Spitfire Women of World War II (22 page)

From the ‘Standing Orders for Delivery Pilots', given to each of them on signature of contract and posted at all ferry pools in case of emergency:

Occasionally, after a crash, unloading one's guns and telephoning Mayfair 120 (a central search, rescue and salvage number for the RAF as well as the ATA) was not immediately practicable. This was certainly the case when another Diana ran into difficulties after taking off from Langley, near Slough, in a Hawker Tempest in 1943. First Officer Diana Ramsay (known as ‘Wamsay' because she couldn't say her ‘r's) was a dainty young woman with an upturned nose and light brown hair held back with a blue velvet ribbon. She joined the ATA the same month as Diana Barnato, who
was at White Waltham as she flew overhead in serious trouble.

With a monstrous 2,500-horsepower Centaurus engine, Wamsay's Tempest was one of the fastest piston-powered aircraft of the war. It could cruise at 350 mph and sustain 450 mph for brief periods at maximum boost, making it perfect for chasing flying bombs. But it proved a handful when anything went wrong.

Soon after take-off, bound for Henlow to the north of London, ‘Wamsay' felt an unsolicited surge of power and saw her airspeed indicator climb smartly to 400 mph. At that speed she would be at Henlow in less than three minutes, but with no hope of surviving a landing. She tried to throttle back and cut her boost setting, but found to her alarm that both were stuck at maximum. At this point, she told the Accidents Committee, she altered course, turning west for White Waltham, because she knew the aerodrome and surrounding area better. (She also knew that as a training school White Waltham had a practised crash wagon and its own blood cart.)

Unable to lower the undercarriage at 400 mph, she hurtled over Wembley and tried to climb to lose speed. It didn't work; she simply gained height and knew she would accelerate again when the time came to lose it. Not wanting to bale out over such a built-up area, she made a low pass over White Waltham at full power and full speed, shattering the mid-morning calm in the operations room; then she cut her engine. She was still travelling at close to 400 mph in an aircraft designed to land at not more than 100 mph. The crash wagon was already racing across the grass as she turned and began a last-ditch final approach. Diana Barnato and others emerged from the administration block to see her ‘trying to lose speed in a series of humps, like a Dover sole or flatfish along the bottom of the sea'. The Tempest whistled clear across the aerodrome, pulled up to avoid a church spire and disappeared. Arthur ‘Doc' Whitehurst – who had taken over as Commanding Officer at White Waltham when Frankie Francis was reassigned to Ratcliffe in December 1942 – ran for his car and invited Diana Barnato to go with him.

Dreading what they might find they drove to the edge of the aerodrome, then walked quickly across two fields in the direction the Tempest had been flying when last seen. The first sign of the crash was a series of cuts in the soft turf from the propeller. A section of wing and a heavy branch lay on the ground between two oak trees at the edge of a third field in which a small herd of cows had been grazing. Beyond this, something large and powerful had heaved itself over a ditch, smashed into a wood and kept going. Barnato and Whitehurst picked their way through the tunnel of torn branches it had left behind and came to a circle of flattened trees which looked, Diana wrote, ‘as if a couple of dinosaurs had had a fight in there'. On the far side the Tempest's fuselage, shorn of wings and tail, was wedged up against a final bulwark of larger trees. Sitting astride its engine, minus her flying helmet but with hardly a bruise, was ‘Wamsay'. She had begun to walk back towards the aerodrome, she said apologetically, but thought better of it since she was afraid of cows. In any case, she had left a velvet ribbon somewhere in the trees.

Even on delivery flights, the ‘lovely warplanes' that Rosemary Rees and the rest of the ATA women delighted in flying travelled about 200 mph faster than the unlovely box kites that passed for warplanes in the First World War. An inevitable result was a much lower survival rate from ‘prangs'. But a more curious result – or it may have been a series of extraordinary flukes – was that many of those who somehow survived potentially fatal accidents did so virtually uninjured.

In January 1943 Helen Richey hit a hangar at full power seconds after taking off from Llandow in a twin-engine Vickers Wellington. She lost three feet of wing, spun involuntary back onto the airfield and walked off smoking a cigarette. (Shortly afterwards she was expelled from the ATA for damaging too many aircraft and returned home to the States.) Three months later Jean Bird crashed in flames in a Hudson bomber when it stalled on
take-off from Gosport in Hampshire. Margot Gore flew there immediately from Hamble in a Fairchild taxi plane, assuming Bird was dead. She was actually in the mess having a cup of tea. Hazel Raines, from Macon, Georgia, who sailed with Ann Wood on the
Indochinois
, spun out of the cloud and into a barn in a Spitfire and escaped with a blow to the head. In April 1944, Lettice Curtis suffered a fuel failure in a Typhoon on approach to Langley. She didn't make it, landing wheels-up in a field short of the runway having somersaulted when the aircraft's giant ventral cooling scoop dug into the grass. She wriggled out of the upside-down cockpit with gashes to her head and leg and insisted that the ambulance driver take her to the Royal Canadian Hospital at Cliveden (rather than Slough hospital). There she bumped into Lady Astor, who found a doctor to stitch her up. All these pilots had to telephone Mayfair 120 in due course, but at least Pauline Gower did not have to telephone their mothers.

The surest way to avoid an accident was, of course, to refuse to fly. In certain circumstances ATA pilots were within their rights to do this. In fact, in principle, they were encouraged to stay on the ground if they had any doubts about the wisdom of taking off. ‘We pay you to be safe, not brave,' said a reminder notice above the entrance to the Hamble Ops Room. And, from the ‘Standing Orders' again:

Furthermore, each pilot was her own captain. Completion of training entitled her to a Flight Authorisation Card which went everywhere with her along with her cherished Ferry Pilot's Notes. It was her passport to the skies. It was also what she showed to any uppity RAF or WAAF operative who presumed to question her judgement or tell her what to do.

Few pilots ever had to put their cards to the test, but the incomparable Mary de Bunsen did. She once made an unscheduled
landing at Stratford-upon-Avon in a Hurricane and stayed there for eight straight days. A plume of smoke was billowing in a dark stripe down the middle of the country from the smokestacks of Wolverhampton directly over the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and de Bunsen refused to move as long as it did. To the east and west the skies were clear. Aircraft were flitting constructively back and forth. ATA pilots were stacking up hours in their logbooks. The weather people had said nothing about Stratford disappearing into a meteorological black hole. Operations at Hatfield, where de Bunsen was based, were incredulous. The RAF officers at her adopted aerodrome thought she was ‘a frightful sissy'. One of them, after a few drinks, lurched up to her in the RAF mess where she was whiling away time and said: ‘Why the hell don't you take off?' The answer was that de Bunsen loved flying even more than Bach's chromatic ‘Fantasia and Fugue', and dreaded being sacked: she had ‘bent' more than her share of Hurricanes already, and even though each accident report had exonerated her she knew that any report would count against her if she bent another. Even if it meant bunking for eight nights with secretly envious, earthbound WAAFs, she was taking her ATA minima – her 800 feet and her 2,000 yards – very seriously indeed.

There was a hitch. Pilots could be legitimately sacked for breaking weather minima, but they could also be illegitimately sacked (which amounted to the same thing) for not delivering enough aircraft. While de Bunsen was camping out at Stratford, Lois Butler, ATA pilot and wife of the chairman of De Havilland's, flew in in a De Havilland Rapide and gently told de Bunsen that underproductive pilots were being quietly let go. Men only so far, but …

De Bunsen understood. She told Butler she thought Rapides were easier to fly than Hurricanes in this sort of muck. Butler agreed, and took off into it. De Bunsen stayed put, and eventually the wind shifted to the west.

In such a fix, the solution for less admirably stubborn souls was to break the ATA's most basic rule and ‘go over the top': climb through the overcast – the concrete, as Bobby Sandoz thought of
it – and worry about landing later. The moment a pilot took this decision she unburdened her employer of responsibility for her welfare, because it was expressly forbidden. Yet everyone knew that if every pilot obeyed this rule all the time only a fraction of the planes required to defeat Hitler would be delivered. Therefore the employer routinely turned a blind eye to such rule-breaking, and the pilot routinely took it upon herself to accept responsibility for her own life.

It was a nervy business. Amy Johnson got dragged into it and died. As Diana Barnato put it: ‘She broke the rules and got caught out.' But of course Barnato broke them, too. A few months after tumbling out of the sky into the puddles at RAF Windrush, in another Spitfire, she ran into bad weather midway between Eastleigh and Cosford over the Severn Valley and had to risk passing out from hypoxia to get over it. Lucky to find a hole in the clouds exactly where she needed one, she stood the Spitfire on its nose and dived from 12,000 feet to 400 feet, levelling out immediately above Cosford. Even allowing for an element of line-shoot, it was a close-run thing.

Veronica Volkersz insisted that the ATA's supposedly strict minima were broken time and time again simply to get the work done. Even the unbending Lettice Curtis admitted breaking them – though not actually going over the top. She described the despair, disembodiment and ‘sickening frustration' of being ambushed by cloud over hilly country west of Cosford, near Wolverhampton, in a Lysander:

The risks posed to ferry pilots by the British weather were invariably life-threatening. The ATA could have mitigated them
substantially by training its pilots to fly on instruments, but chose not to. No convincing reason for this decision was ever given. Barnato suggested, not entirely facetiously, that it was to prevent pilots joyriding beyond the British Isles (and in the end, in her case, it failed even to do that). Eric Viles, a former ATA cadet on heavy twins and four-engined bombers who subsequently became a public relations officer for Concorde, said there was simply no time for blind-flying training. Others have argued that refusing to give it helped to enforce the rule against flying in bad weather. This was clearly true, but it also helped kill those who were forced to break those rules. In any case it was a circular argument: if pilots had been taught how to fly in bad weather there would have been no need to forbid it and there would have been many fewer delivery bottlenecks, especially in winter.

The more enterprising pilots understood that they were risking their necks more than was necessary, and did something about it. When Diana Barnato landed at RAF Windrush, the officer who walked her to the Nissen hut under a cape explained that the aerodrome was a blind-flying school, and he was the instructor on its Link trainer simulator. She sat down with him immediately for an hour's tuition. Freydis Leaf told me she ‘realised very early on that although they said not to do instrument flying you had to learn to do it so that when you got into cloud, you could just turn round and get out of it'. Whenever she found herself stuck out at an RAF station she would go in search of its simulator. ‘And you know the officer in charge was generally delighted to give me an hour's training. ‘One well-known senior woman pilot was shocked, after the war, to learn of such brazen initiative.

There is a loyal consensus among most ATA veterans that their training was second to none. It was certainly remarkable as far as it went. Never before (to adapt Churchill) had such an eclectic crew of civilians flown so many different types of aircraft in such trying circumstances with so few mishaps, all things considered.
The Times
' aeronautical correspondent likened the achievement to 'taking a bunch of suburban motorists and, after a month or two's
practice, turning them loose at Brooklands to discover that they can equal the professionals at their game'. He was right. But the failure to teach pilots how to save their own lives simply by using the information on the instrument panels in front of them was egregious and pointless. At the Aeroclub de Santiago, far from the English reunions and obituary desks where the loyal consensus was forged, Margot Duhalde called this failure ‘criminal'.

One of its victims was a friend of Duhalde's called Honor Salmon. She was the granddaughter of the inventor of shorthand, Sir Isaac Pitman, and had not been married long when she flew into a hill near her parents' home on the Wiltshire Downs. It happened on 19 April 1943. A cold front had been forecast to arrive from the west in the late afternoon but it was over the Cotswolds by mid-morning, a wall of cloud and rain moving steadily across the country like a giant automatic car wash.

Salmon was supposed to be delivering an Airspeed Oxford to Colerne, the same type of aircraft that carried Amy Johnson on her last flight from Squires Gate two years earlier. On the same route and the same day, Veronica Volkersz was assigned a rare Mark XII Spitfire – the very latest thoroughbred from the Super-marine stable, with a snarling 2,035-horsepowered Griffon engine that could pull it along at 435 mph. Volkersz flew cautiously and turned back as soon as she ran into the front. Salmon was less experienced and possibly felt less vulnerable in the slower, roomier plane. Next to the rollercoaster Spitfire her Oxford was a bus, and famously dependable. Flying directly into the oncoming front rather than with it or along it, she would have known it couldn't last forever. Moreover, she may have thought she could wriggle through under the worst of the weather since she knew those particular hills so well. She hit one of them near Devizes and was killed instantly. She had been a team player, not a prima donna, and was never more noticed than when Margot Gore called everyone together on the Tannoy to tell them she was dead.

Six pilots from Hamble attended the funeral, Volkersz among them. Honor's mother asked them to share out the possessions
left in her locker between her fellow pilots. ‘After the ceremony we went back to the Pitmans' house, where refreshments had been prepared,' Veronica wrote. ‘Trying desperately to smile, Honor's mother told us: “I do want this to be a jolly funeral, for I know Honor would like it that way.” The gallantry of those words haunted me for many days.'

But it could only be for days. Quiet, kindly Honor Isabel Pomeroy Salmon had her name rubbed off the board at Hamble as the still-living had to get on with the war, still untrained on instruments.

Prince Chirasakti of Siam was another casualty of the British weather and the unspoken agreement that pilots would keep flying, edging into it, until they started getting killed. So were First Officers Ronald Porter and Alexander Scott. They took off from Kirkbride on 15 March 1942 in priority Spitfires for Prestwick under cloud at 200 feet and slammed into the first mountains they came to on the north side of the Solway Firth. Such was the fate of perhaps half the 170 ATA pilots of both sexes who were killed while flying during the war.

A few others died because of pilot error: their own or that of a taxi pilot. Others were victims of catastrophic mechanical failure resulting from combat damage, hasty or botched repairs or the sort of freak malfunction that the law of averages ensured was never more than a few engine beats from sending even the most careful pilot into a sickening, terminal spin.

Irene Arkless, ‘the flying schoolgirl of Carlisle', was a proud pre-war pupil of the Border Counties Flying Club. She applied to join the ATA after her fiancé, Flight Lieutenant Thomas Lockyer of Chorley, Lancashire, had been shot down over Germany on a bombing raid. On being accepted, Arkless told her local paper she planned to fly over there and ‘bring him home'. But she stalled and crashed in flames near Cambridge three days into 1943. She was hauled alive from the wreckage of her aircraft with severe shock, a badly broken femur and a fractured skull. She died later from her injuries.

Dora Lang died in a Mosquito in March 1944, with Janet Harrington, one of the ATA's four female flight engineers. The aircraft reared up, flipped onto its back and hit the ground seconds before what should have been a routine landing at Lasham in Hampshire. She may have lost one of the two engines and, with only twenty feet between her and the runway, failed to control the other. She may simply have stalled. The accident report was inconclusive, not least because the explosion on impact destroyed much of the evidence.

In the strange case of Mary Nicholson the accident report stated exactly what happened:

In lay language, she lost her propeller; it was recovered several miles away. The accident happened around 5 p.m. on 22 May 1943 near the village of Littleworth in rolling Staffordshire farmland, about fifteen miles south of Stoke-on-Trent.

The report was posted on a noticeboard at Hamble a few days later. It was the first detailed information Bobby Sandoz gleaned on the death of her friend and fellow veteran of the good ship
Mosdale
. But the few cold lines about pinion wheels and reduction gear failed to satisfy her. When her next leave came due, Sandoz went to Littleworth to find out more.