aircraft,' she told me, and she once lost all power while upside-down in a Miles Magister. Like Jordan at Edgefield, she told no-one about the inversion and was commended for not losing the plane.)

Jordan was with Ann at Castle Bromwich that spring day in 1943, in another Spitfire; so too was a third pilot whom Wood remembered as Don Spain, although his real name was probably Leslie Swain. They took off in quick succession into a corridor of barrage balloons that dead-ended a mile or two beyond the runway.

Initially Wood followed normal ATA procedure, executing a smart 180-degree turn before climbing out of reach of the balloons. All three Spitfires then turned south towards Bristol, heading, as far as Wood knew, for the ATA's No. 2 Ferry Pool at Whitchurch. ‘We didn't have any radio so we couldn't communicate with one another, but before we took off we organised that we would fly in line,' Wood recalled.

The Severn Railway Bridge, with its twenty-one arched spans of girders, each a little over seventy feet wide and supported by stone pillars and giant lengths of iron pipe, was a deeply functional piece of engineering. After two barges collided with it and exploded in 1960 it was torn down, but until then its plodding, unambitious structure made it seem closer to the water than it really was. The sight of three Spitfires diving as if to strafe it, then choosing their span and skimming under it at 300 mph, would have been thrilling enough, especially if seen from above by the good people on the 9.15 from Cardiff to Paddington. But most would have found it hard to believe that the third aircraft was being flown by a rangy New England society gal and graduate of D'Youville College who was also a qualified flying instructor. And their disbelief would have turned to alarm had they seen Ann's second, solo run. Between low and high tide the water level under the bridge rose by more than 30 feet – the second-largest differential in the world after Canada's Bay of Fundy. And here was the same young woman, strapped legally and officially into one of His Majesty's deadliest warplanes, barrelling down once more towards the surface of the River Severn so that she could pull off on her own the stunt that she had hitherto performed only as tail-end Charlie to two ungovernable fly boys who'd thought it funny to lead her into it without telling her; and finding, too late, in a moment of quiet terror, that she had 30 foot less clearance than the first time around. Truly she would have a line to shoot if she ever made it back to Ratcliffe alive.

In later years, when Jordan told his part of the story, he would say it transpired further south under the Clifton Suspension
Bridge. He probably did fly under this bridge, and possibly more than once: it was clearly visible from the Whitchurch aerodrome, leaping the Avon Gorge as impudently as ever between Brunel's stubby white towers. It was a magnet for daredevils throughout the war and after, until Flight Lieutenant John Crossley of the RAF's 501 Squadron made the last confirmed fly-through one February morning in 1957, hurtling under the span at 450 mph in a Vampire jet and slamming into Leigh Woods on the south side of the gorge when he failed to get his nose up in time. The aircraft burned for two hours; afterwards only a smouldering clearing in the steeply sloping trees remained. But the Avon gorge is so deep that the level of the tide would have made little difference to Ann Wood's clearance on her second run. And in any case, when shown a photograph of the Clifton bridge in her retirement she said confidently, ‘that's not my bridge'.

It was only after her death that I learned from Chris Witts, author of
Disasters on the Severn
, that RAF Spitfire pilots made such a habit of buzzing the railway bridge that a policeman had to be stationed on the front lawn of the Severn Hotel on the Lydney side to take down their call signs. Whichever bridge was ‘hers', when asked why she went under it a second time, Ann replied that it was because the first had been ‘grand fun'.

Ann Wood had her disagreements with the English, with their ways of eating and relating to each other and to Americans, and with their approach to fighting wars. ‘I honestly believe,' she wrote in her diary in September 1942, ‘that if there is an inconvenient or difficult way of doing something, the English will think of it.' But on the whole she kept such views to herself and adapted easily to life on the edge of war.

Dorothy Bragg (née Furey) found the whole process harder. She was so incensed at having to sit through a talk on her arrival in London on how she would be expected to behave that she nearly turned straight round and sailed for home. And when she
and the other American women from the
Beaver Hill
finally reached the nerve centre of the ATA at White Waltham, they had to run a gauntlet of chilly curiosity from the men there.

Besides the three one-armed First World War veterans and ‘Doc' Barbour, the medic who liked people to strip for their physicals, there was First Officer Stefan Karpeles Schenker, an exiled Austrian businessman who had been interned on the Isle of Man at the start of the war until his bona fides could be established; First Officer Gwynn Johns, a world champion parachutist; Flight Captain Jim Mollison, the moody and reckless former husband of Amy Johnson; and Chief Supply Officer Captain F. Ellam, who had written in all seriousness to the Ministry of Aircraft Production seeking funds for two elephants being sold off by a circus in Horley. (The idea was to use them to pull aircraft stuck in mud. A budget was agreed and plans were made to enrol the circus mahout as a uniformed member of the ATA, but the purchase was cancelled at the last minute because of fears that the elephants might panic during an air raid.)

The place was ‘an utter madhouse', Wood decided later. In fact it was a model of flexible management and improvisational genius, even if it sometimes felt like a boarding school for grown men. Before wondering about elephants – but after being bombed with no warning or defences in the first summer of the war – the ferry pool commanders had authorised the construction of a ‘tank'. It consisted of a truck chassis, armour-plating of welded scrap iron and the gun turret from a decommissioned Avro Anson.

White Waltham was a hive of functional and usually amiable eccentrics, but they could be intimidating. Their preconception of American womanhood had been formed almost entirely by Hollywood and it was ‘all blonde and glamour, all singy and dancy', according to Ops Officer Alison King. When the time came to see whether the real thing measured up, the men did little to disguise their curiosity.

Virginia Farr from New Jersey said she would never forget her arrival at the airfield: ‘the walk past the windows filled with silent
male faces, all dropping as they saw the travel-stained girls – you could feel their thoughts,' she said; ‘why, one's fat, one's definitely strapping – no glamour, no glamour anywhere'. In a half-hearted show of solidarity, King noted that ‘actually, they were all good-looking girls, each in her own way, but when you expect Hollywood and you get instead ordinary flesh and blood. Well!'.

If ever the new arrivals needed a mother hen, it was now, and Jackie Cochran had assigned herself the role. She had rented a Chelsea apartment in which to entertain high-ranking members of General Eisenhower's staff, but also to show her recruits that she cared about their welfare. She summoned each of them to dinner on their first two days' leave – six weeks into their contracts – even if by that time they had settled in and wanted nothing more to do with her. For Dorothy Bragg it would have been comic had it not also been embarrassing: Cochran, after all, had faked a job application on her behalf. But Ann Wood was always loyal to Jackie and was repaid with frequent invitations which were worth accepting if only because they meant unrationed food and honest-to-goodness American company.

‘Bobby' Sandoz, likewise, was appreciative. Her crossing on the
Mosdale
had been nervewracking; her first English billet, with a hard-pressed couple in Luton, depressing. And then she received the news that her fiancé, her college sweetheart of three years, had been listed as missing in action in the Pacific. When Cochran opened the door to her at her Chelsea apartment, Sandoz dissolved in tears: ‘Jackie said something like “What the hell is the matter with you”,' Sandoz recalled, ‘and I lost it. I just lost it.'

Cochran took her in and cooked her southern fried chicken and told her everything would be all right, and in the end it was. Sandoz was ‘scared to death most of the time' by the sheer power of the aircraft she had to fly, but she was skilled enough to tame them. Sometimes the gaucheries of her fellow Americans left her feeling mortified, but she was no killjoy. After her fiancé's ‘missing in action' turned out to mean ‘killed' she mourned him in the breaks between flying, then let a British officer whom she had met
in a pub in Mayfair pursue her all the way to a respectable London altar.

It was Cochran herself who never found her feet in England. She always maintained that she left on her own terms to lead her own all-American legion of uniformed airwomen. But even her staunchest supporters admit the fuller story of her time in London is one of a self-taught bull in a china shop of over-educated mandarins. According to Sandoz, she was let down by her ‘lack of background'. She was also let down by Brits who took thin-lipped delight in humiliating her.

Cochran was always on edge in London. Ann Wood realised this on her very first visit to White Waltham. She was overdue there herself: the ATA had failed to send anyone to Liverpool to meet the
Indochinois
, which Wood had taken as a signal that she was free to plan her own itinerary through the great blacked-out capital of free Europe about which she had read so much. Her fellow recruits, at Helen Harrison's suggestion, checked into the Savoy. Wood opted for the Grosvenor House, and then went sightseeing. She took in Big Ben and a bombsite or two before making her own way to the aerodrome, where she found ‘La Cochran trés gaie in uniform', but agitated. Cochran was, firstly, ‘greatly distressed that we were not met at Liverpool,' Wood wrote in her diary; ‘then embarrassed on my behalf because I wasn't with the other gals and she thought I was in London sobering up. But as I have quickly gathered she is conversationally and mentally in a dither all of the time.'

Cochran had been in even more of a dither with the first group's arrival, over the vexed question of Dr Barbour's nude physicals. None of the British women had objected to stripping for him. But Cochran did, so vehemently that Barbour was forced to back down. She won that fight, but lost any hope of earning the respect of the ATA rank and file by failing to ferry any aircraft herself. She awarded herself the rank of flight captain and the right to wear the ATA uniform, but never submitted herself to a flight test even with the indulgent Captain MacMillan. Dorothy Bragg
believed this was because she couldn't navigate from a map and was afraid of failing or flying into a stray hill. Wood insisted that ‘Jackie never intended to fly in the ATA. Her mission, strictly, was to convince the American generals that women could be used.' But if so, she went about that mission in a way few could fathom. She would disappear to London for days at a time, then reappear at White Waltham unannounced to offer her unsolicited Pensacola dime's worth of advice on how to run an organisation that thought it had been running itself rather well for three particularly stressful years. Wood concluded: