Spitfire Women of World War II (25 page)

Gower had been closely involved in the manoeuvring that led to the announcement of 18 May. In a sense, the process had begun two years earlier. She had seized on her pilots' success in switching to Hurricanes to announce at a lunch for the Royal Aeronautical Society that the theory that ‘the hand that rocks the cradle wrecks the crate' had been proved wrong. There was now no limit to the types of aircraft women could fly, she declared, and no-one contradicted her. In practice, it took until February 1943 for Lettice Curtis and Joan Hughes to be cleared to fly four-engined aircraft – but as soon as they were, the ATA's Director of Services and Personnel, the Hon. Ben Bathurst, urged on by Gower, asked Sir Stafford Cripps for more money for his women. At first Cripps said there was nothing he could do. Then Gower went to see him herself, and he changed his mind. It seems that she simply let him know that Irene Ward MP would shortly be raising the matter in the Commons. Armed with a credible threat of embarrassment for the government, Cripps went to the Treasury, which capitulated.

Was it part of the plan that Miss Ward would be able to congratulate the government on doing the right thing ‘without pressure from women members of the house'? Presumably. But whose plan was it? Who decided to involve Miss Ward? She never claimed credit for it, but it can only have been Miss Pauline Mary de Peauly Gower.

On 22 May 1943 Ann Wood visited White Waltham and noted that Gower was ‘overjoyed' at her appointment to the board of BOAC. Indeed she was, even though her new post nearly killed her: on the first of several route inspection flights that summer,
her plane, a De Havilland Fortuna airliner, disintegrated while making a forced landing on a mud flat near Shannon in the west of Ireland. Miraculously Gower was unhurt.

Feeling generous, Gower gave some of her American pilots permission to go home on leave. This was, apart from anything, good people management. The Americans' lives had been upended. Many of the British women pilots could go home for their fortnightly two days off, or at least to friends. The ‘cousins' were lucky if they had any. And apart from anything, there was only so much Britishness a gal could take at a stretch.

For Bobby Sandoz there was also some important family news to impart. Two days before heading home from Prestwick in a B-24 via Reykjavik, Newfoundland and New York, she was married to Peter Leveaux, a cavalry officer who had muscled in on a date she was not particularly enjoying with a test pilot in Mayfair the previous year. It was, she said, ‘a pretty simplified wedding'. The groom's family was there in numbers. Emily Chapin stood in for the bride's. There was no honeymoon. Instead, the new Mrs Leveaux wrapped herself up in an oversized US Army Air Corps sheepskin coat given to her by a pitying sergeant on Atlantic ferry duty, and made the 12,000 mile trek to Evans and back. She spent four days at home in the mountains north of the Grand Coulee Dam. Mainly for practical reasons, her parents regretted that their only child hadn't married an American, but they didn't belabour her with their regret. ‘My stepfather was probably afraid of crying,' Bobby said. ‘My mother just wanted to hold my hand all the time.' She would not see her daughter again for another six years.

Ann Wood took a longer break. She had learned that ‘he who yells loudest to the right people generally is heard' and she practically demanded a decent summer holiday. For the month of August 1943, she was Mrs Oliver Wood's prodigal daughter and the toast of Waldeboro, Maine. The strangeness of home and abundance after blockaded England – and of airborne Atlantic crossings when they were still so new – were obviously worth it. She shelved her diary writing, but her holiday snaps show a citizen
of the world such as that part of the world had never seen before. In most of them she wears dark slacks, a button-down white shirt and a grin. She had been through what Waldeboro and her old flying school down on the coast at Bowdoin College had only heard about on CBS. She had seen the blackout, dived for an air raid shelter, flown the Spitfire, shaken Ike's hand and buried a comrade. She left as ‘socialite' Ann Wood. Now she was First Officer. People seemed to want to reach out and touch her.

It was, she wrote to her mother on her return to England, ‘a colossal holiday', and it ended in style. Weighed down with gifts and provisions, she reported to Atlantic Ferry Command in Montreal for her return to England in the second week of September. Captain Hump Moody of Illinois, aged twenty-three, was to be her pilot in a lightly laden Mitchell fitted with long-range tanks instead of bombs in its bomb bay. Harry McKinley, of New York and the Royal Canadian Air Force, was navigator. Larson Blakely of Montreal was radio operator. Wood took the co-pilot's seat; there were no others.

Hump had the choice of a straight shot to Greenland over 1,500 miles of tundra and cold sea, or a stop half-way in Goose Bay, Labrador, where the North American continent finally slips under water. He chose Goose Bay, which turned out to be the right decision. One of the reserve tanks sprang a leak which none of Hump or Harry or Larson Blakely could fix. So they stayed the night, perplexing the local wing commander, who, four years into the war, still had no agreed procedure for feeding or accommodating females.

Next morning the leaking tank was drained. At noon the Mitchell took off again and headed north by north-east for Narssarssuaq on Greenland's ice-mangled southern tip. The plan was to stay within safety limits by taking a stopping route the whole way over; they would refuel again in Iceland. But the plan did not allow for dud weather, or dud weather reports. In Goose Bay the forecast had been for clearing skies on the far side of the Labrador Sea, but they never cleared. Instead, as darkness
approached, the cloud and sea mist over Greenland merged. After circling for an hour in search of a way through, Hump turned round with just enough fuel left to make it back to Labrador.

Ten minutes later Narssarssuaq radioed to say they were sending up a fighter escort to bring the Mitchell in. Hump turned the plane round again, committing himself and his crew to landing in Greenland or ditching in water that they had been told gave a healthy body about eighteen minutes' survival time. For a quarter of an hour, the Mitchell circled again, waiting for the escort. Then Greenland came on a wireless to say the escort plane had developed a problem and they were to return to Goose Bay.

At this point Hump ‘hit the ceiling'. Returning to Goose Bay was out of the question. Wood started scribbling frantic notes to the radio operator to tell Greenland that if they couldn't send a plane they had better send a boat because the Mitchell would have to ditch.

Narssarssuaq said it would find another plane instead, and an hour later they saw it circling below them. Then they heard it: ‘Come on chicken, tuck your wing right in behind daddy's and everything will be fine and dandy.' By this time, a second bomber had appeared off Hump's wing, also needing help. The escort led them both down to 2,000 feet and along a 30-mile fjord between rows of mountains whose glaciers could still be made out in the deepening dusk. They landed where the mountains dead-ended, ‘and boys came tearing from every nook and cranny, I thought to find out how we made out', Wood recalled. ‘But no – merely to look at a white woman. Many hadn't seen one for eighteen months.'

They had left Montreal on a Friday morning. On Saturday night they were guests of the Narssarssuaq US Army Air Corps Base Executive Officer for cocktails in his hut, proceeding to a series of enlisted men's messes dotted along the fjord for an improvised multi-venue banquet. On Sunday morning Wood attended prayers in the hospital dining room, noting afterwards that ‘most of the boys including the padre thought they were seeing a mirage and would end up in the mental clinic'. Later, a boat trip was
arranged. Ann and her new friends amused themselves by shooting the tops off icebergs and handing out cigarettes to Eskimos. Dinner that night was a no-holds-barred set piece: chuck steak, rehydrated potatoes, bread, butter, peas, pears and chocolate cake. Afterwards there was a movie. The boys knew every word of it and the mere appearance of the female form on-screen drew from them a gigantic ritual sigh. By this time Wood had been joined at Narssarssuaq by Grace Stevenson and Mary Ford, England-bound after leave in Oklahoma and Hollywood respectively. In the cinema they received a standing ovation. They were called at 3 a.m. for a dawn departure, three bombers thundering back along the fjord in single file, then spiralling slowly to 10,000 feet to clear the mountains and set course for London by way of Reykjavik. In all the journey took eight days; almost as long as the
Indochinois
had taken to sail from Montreal to Liverpool.

For Opal Anderson, the enthusiastically expressive Chicagoan, it took eight
weeks
. She was detained in Canada rather than Greenland (where the stopover by Wood, Ford and Stevenson turned out to be the last by women during the war as well as the first; Ford's captain afterwards accused the Narssarssuaq tower of grounding him for a day in order to see more of his personable passenger, and an investigation ensued). The reason for Anderson's inordinate delay was a lawsuit brought by her against the
New York Herald Tribune
for an article published in her absence on the women of the ATA. It called Opal an ex-stripper, and, without naming its source, gave the impression that the tittle-tattler had been none other than Pauline Gower.

Anderson was livid. At first she demanded a conspicuous retraction from Mrs Ogden Reid, the
Tribune
's publisher. When none was printed, she sued. The affair was still unresolved on her return to London (20 lbs heavier, she claimed, then when she left). She was ‘itching to get her hands on Pauline', she told Wood. But official business had called the new BOAC board member away, and the seething American was left to vent to sympathisers and scowl at any other Brits who looked as if they might have
questioned her honour when her back was turned. Luckily for Gower – and probably for both of them – by the time she returned from a long series of route inspection flights there were more urgent things to worry about than slander and stripping.

Hanging from the roof of the Imperial War Museum, the doodlebug looks oddly pitiful: blind, battered, unexploded and devised in desperation. Hanging in the sky over the English Channel – more precisely, pulsing towards London at 390 mph – it looked pitiless. With no-one on board, it could hit a primary school or a country ditch and not know the difference. With no-one on board, you could shoot it down and still not have the satisfaction of taking a pilot out of the war.

The V1 flying bomb was powered by a ramjet and guided by gyroscopes. It could be launched from almost anywhere and could carry nearly a tonne of high explosive from German-occupied Holland to the Isle of Dogs. It was horribly advanced; so advanced, in fact, that the Allies failed to take it seriously until it was too late. The first inkling of a secret weapons programme, had anyone been paying attention, came in a British intelligence report of November 1939 that spoke of a rocket research establishment at Peenemunde on the German Baltic coast, 150 miles east of Hamburg. In a different era, Britain would launch a war on the strength of similar (albeit flimsier) intelligence, but the first Peenemunde tip-off was ignored. The next one came in mid-1943, from agents in the field. Stripped-down, ultra-streamlined photo-reconnaissance Spitfire Mark XIs (Diana Barnato's favourite type) were sent over to photograph the complex. The RAF confirmed there was something in the pictures, and destroyed it before finding out what it was.

By this time the design of the V1 had been finalised. Testing was complete, manufacture was dispersed, and hundreds of launch sites were being built across Holland and northern France. The sites showed up in more reconnaissance pictures, usually at the edge of small patches of woodland. A few were destroyed, but most were not and the Allies still had no firm idea what they were for. Then, in November 1943, a thirty-one-year-old Constance Babington Smith of the WAAF (who would go on to write Amy Johnson's biography) was poring over the top-secret photographs when she spotted something everyone else had missed: a dark cruciform object at the lower end of a set of rising rails at one of the launch sites in Normandy. It was tiny, with less than half the wingspan of a Spitfire, but it was clearly the weapon the RAF had been hunting. Judging by its size relative to a concrete storage bunker next to the rails, and the number of similar sites seen from the air, it was reckoned the Germans had stockpiled 2,000 of them.

Destroying the V1s on the ground proved almost impossible. High-altitude bombing raids usually missed the launch sites and low-level attacks ran into deathtrap corridors of anti-aircraft guns: 771 aircrew were lost in such attacks before a single V1 had been launched in anger. By the time Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was ready to unleash the ‘buzz bomb' on southern England, the Allies had little option but to hope they could blow it out of the sky. Ground-based Bofors guns proved surprisingly effective at this, but so did the big-nosed battleaxe that was the Hawker Tempest.

Powered either by the huge 24-cylinder Napier Sabre engine or by the 18-cylinder dual radial Centaurus, Tempests packed more piston power than any other single-engined aircraft available to the RAF. Those with the Sabre engines were cooled with the aid of an enormous air scoop immediately under the propeller that made them look permanently slack-jawed, as if salivating at the prospect of an Me 109 to butcher or a lady-driven Spitfire to buzz. The Centaurus-powered version, which had given Diana ‘Wamsay' so much trouble over North London in 1943, was more elegant but not much more reliable. Neither type could match the Spitfire
for responsiveness or manoeuvrability; nor could they outrun the more powerful Spitfires at altitude for more than a few minutes at maximum manifold pressure. But they could lower down. Between sea level and 5,000 feet, in the thick air that the V1s breathed, nothing beat a Tempest.

Which is why, a few days after Keitel sent the first self-propelled missile in history over the Kent Downs towards Swan-scombe, Jackie Sorour was hauled off the tennis court at Hamble. There was a priority Tempest to pick up at Aston Down in Gloucestershire and move to RAF Newchurch in Kent. She indicated she might like to dash home and change, but was overruled by the operations officer and took off for Aston Down wearing her tennis whites and shoes (though even this was more than she had once been spotted wearing by an all-male RAF crew that pulled alongside her taxi Anson in an Airspeed Oxford as she was changing in mid-flight for a party). The outfit caused such a stir on her arrival that she slid into the Tempest's cockpit to cheers of ‘Ride her, cowboy!'.

Jackie made a show of having to refresh her memory from her Ferry Pilot's Notes, taking a copy and jamming it up against the Tempest's windscreen as she roared into the air. She saw the doodlebug, her first, when it was still some way out over the Channel, a black speck barely distinguishable from the French coast. She was flying south. It was flying north-east. The distance between them was shrinking at roughly 700 mph. Sorour assumed the growing dot was piloted and hoped it was friendly. She waggled her wings. When it failed to respond she turned directly towards it in the hope that the Tempest's great mouth might scare it off. She felt mildly insulted when it refused to change course, but it gave itself away when it streaked past her nose in black silhouette. She turned steeply and opened the throttle, feeling the wake of the ramjet buffet the Tempest's nose. Now London, not the coast, was on Sorour's horizon. Although her guns were empty, there were already stories of Tempests catching V1s and tipping them off course with their wings. But before she could close the gap, a
ball of smoke jumped from each side of the bomb's orange exhaust nozzle. Up front, next to the warhead, the miles-to-target log had counted down to zero. The smoke was from a pair of explosive bolts, locking the tail flaps into their ‘down' position. The missile dropped a wing and went into a lazy spiral dive that ended with a direct hit on an unsuspecting Surrey hamlet. Sorour circled above the burning cottages, sickened at the sight of them and vaguely aware of goose pimples on her legs. Then she forced herself to remember what she was doing, and set course for Newchurch.

This snapshot is fragile, because there were no witnesses besides Sorour herself. The scene from outside the cockpit has to be imagined, but there is no reason to doubt that it happened. Hitler had demanded an onslaught of 500 V1s a day. Keitel was launching fewer than that, but the bombardment was still almost continuous. Number 11 Group Fighter Command, tasked with destroying the buzz bombs in mid-air, was constantly demanding replacement Typhoons and Tempests for its twelve interceptor squadrons because the time between overhauls for their Sabre engines had shrunk to ten hours or less.

Given a choice of personnel for a priority delivery of a difficult aircraft, it is not surprising that Alison King, the Hamble operations officer, picked Sorour: she was a brilliant pilot. And given that she was airborne over the south coast in the first days of the offensive (when most non-operational flights were grounded) it would have been stranger not to meet a V1 than to meet one. When she did, she reacted exactly as a combat pilot would have. Had her guns been armed, she would have had as good a chance as any of the Newchurch boys of shooting down this ‘macabre parody of an aircraft' in front of her, and there is no reason to doubt she would have taken it.

In March 1944, British factories produced 2,715 new aircraft, a record for the war. The average for the first half of the year was 2,400 planes a month. When ferrying of damaged aircraft to and
from maintenance units was taken into account, this translated into 6,000 flights a month for the ATA, or 200 a day. This in turn created a sufficiently intense demand for pilots for the last major obstacle to women flying in the war to be quietly dismantled: the ATA started training them from scratch.

Anticipating a pilot shortage, the RAF had agreed the previous summer to release up to thirty WAAF officers for
ab initio
pilot training. Mainly to narrow the field of applicants, it was decreed that they had to be under thirty years old and over 5 foot 5 tall. They also had to be fit enough to pass the RAF aircrew medical, have a School Certificate or matriculation and get through interviews with the Ministry of Aircraft Production and the ATA. In principle, this meant that the war had finally levelled the social playing field in terms of class and background as well as gender. ‘The most thrilling war work undertaken by women' was now open to anyone, regardless of whom they knew or whether they had been able to afford flying lessons before the war. Two thousand women duly applied.

In practice, a little name recognition still helped. Betty Keith-Jopp, who applied in order to escape the purgatory of Voluntary Aid Detachment work on an army base on Salisbury plain, is convinced to this day that she was accepted less as a prospective pilot than as a known quantity: she was a niece of the terrifying, one-armed Stewart Keith-Jopp. June Farquhar (5 foot 5, but only in heels) was delighted to find herself being interviewed by Kitty Farrer. They knew each other well having hunted together with the Aldenham Harriers, of whom Farrer was Master. Katie Stanley Smith, on the other hand, didn't know any of her interviewers or fellow applicants and got in, entirely, unquestionably, on merit. It was after having been accepted that she realised she needed friends.

Smith's first posting was, she said, ‘the loneliest time I've ever spent'. Formerly a weather-forecaster in the WAAF, she was assigned to Hamble with instructions not to ask for ferrying work but to wait till it was offered, because the first ex-WAAF pilot to
be posted there had made a nuisance of herself. She'd been too pushy, and given the
ab initios
a bad name. And as far as Smith was concerned, orders were orders. A car would pick her up every morning from her farmhouse billet outside the village and take her to Hamble aerodrome. There she would sit tight while the ATA old hands – Gore, Rees, Duhalde, Barnato and the rest – were given their chits and lifted off to Tangmere, Hornchurch, Biggin Hill and other familiar-sounding places written into history by the Battle of Britain. Then she'd be taken home again to repeat the performance the next day.

It was not a distinction of class that Smith was up against, but of experience. She was the daughter of a London lawyer; well bred and privately schooled, with a dry, quiet humour, and precisely the inner steel required to stay in one piece in this line of work. She was just new to it. Some of the others had been turning heads on the ground and ‘dicing' (with death) in the air for four years now. Perhaps they were irritated that their prestige was being diluted, and by newcomers who were showing it was possible to go from ambulance driver or met officer to Spitfire pilot in less than a year with no previous experience. They may have even wearied at the thought of making another friend who could be killed by the next temperature inversion. They may simply have been overgrown schoolgirls welded into long-established cliques. If so, they were little different from the fighter pilots. If a new girl wanted some respect, she had to earn it.

A personal connection would have helped, but Katie Stanley Smith didn't have one. ‘Betty Keith-Jopp was accepted completely because of her uncle,' she said. ‘Betty was one of them, and she got invited out to tea and supper and a wonderful time there. But those of us who didn't have that connection were pretty much …' (at this point Katie – now Kay Hirsch – living among sagebrush and hummingbirds in northern Arizona, paused to choose between two versions of the Hamble story, one less idyllic than the other) ‘… we were pretty much ignored, to tell the honest truth'.

Another memory of her wartime flying, solider and ultimately
more significant, sits beside her in her living room. It's a propeller tip from a Fairchild taxi plane that nearly finished her off at Castle Bromwich. She had dropped three pilots there to pick up Spitfires and was following them to their delivery destination, when her engine failed at about 300 feet. Standing Orders in case of loss of power so soon after take-off were to force land straight ahead and on no account attempt to turn back to the airfield. With no engine and so little height a crash was almost inevitable. Smith's problem was that following orders and landing straight ahead would have made a crash a certainty. ‘It was all Birmingham,' she explained. ‘This was a factory airfield. There was just nothing but rooftops.' So, in one of those moments when a pilot sees death one way and a chance to save herself another, and says quietly to herself that, dammit, she'd prefer the other, she put the Fairchild into a shallow turn. ‘I did just make it. I thought I was going to hit the hangar roof, but I did get back on the airfield, and landed very heavy, broke the undercarriage, tipped over and broke a propeller.' She points to the half-yellow, half wood-coloured tip beside her chair. ‘Somebody who came out to rescue me picked that up and handed it to me.'

Katie could easily have done a Joan Marshall, or a Mary Nicholson, or a Bridget Hill and been bumped off there and then, occasioning a difficult but practised phonecall to the Stanley Smiths of Croydon from Pauline Gower in White Waltham, and a two-paragraph letter from Sir Stafford Cripps. Instead she kept her nerve and for the few seconds in her life that nerve really counted, and made all the right decisions.

When photographed in ATA uniform, Smith tended not to bother with airs or graces or awkwardness of any kind. She always looked immaculate, and somehow knowing: the quiet professional; proof that the selection procedure had been working on the day she came for interview. (‘None of us could quite figure out what they were looking for,' she said. ‘But I think you had to show self-confidence. You had to walk in the room like you knew what you were doing.')

She walked away from her crash landing shaken-up but unhurt and waited for another plane to take her home. While she was waiting a call came through from White Waltham and a colleague took the call. Could someone bring in a Fairchild 477? It was due for breaking up. The colleague told White Waltham not to worry; it had been broken up already. Which was almost the end of the story, except that there was still an accident investigation to be gone through. On account of violating Standing Orders, Third Officer Smith was held responsible.