Spitfire Women of World War II (21 page)

Marshall crashed within five minutes' walk of Castle's billet. That evening he and three other pilots went along to see the wreck. ‘It is between the houses in a garden. And is a dreadful sight. The whole tail unit has broken off and the rest is just small pieces. Why it did not burn is a mystery. It is a great shock to everyone … I wonder how many more of us have been marked out for the same fate.'

Over the course of the war, the ‘wastage rate' of female pilots was fewer than one in ten, twice as economical as the men, who lost nearly one in three of those enrolled by February 1940 (a rate comparable to that of Fighter Command). But it was still death on a significant, non-civilian scale, close to what the Romans called decimation; and it took some getting used to.

The women of the ATA were living the days of their lives. They were often embarrassed by the intensity of the thrill of flying such ‘lovely, powerful, fast, exciting war aeroplanes'. Ordinarily, the experience might have forged a special bond between them and with many it did – but this mainly came after the war, once they had had time to reflect. Until then their comrades – their partners in flying, bridge, filmgoing, cocktailing and line-shooting – were
people who might on any given day let their mind wander for a moment from the railway line below; or hit an unforecast fogbank and then a steeple; or pull a dud chit from their operations officer and climb into a dud Spit with gummed-up spark plugs; or they might just lose a propeller – watch it detach in front of their eyes and disappear in a useless spiral ahead of them – and panic, and perish in a matter of seconds.

For many the best defence against falling apart was not to get too close to one's comrades. Margaret Frost, convivial by nature (and my grandparents' neighbour for many years) knew this intuitively. When asked who her closest friends were during the war she didn't have to think long. ‘I don't know that you made close friends,' she said.

Alison King at Hamble tried to help by rubbing out the names of the dead in the left-hand column of the giant blackboard on which she wrote out each day's programme. Each name below would quickly move up a line. But she and the pilots she dispatched still had to acquire that ‘strange philosophy of life where friends went out on their appointed tasks and did not return'.

Unlike combat pilots, the ferry pilots flew without radios, instrument training or weapons in aircraft that were nonetheless legitimate targets for any Luftwaffe pilot who saw them, and they flew in any weather except the certifiably foul. They flew continuously, not just when grand strategy demanded it. They were sometimes mistaken for enemy aircraft by bored ack-ack units. They were frequently required to fly badly damaged planes to maintenance units for repair or to be broken up, and they took special pride in being able to fly a new type of aircraft with no notice or familiarisation apart from twenty minutes alone in the cockpit with their ring-bound A6 bible – the official ‘Ferry Pilot's Notes'. With no surplus syllables and hardly a verb anywhere, these cards gave take-off, flying and landing settings for every knob, flap and fuelcock in every aircraft flown by the Allies into or out of Britain in the war. They fitted neatly into the breast pockets of the ATA uniform. It was ‘all THERE', as Ann Welch once put it with the
delight of a pirate clutching a treasure map. Even pilots trained from scratch later in the war used them to fly dozens of different types before it was over, and sometimes three or four in a day.

For passengers foolish enough to ask what was going on, being flown by a pilot who had to bury her nose in a ring binder before take-off and again before landing because she had never sat in this sort of cockpit before could be a disquieting experience. Nothing similar was ever asked of combat pilots. It was a sustained aerial stunt that one seasoned British Airways instructor long after the war called, simply, ‘mind-boggling'.

In all, the ATA delivered 308,567 aircraft, including 57,286 Spitfires, 29,401 Hurricanes, 9,805 Lancasters and 7,039 Barracudas of the type that took Betty Keith-Jopp to the dark floor of the Firth of Forth. In mid-1942, when British aircraft production reached its peak, the ATA was moving more planes each day than British Airways did on a typical day in 2006. Its taxi Ansons alone covered ten million miles with no fatal mechanical failure. But this was not achieved casually. The pilots – the best of them, at any rate – lived in a continual state of stress. Keeping themselves and their aircraft in one piece was a nervewracking business.

When asked, aged ninety, if she would like to have flown in combat, Lettice Curtis rolled her eyes and groped for words. She would clearly have liked nothing better than for her interviewer to leave. When she had composed herself, she said: ‘This is the sort of imagination I am very much against. There was no question of it, and it was not a question you asked. It just never came up.'

I left it at that. But a few months later I asked Sir Peter Mursell, director of training at White Waltham for the last three years of the war, if he thought any of the women whose progress he was responsible for monitoring would have made good combat pilots. ‘I'm sure Lettice would have,' he said without hesitation.

Apart from a week's rest at Cliveden hospital after a crash that almost killed her, Curtis flew continuously from July 1940 to
September 1945; thirteen days on, two off, for sixty-two consecutive months. In that time she ferried nearly 1,500 aircraft including 331 four-engined bombers. She was never given command of a ferry pool because she never got on with Pauline Gower, but she was still the alpha female of the ATA. If Margie Fairweather was the Cold Front, Curtis was the Ice Queen, the Iron Maiden, the
prima inter pares
. More particularly, she was the embodiment of the ATA's most important sociological discovery – that any man who clung to the view that aircraft were for men only was liable to be made a fool of.

It was not that Curtis didn't suffer fools gladly; she didn't suffer them – or anyone who had not somehow proved that they deserved her respect – at all. She would simply ignore them, or cut them off with a conversational carving knife. Naomi Allen, the flamboyant ex-parachutist and glider pilot, once recorded in her diary telling Curtis that she would be seeing Jim Mollison, Amy Johnson's estranged husband. ‘Oh,' Curtis replied. ‘Give him my hate will you?'

To this day some of Curtis's defenders explain away her spectacular froideur as proof of crippling shyness. But Peter Mursell, who knew her well, said she wasn't a bit shy as long as she was ‘on firm ground', and firm ground was Lettice Curtis's speciality, even in the air.

Her father was a country lawyer, too hard of hearing to engage in more than perfunctory conversation. He sent her away to boarding school when she was six. At seven, after scandalising her nurse on a weekend at home by telling her she was expected at her new school to share a bath and bedroom with a boy called Monty, Curtis was moved to an all girls' establishment on the north side of Dartmoor. It was run by three spinsters, victims of the man-drought left by the First World War, who gave her a solid grounding in all subjects along lines set out by the Parents' National Educational Union. The school had a library, where Lettice found herself indifferent to Dickens but entranced by the adventure novels of Rider Haggard. Aged thirteen she was moved again, to
Benenden public school, in Kent, which taught her ‘the importance of exams and passing them', and the loneliness of wanting, above all, to win.

‘Benenden was to some extent a bittersweet experience,' she wrote in her autobiography, ‘as until I became House and School Captain, when I thoroughly enjoyed being a leader, I never completely fitted in …'. She was, she said, extremely competitive. ‘To me, second place at anything was a failure.' She went to Oxford University in 1933, longing ‘to be told the right way to do everything'.

Academically, Oxford disappointed Curtis, and vice versa, since her college, St Hilda's, had no mathematics tutor of its own. So she concentrated on sport, which naturally entailed sweeping all before her. She was a triple blue in fencing, tennis and lacrosse.

She joined the ATA reluctantly, so she said, having scared herself in bad weather over the Pennines while doing aerial survey work for the army before the war. She also claimed to find her fellow women pilots pleasant and intelligent, but hamstrung by ‘a fundamental lack of enterprise – a willingness to cling perhaps a little too rigidly to rules and customs good or bad'.

This was her explanation for applying to be posted from all-female Hamble to the all-male headquarters at White Waltham. It appears no coincidence, however, that the commanding officer there was the darkhaired, blue-eyed Frankie Francis, leader of men and enchanter of women. Curtis would have known of Francis from ferry flights in and out of White Waltham, and from gossip, and the most poignant strand of the Curtis legend holds that she had something deeper than a crush on him; that she lobbied for White Waltham postings to be near him, and that she even allowed herself to think of a life with him. In her history of the ATA her formal narrative tone is dropped for two subjects: Spitfires and Francis. ‘All the girls fell for Frankie and I was no exception,' she wrote. ‘I thought he was wonderful.' There is a sense at this point of the incorrigible, binary-minded competitor aching to elaborate on something unfamiliar and mushy, and to an extent she does.
She writes about her marathon backgammon sessions with Francis, and her admiration for his methodical and scientific approach to winning them.

Whatever motivated her to aim for White Waltham, she was there one sodden October morning in 1942 when Eleanor Roosevelt came calling, and that visit propelled her into history.

There were any number of stories that the papers could have told about the First Lady's visit to White Waltham. Apart from anything, the Germans bombed the place while she was there.

Mrs Roosevelt, in greatcoat and fox fur, had just finished a short speech of thanks and encouragement in front of a Lockheed Hudson draped with the Stars and Stripes. Her invited audience, including most of Jackie Cochran's recruits, then repaired to the mess to eat bountiful American food and to bombard her with questions about when women would be flying back home. ‘We proceeded to gorge ourselves,' Ann Wood wrote that night, ‘when suddenly the siren went and we were all told to make for the shelter. It was rather a weird awakening, and my first into-the-shelter raid. I couldn't help but marvel at the German timing.'

No-one was hurt, so the raid's newsworthiness was deemed marginal. The reporters covering the visit were similarly uninterested in the Cochran angle. Where was she? Why had she gone home so soon? Would it not have been appropriate for her to return with Mrs Roosevelt since without her there would have been no American women pilots for her to visit? But Cochran was three months' gone, and long forgotten.

A piquant human interest story also went unsampled – that of Mary Zerbel, petite, attractive and beside herself with worry as the others delighted in the attention of the ‘soft and kindly' Mrs Roosevelt and her ‘very cute' companion, Mrs Clementine
Churchill. Zerbel had learned to fly in Southern California and lived in Hollywood until her boyfriend, Wesley Ford, was posted to England soon after Pearl Harbor. She leapt at the chance Cochran offered, not so much to fly as to follow Wes. They were married in Sir Lindsay Everard's private chapel at Ratcliffe Hall. Now Wes was missing, and had been for two weeks; shot down over Germany. Ann Wood did not foresee a happy ending: ‘Mary is being terribly plucky,' she wrote, ‘but it must be quite an effort as [I] don't believe she was ever too thrilled with her work, nor the people, and it was only the nearness to Wes that made the job passable at all.'

It was Mrs Roosevelt's encounter with Lettice Curtis that made the headlines the following day. For the First Lady's walkabout before her speech, Curtis was positioned under the giant wing of a Handley Page Halifax, which provided shelter from the rain and a conversation point. Curtis was at this stage the only woman in the world to have taken the controls of a four-engined bomber, having earned the privilege with relentless work and a blemishless record. She would gloss over the achievement afterwards, saying she had merely been ‘lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time'. But her promotion to four engines opened the way for her and a select few other women to a class of planes that included Short Stirlings, American Liberators and Fortresses, and the mighty Avro Lancaster. When she met Mrs Churchill, Curtis had yet to go solo in the lumbering monster that shielded them both from the rain, but that didn't bother the gentlemen of the press. ‘Girl Flies Halifax', they announced the next day, which meant there was no turning back now even if the girl had wanted to.

The ATA's assault on the last bastion of male air supremacy began, typically, with no fanfare and the quiet help of some supportive men. Commander Frankie Francis put Curtis up for what was known as ‘Class V conversion' because he thought she was ready for it. Chief Instructor Captain Macmillan agreed. The only possible objection anyone else might have had was that she was a woman, but the d'Erlanger-Gower doctrine that gender was no
bar to anything had been established thirteen months earlier by Winnie (‘It's lovely, darlings') Crossley in her first Hurricane. There were, of course, still men who believed that 30 tonnes of aeroplane needed at least 200 lbs of man to fly. But any of them inclined to grumble to
Aeroplane
magazine would have thought better of it when they learned that the insurgent 130 lbs of woman belonged to the triple blue with the frozen sense of humour and angular jaw who played backgammon marathons with Frankie Francis. And in any case, the grumblers were wrong, as Rosemary Rees explained briskly to one of them after joining the women's Class V elite in 1943: ‘I remember having quite an argument with a Wing Commander about an [Avro] York I was collecting,' she wrote. ‘He said it was so heavy compared with my five foot three and seven stone weight. I pointed out that I was not proposing to attempt to carry it after all, but on the contrary to make it carry me.' Taxiing a four-engined bomber in a strong wind could take a bit of elbow grease, Rees admitted, but ‘the controls of a big aircraft were not at all heavy in the air'.

Before the Roosevelt visit, Lettice Curtis had done several dual circuits in a Halifax with a mild-mannered Polish instructor called Klemens Dlugaszewski, also known as Double Whisky. He had founded LOT, the Polish national airline, in 1929, and escaped to England ten years later. He was much loved: a model of probity, patriotism and pride in his pupils; and it was up to him when Curtis would go solo. She did so before the ‘Girl Flies Halifax' headline became fish-and-chip paper.

On 27 October 1943, Dlugaszewski clambered down from a Mark II Halifax that he had flown for her to an airstrip with a convenient east-west runway, and left Curtis to get on with it. She flew a perfect circuit and remembered long afterwards the sight of Dlugaszewski standing at the edge of the runway and saluting as she taxied it back towards him. Someone, at least, had witnessed this little piece of progress. But if Dlugaszewski was proud of her, she would not confess to any pride in herself. Granted, it might have helped that she was tall and strong, even if physical strength
was no particular requirement to fly big planes. Granted, it might have helped that she had got herself posted to the otherwise all-male White Waltham pool. But you weren't proud, she said. You had a job to do.

That evening the instructors held a party at White Waltham to which Curtis was invited. I made the mistake of asking if it had been in her honour, and quickly understood that a more preposterous question had not been asked in the whole history of aviation. Too much celebration would, in fact, have been premature. Gender politics intervened just before Curtis was cleared to ferry heavy bombers: she was required to make ten perfect landings, rather than the usual seven, and Freddie Laker (the future airline tycoon) accused her of bouncing on one of them. He was her flight engineer and may have been alarmed at being flown by a woman; Dlugaszewski happened to be watching the landing from outside, and vouched for the fact that it was ‘perfect'.

Curtis finally completed her Class V conversion at RAF Pocklington in Yorkshire in February 1943. She was lonely there, and self-conscious about having to request landing permission by radio in line with RAF procedure. She wrote simply: ‘I went solo on my second flight.' But it was not that perfunctory from where her new instructor, Captain Henderson, was sitting. He wrote an account of it in 1946:

There was now no logical bar to women flying any type of aircraft – only an illogical ban on their presence on flying boats. The reason, apparently, was the risk of untoward intimacy among mixed-sex flight crews should they find themselves left with no alternative to sleeping on board. But the ban affected few of the ATA women; only eleven of them were ever cleared to fly Class V planes, the prerequisite for anyone hoping to move on to flying boats. The remaining 153 women pilots found the awesome power of fighters and fighter-bombers challenge enough.