Spitfire Women of World War II (20 page)

The younger Dorothy, in her
Gone With The Wind
red dress and black choker brought over in the
Beaver Hill
, learned soon enough that in David Beatty's set even a happy marriage was no bar to serial adultery. ‘Marriage meant nothing,' she found out. ‘People just slept around.' But that night Beatty had reason to feel more than usually reckless. His men were tired and in need of entertainment because he had just led them on the worst British naval disaster of the war. With Stalin demanding a second European front to slow the German momentum towards Stalingrad, Churchill had reluctantly approved a hasty, half-baked plan to attack German forces in Dieppe. Beatty had been given command of a flotilla of transport and patrol boats, with orders to support the mainly Canadian troops going ashore. Over the course of the operation, on 19 August 1942, 555 sailors lost their lives. It could have been worse. German defences in this part of the Channel were all but impregnable, which was why Eisenhower left them well to port on D-Day. Beatty had simply drawn a short straw in an absurdly grand game of geopolitics.

He murmured the gist of the story into Dorothy Bragg's enraptured ear that evening in the Polygon ballroom, unaware until she pressed him for more detail that this closeness to the real war thrilled her quite as much as his uniform or eyebrows, or his strangulated accent. ‘He swept me off my feet,' she said.

Sixty-three years later Bobby Sandoz begged to differ. ‘I think the shoe was on the other foot,' she told me with considerable feeling. ‘And that was only the beginning. Damn, I wish it hadn't happened, for the impression of Americans in England. We came to do a job, we wanted to fit in. We didn't want to make trouble.'

But was it really seen as trouble to allow a senior British naval officer to dance with you, I asked?

Only one of the English pilots could match Dorothy Bragg's impact at a ball. This was Diana Barnato, a latecomer to the all-women's pool at Hamble, who as far as she was aware had been sent there from White Waltham to keep her out of trouble.

Before joining the ATA, Barnato had grown used to a dual existence in London. By day she was, like Veronica Volkersz, a volunteer angel – an ambulance driver with the Red Cross. By night she was a party animal with a very full dance card. It was hardly sustainable, but then not much was about the war. It required a full ration of coffee and cigarettes, but it enabled her to squeeze the marrow out of a life that she knew could end at any moment. It was exhilarating, and what had proved exhilarating as an ambulance driver she was reluctant to abandon as a ferry pilot.

She never did abandon it, though the authorities at ATA headquarters did their best to make her. One senior official whom she will still not name – or forgive – thought he saw a chance to clip Barnato's wings in the spring of 1942.

While based at White Waltham she lived in a house her father had given her on the Chelsea Embankment, within easy striking distance (by train or by Bentley) of her favourite clubs and restaurants. She was especially well known at the 400 Club
on Leicester Square because her father was also a regular there. As a pre-war motor-racing hero to many of the fighter boys who showed up at the 400 after a hard day's work over France or the Home Counties, Woolf Barnato helped set the tone. The dance floor was tiny, but it tended to be full because of the irresistible Fat Tim and his band. ‘And the maitre d' was called Rossi,' Diana remembered:

There had been no flying for two weeks because of fog, but then the murk evaporated and Barnato was assigned a Spitfire delivery to Somerset. It was her one job for the day. To anyone with an ounce of wanderlust a chit for a Spit with a clear sky and a full tank of fuel constituted grave temptation. Even at the regulation ATA cruising speed of 250 mph, almost nowhere in England was more than an hour away.

Barnato gave herself a joyride down the Cornish coast and had lunch with a friend at RAF St Eval. She was spotted signing in there and was reported to her commanding officer. He demoted her for misuse of fuel, lectured her on the terrible risks run by tanker crews to get the precious 100 octane past the U-boats, and took the opportunity to move her to Hamble. She was led to believe it was, apart from anything, for her own good. ‘I flew all day and was out all night. I suppose they thought if I didn't let up I'd break my neck.'

Instead of letting up, though, she befriended two obliging London cabbies whom she remembers as Bert and Ozzie. They joined what began to look like a broad-based conspiracy to save both her life and her lifestyle, as did Max Aitken, Billy Clyde
and Tony Bartley. Aitken was Lord Beaverbrook's bronzed and charismatic son, and a skiing companion of the Barnatos from before the war. Clyde had fought with him in 601 Squadron in the Battle of Britain. Bartley had originally introduced Barnato to her first love, Humphrey Gilbert (who had been killed taking off in his Spitfire, nine months earlier). All were still serving fighter pilots, and all of them joined Diana at the 400 Club on the evening of 19 January 1943. There they learnt for the first time that ATA ferry pilots were expected to fly with no wireless or instrument training. They were appalled: did this mean that Diana couldn't fly blind? It did.

‘Max got out his fountain pen, and, to my horror, drew an instrument panel on the pink linen tablecloth,' Diana said. ‘He gave me a lesson there and then on what to do on instruments, and I needed it the next day or I wouldn't be here.'

Diana left the club at about 2.30 a.m. and went home to Chelsea to change. Bert – or Ozzie, they were brothers and she never knew which it would be – was waiting as usual. She shed her gown, pulled on her uniform and over it a large, furry Afghan coat that smelt rotten when wet but kept out the cold. Then she slipped out again into the night to curl up in the back of the cab. Ozzie – or Bert – drove across the river to Waterloo and Diana caught the 3.40 a.m. milk train to Eastleigh. That gave her a little over an hour's sleep. She had left a secondhand Vauxhall her father had given her at Eastleigh station, and there would be another hour or two in bed in her little-used digs at Hamble before the 9 a.m. rush to the aerodrome.

The morning of 20 January started clear, and Diana was given a Mark IX Spitfire to deliver to Cosford. It should have been an easy half-hour hop in the RAF's ultimate flying machine, with a top speed and rate of climb that left the Mark V wallowing in its slipstream and was, at last, more than a match for the Messerschmitt 109.

Barnato was high over the Cotswolds, enjoying the view, when a slight fall in the temperature outside filled the sky with an
instant, impenetrable blanket of condensation. It had not been forecast because it was not a front, but it looked like one and presented exactly the same risk of sudden death for a pilot unsure how to use her instruments.

The night before, with the help of the pink tablecloth, Max Aitken had stressed two things: a pilot almost never flies head-first into cloud because of the instinct to look for a way around it, so first, he said, straighten up. And secondly, remember the last spot height on the map, add a safe margin, then turn through 180 degrees and descend as gradually as possible. Oh, he'd said, ‘and think'.

Barnato thought, feverishly. She also remembered a final piece of advice from Aitken: if there was still no visibility at her safe break-off height she was to climb fast and bale out. This presented a problem. She was in her regulation skirt rather than slacks. Under it she was wearing large knickers made from parachute silk and wartime stockings that ended just above the knee. She wasn't bashful, but she did have a reputation to consider. She put the Spitfire into a shallow dive from 6,000 feet. At 800 feet, 50 feet above what she hoped against hope might be the Little Rissington aerodrome in Gloucestershire, she was still in thick cloud.

‘But we didn't bale out, we came on down,' she said, remembering the plane as half of a two-person team. She broke out of the cloud in driving rain at 200 mph and 600 feet, which in that part of the Cotswolds turned out to be treetop height. A glimpse of a parked aircraft on a waterlogged grassy airfield flashed by under her port wing and she threw the Spitfire into an immediate tight turn to get back to it. Another turn, and she was down, falling out of the sky into a series of enormous puddles. Through luck or instinct, she managed to keep her nose up despite the natural tendency of the huge engine inside it to tip the plane forward into the mud. She opened the canopy and felt her knees buckle as she climbed out of the cockpit. A startled RAF officer was already striding over with a cape. To disguise her jellied legs Barnato knelt on the wing, pretending to scrabble in the cockpit for stray maps.
‘I say, miss,' the gallant officer remarked as he reached up with the cape, ‘you must be good on instruments.'

He led her back to a Nissen hut at RAF Windrush from which she telephoned ATA headquarters. The commanding officer there was relieved to hear from her. The instant cloud, caused by an unusually high dew point, had covered the whole of England. An entire training pool had had to force land and two pilots had been killed.

‘No glamour', the British women pilots would insist to reporters. No glamour, the men of No. 1 Ferry Pool ruefully agreed when they saw the first Americans. No glamour, Jackie Cochran must have thought so often in White Waltham that she wanted to scream.

Even in 2006, surviving ATA veterans in several countries warned me darkly against romanticising what they'd done in the war. But in the end it is impossible to oblige. There is a limit to how long one can soberly agree that there was nothing particularly special about criss-crossing Britain in Spitfires and Hurricanes as a young woman in the early 1940s. In the end one has little choice but to grant the women pilots their compulsive understatement, and then, respectfully, break their golden rule and see them as others did; as Flying Officer Henryk Jagowy of the Polish Air Force did, for instance.

Jagowy was posted to RAF Millom in remotest Cumberland in 1943. As he recalled at a Polish Air Force Association reunion after the war, glamour dropped in unannounced one lunchtime as his officers' mess was filling up with hungry men:

I showed Jadwiga a transcript of this account at her home in Warsaw, and she shook her head gravely. ‘Not true,' she said. ‘Not true at all.' It was nonsense. As the station commander in this fictional episode appeared to understand full well, at least in principle, this type of flying was strictly forbidden. There had been no aerobatics.

At first I was unable to hide my disappointment. Then I realised she was not denying everything, only the aerobatics. Did she have any recollection of the lunch? She smiled, but only a little. She admitted that such hospitality was not unheard of.

In fact, by pure chance it seems to be corroborated in this case by a written account left to the Imperial War Museum by an impressionable Edgar Featherstone of the RAF Volunteer Reserve, posted to RAF Millom between 1941 and 1943. ‘I was on duty crew when I saw my first (and only) World War II female pilot,' Featherstone wrote,

Glamour, it turned out, was in the eye and imagination of the beholder. Pilsudska would have known this even if she preferred not to admit it. Why else the constant presence of photographers during her weekend gliding trips outside Warsaw before the war? Maureen Dunlop learned the same lesson the easy way, stepping out of a Barracuda onto the cover of
Picture Post
and then, mercifully for someone so shy, never being bothered by the press again. Diana Barnato revelled in all the glamour she could generate, but in the end the self-effacers set the tone. Some might have carried powder compacts with their parachutes, but glamour in the form of ‘blonde hair streaming out in the breeze' was the exception, not the rule.

Consider the apparently workaday 50-mile ferry flight by Ann Welch on 3 February 1942, from Chattis Hill to Colerne in north Wiltshire in a Spitfire. Chattis was a heavily camouflaged grass aerodrome outside Stockbridge with a gentle hillside for a runway. Spitfires built at the original Supermarine works and its satellites in Southampton were assembled and test-flown there before being distributed to wherever they were needed. It had been snowing for three days by the time Welch climbed into her cockpit. Two of those she had spent in a freezing hut in her Sidcot suit, sipping tea from a Thermos flask, or just sitting, saying little. Visibility had been close to zero and the forecast gloomy. To have taken off without instrument training or the use of wireless would have been suicidal.

Ordinarily, Welch's commanding officer would have been able
to ‘wash out' and send her home at noon each day as long as the foul weather continued, but this Spitfire was a PW1 – a ‘Priority 1 Wait'. She had orders to stay by it from dawn to dusk and take off at the first hint of an improvement in the weather. The only clue to the reason for the urgency was the aircraft's unusual colour scheme. It was pale blue on its underside and khaki from above. This was also a time when angry questions were being asked in the House of Commons about Germany's increasing strength in North Africa and the Allies' apparent inability to do anything about it.

That month, 1,300 miles to the south, in perfect weather, the island fortress of Malta was being bombed back to the Middle Ages. For an island so critical to British control of the Mediterranean its aerial defences were pitiful. The RAF had started the Battle of Malta with four aircraft, all biplanes – Gloster Gladiators borrowed from the navy. When one was shot down, the others were named Faith, Hope and Charity. By March 1942 Malta was defended by twenty serviceable fighters, of which no more than six were likely to be flyable on any given day. Each day that month, Field Marshal Kesselring, based less than 200 miles away in Sicily, sent over 150 bombers with orders to destroy the Grand Harbour at Valletta, all three of the island's air force bases, and anything that moved. The pounding was having its desired effect. German convoys were getting through to North Africa again.

Worse still, there was every chance that Malta would be lost. Six weeks before Welch got her PW1 Spitfire, Lord Cranborne, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, had written to Churchill warning that if the island were not resupplied within two months it would only be a matter of time before it fell. Since then a supply convoy had set out for the island, but only two ships had reached it and they were bombed in the harbour. At Churchill's pleading Roosevelt had loaned Britain an aircraft carrier, the USS
Wasp
, for one trip only, to deliver Spitfires to Malta. The war could not be won as long as Germany was undefeated in North Africa. Victory there was hard to imagine without the island. Malta was desperate
for food, fuel, ammunition and, above all, Spitfires. The
Wasp
was waiting in the Clyde to take them there, but none had arrived. Welch was sitting in one of them, waiting for a break in the weather.

She knew what was at stake; the parliamentary questions had been reported on the BBC. But she could not even see the trees at the top of the hill that served as a runway, and snow was still falling. There was nothing she could do and nothing much worth saying. Lettice Curtis, not often given to sympathy, was sympathetic. Everyone who took off that day ‘frightened themselves in a way that is known only to those who, of their own free will, pit their lives against the clearness of their thinking', she wrote. ‘And there can be few things more frightening than finding oneself committed to chasing through the sky … pressed down by a vast greyness, knowing that if reference with the ground is lost even for an instant one's chances of a safe return to Earth are not worth the proverbial row of beans.'

Welch had a plan. If the trees at the top of the hill appeared she would take off and follow a memorised sequence of roads and railways that would get her to Colerne as long as she stuck to it rigidly. The route included a double loop in the Savernake Forest branch railway line as it went through the hills on the north side of the Vale of Pewsey. She would follow every yard of each loop, circling as if lost in order not to get lost. And she would fly as low as necessary to keep the tracks visible beneath her.

A slight improvement in the weather was forecast for mid-morning, and soon after 11 a.m. the trees did appear. Visibility extended briefly to 700 yards under a sagging, sodden blanket of dark cloud. A snowplough cleared a strip up the middle of the slope and Welch warmed up her engine. She took off with the cloudbase at 300 feet and headed north by north-west, flying lower than she ever had before, peering intently down to her left, then her right, then her left again as she banked to follow each curve of her route.

The plan worked. ‘I flew as slowly as possible, flaps down,'
she recalled. ‘It was not possible to fly with the wheels down on a Spit for extra drag as the undercarriage leg obscured the oil cooler. The weather did not improve, but neither did it worsen, and I picked my way along the roads and railway tracks at 140 mph, flying the last mile along a lane uphill to the aerodrome.'

On arrival she was pulled from the cockpit by engineers waiting to fit out the aircraft with a full complement of instruments and weapons before it continued to Renfrew. No other Spitfire made it to Colerne that day; the only other one that had been able to follow Welch into the air from Chattis Hill before the fog closed in again had turned straight round and even then had fallen out of the murk and back onto the cleared strip more by luck than skill. Ops Officer Alison King, waiting for news at Hamble, feared Welch was dead until she heard her voice on the telephone, and even then was not convinced she wasn't talking to a ghost. Her voice was ‘bleached and expressionless … it was as though she was drained of feeling and didn't want to talk about it'. What she actually said was: ‘It was very bad indeed; worse than I've ever known.‘

It wasn't combat, but Welch had run a series of risks that combat pilots rarely ran. It wasn't glamorous in the peer-reviewed sense, since no-one was watching her terrifying slow-dance over the Savernake Forest to ascribe any glamour to it (though the engineers waiting for her at Colerne may have recognised something special in an uphill final approach). But it was exceptionally brave, and, unusually for an individual ferry flight, it had its own toehold in history.

The USS
Wasp
finally sailed from Port Glasgow carrying forty-seven Spitfires on 13 April 1942. It passed through the Strait of Gibraltar six days later with an escort of three cruisers and eight destroyers. Starting at 5:45 a.m. on the 20th, all forty-seven planes took off with nearly 700 miles still to go to Malta. (Half of them were led by Lord David Douglas-Hamilton, a 6 foot 4 former Oxford University boxing champion, and a tighter fit in a Spitfire than Audrey Sale-Barker, who married his brother after the war.)
The Spitfires landed without incident and their pilots went to get some lunch. Immediately, Kesselring attacked: 300 German bombers hit the new Spitfires where they were lined up on the ground. The following morning six were still serviceable. It was a terrible, avoidable disaster, watched by many of the pilots themselves as they stood outside in their tin hats. But the RAF did learn from it. An SOS went back to London for ‘Spitfires and more Spitfires'. Roosevelt allowed the
Wasp
to make a second trip. The ATA flew forty-seven more Spitfires up to Renfrew, and this time they were back in the air above Malta within ten minutes of arriving. Kesselring had lost his chance to conquer Malta, and the tide in Africa soon turned.

There was also a less grand footnote to Ann Welch's heroic hop from Chattis Hill to Colerne. Once she had landed, the operations room at Hamble had to work out how to get her back. Ordinarily a taxi aircraft would be sent to pick her up. That did not seem possible given the weather, but a junior pilot volunteered. She was Third Officer Bridget Hill, not long out of Wycombe Abbey Girls' School, ‘wise and mature beyond her years', according to a friend, and very promising in the cockpit. She astonished Welch by puttering out of the murk at Colerne in a Puss Moth twenty minutes after Welch had got there in a Spitfire. She had the advantage of a much lower stalling speed and a better view of the ground, but it was still an achievement not to have crashed, and Welch rewarded her by letting her fly the return leg, too.

Hill flew back to Hamble at treetop height along two sides of a large triangle via Oxford. When Welch asked why, her chauffeur replied calmly that her parents lived in Oxford, so she knew the way. Less than a month later, Hill was dead. Another taxi plane in which she was a passenger crashed into a house near White Waltham after being roughly handled by its male pilot. He, Hill and another ATA pilot, Betty Sayer, died. Three more ATA pilots were killed on the same day, two of them while trying to find a way round the rugged lobe of western Scotland between Prestwick and Kirkbride in zero visibility. It was the ATA's blackest day. It
was also a jolt for many newer recruits; confirmation that they were in the war, not watching it. A moment's lapse in concentration, as Ann Wood wrote to herself, and you were apt to be a goner. Or maimed or burned beyond recognition, which many considered worse.

It did not help morale that Bridget Hill and Betty Sayer spun into the ground so close to White Waltham. Three months later it happened again in plain view of many on the ground. Flying Officer Castle recorded the aftermath in his diary on 6 June: ‘Joan Marshall was killed today. She was solo in a Master, doing a circuit … she made her final turn into wind, went into a normal power approach and then turned off to the right in a steepening turn which finished in a spin.'