Spitfire

by John Nichol

  ‘ “Yes, thank you, sir.” ’

  After years of war, Holmes was able to explore the French countryside in peace when Churchill gave him a forty-eight-hour leave pass.

  * * *

  For the women of the ATA there was no bright or glorious ending to the war; their jobs simply petered out after VE Day. As each female pilot left, she knew that she had achieved more than many others of her sex; but the ATA women knew too that their flying careers had come to an abrupt end.

  The ferrying work for Joy Lofthouse went on until September 1945. And then it simply stopped and she was out of a job. ‘For me, it was devastating. The excitement of this amazing wartime job had gone. No civilian job could possibly live up to it. I certainly didn’t intend to go back to my job at the bank.

  ‘To be perfectly honest, I wanted the war to go on as long as possible. Wartime gave many women something they’d never had: independence, earning your own money, being your own person. Once you married, everything changed dramatically. And I had no aspirations to continue flying; the men were pouring out of Bomber Command into any commercial job available. It wasn’t until the 1950s that Dan-Air had the first women on the flight deck. Commercial flying came too late for most of the ATA girls.’

  However, the ATA aviatrixes had proved that women were capable of doing ‘men only’ jobs.

  ‘We were trailblazers for women’s emancipation,’ Joy said. ‘It was the first time ever in Britain that women achieved equal pay with men. We weren’t like the Pankhurst suffragettes, but people will always be able to look back at us and say: “Look what these women did during the war.” ’

  Her sister Yvonne’s job continued until a month after the war ended. The only silver lining for the widow was that her final delivery was in the aircraft she most loved. ‘The last plane that I ever flew was a Spitfire, from Scotland down to Yorkshire. Everything was closing down by then. It really was like resigning from a job you loved, a place where there was a lot of camaraderie.

  ‘I had known flying wouldn’t lead to anything, though I would have liked to continue in aviation. But we all knew there were so many wanting to do just that. Too many people looking for too few jobs.’

  Despite the end of her career, Yvonne still cherished the experiences few others would share. ‘Sometimes, when you were landing a Spitfire at dusk you felt it was almost as if you could play with the whole world. I can only describe it as an otherworldly feeling.’

  Mary Ellis’ flying skills meant she was one of only three ATA women kept on until the organisation was wrapped up. Her last flight was something totally unexpected and a ‘first’ for British women.

  Shortly after Victory over Japan Day in August 1945, she was flown down to Moreton Valence near Gloucester, where the RAF’s brand-new Meteor jets had been tested in great secrecy. Mary had picked up a few snippets about the British jet fighter. That its twin turbojet engines were capable of an incredible 600mph, it had four 20mm cannons and had shot down a handful of V1s. It was certainly a lot faster than the Spitfire but also a lot less agile. Still, she was left speechless when the Station Commander at Moreton Valence told her she’d be ferrying a Meteor.

  ‘I’d never even seen one before, it was an entirely different type of plane,’ she said. ‘The Meteor was large and so different, with no propellers. I asked the test pilot if he could tell me anything about the plane’s flying characteristics. He said the thing to watch was the fuel consumption. “The fuel gauge goes from full to empty in thirty-five minutes,” he warned. “So you had better be on the ground in thirty minutes. And when you prepare to land, the power will mean that the aircraft will drop like a stone.” ’

  With these few words of advice, Mary set about reading the pilot notes before undertaking the 100-mile flight to Exeter to deliver 222 Squadron’s first ever jet.

  She was nervous but steeled herself with the thought that this is just another aeroplane. She had after all ferried 400 Spitfires and flown seventy-five other different aircraft types. She’d also earned the nickname the ‘Fog Flier’ because of her skill in delivering planes in atrocious weather conditions. It didn’t dawn on her that she was about to be one of the very first women in the world to fly a jet aircraft.

  Mary climbed into the cockpit then felt the plane shudder as the mighty Rolls-Royce engines thundered at the press of a starter button. Then she smiled to herself. The last time she’d delivered a ‘first of type’ plane to an RAF squadron it was a big Wellington bomber, back in 1943. The eager RAF pilots did not believe the diminutive woman had piloted the six-crew plane all by herself. Indeed, one airman had actually searched the entire plane, looking for the pilot.

  Mary opened the Meteor’s throttle and felt herself pushed back into the seat as she hurtled down the runway. ‘It was exhilarating.’ The Meteor raced through the air, down to Exeter. ‘Then I was concentrating so hard on my landing I didn’t realise until I looked down that a whole crowd of people had actually gathered around the control tower.

  ‘I landed quite safely, taxied up to dispersal close to the control tower and got out. I was amazed to see a bunch of RAF officers standing in the crowd. They were changing over from Spitfires to Meteors and this was the first Meteor jet these RAF pilots were due to fly.

  ‘They couldn’t believe that this little girl had delivered their new plane to them.’

  Mary allowed herself another smile. This time there would be no doubting that a woman had flown the new aircraft. It only had room for one.

  * * *

  The war’s denouement presented many of its other participants with new opportunities. Ray Holmes’ 541 Squadron had again been chosen by Churchill to act as King’s Messengers during the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, when Germany’s future was decided by the three victorious powers, Russia, Britain and America.

  On his first trip to Germany since the war ended, Holmes found it unnerving simply to fly with only navigation to worry about without being attacked by jets or flak.7

  ‘To land at Berlin’s main airport was even stranger. One visualised guns spewing up lead on your approach and expected a swarm of jackbooted soldiers to rush out with fixed bayonets when you jumped down from your cockpit. Instead, when I landed, I was guided by RAF ground crews to the Officers’ Mess where two very beautiful, flaxen-haired German girls were singing English songs to a grand piano they played in turn in the lounge.’

  Holmes, with .45 revolver strapped to his waist, hitched a lift into Berlin and decided to take a look at the Reich Chancellery, scene of Hitler’s last stand, with an eye for some souvenir hunting. The Russians had looted almost everything from the bunker but not quite. Holmes spotted a brass candelabra swinging from Hitler’s reception lounge and cut it down, scooping it up with a load of Nazi medals. He bundled the booty, along with some black-market German cameras and Zeiss binoculars, into his Spitfire and headed back to Benson in clear blue skies. Not far out from the airbase he was astonished to be told not to land, as visibility was nil, and divert to nearby Kidlington. He suddenly remembered this was code for customs officers being present on the base, tipped off that cameras and perfume were coming in from Germany without duty being paid.

  Over breakfast, Holmes was told that ‘the weather over Benson had now cleared’. ‘The fellows on the squadron who had entrusted me with their hoarded-up cigarette rations were anxious to see the Leicas and Contaxes (standard exchange rate 1,000 cigarettes) I had traded for them. My personal camera was a beauty, a Zeiss Ikon. This cost me 400 cigarettes and, when I took up commercial photography after the war, was one of my most successful pieces of equipment. I still treasure it for its history, with Hitler’s brass candelabra which is wired up on my hall wall.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE LAST SALUTE

  A generation had suffered horrors on a scale that none before or since have witnessed. The war’s denouement was abrupt and everyone had to readjust to ‘normal life’ in a world that had changed utterly.

  As
it always will be, the fighting was toughest for the infantryman. But in the air, a form of modern combat emerged that allowed for a swift death almost on a daily basis. The fighter plane had evolved dramatically from the biplanes of the First World War into fast, deadly objects carrying hammer blows.

  There was nowhere to hide in a dogfight – it was kill or be killed. And many pilots had to contemplate their own mortality and that of their friends not just for one day but throughout the war. The men of the RAF might return to warm, dry beds, but every morning they would wake up knowing it could be their last.

  Every man comes with a finite well of courage to surmount their fear. Some cracked up, while others, like Hugh Dundas, fought it year after year.

  Alan Peart was of the same mould. Luck had seen him through his first combat over Dieppe and he learned the necessary skills to succeed in North Africa and Italy. Courage, self-preservation, good fortune and ability had kept him alive. His astonishing efforts in keeping twenty Japanese fighters at bay in his lone Spitfire in Burma had been recognised with a DFC. He had survived the war but was on a difficult journey of readjustment to normal life after two years on intense combat operations and nearly four years away from home, having left in the middle of 1941.

  He had returned to New Zealand in February 1945 and a crowd, including his mother and young brother, had gathered in his home town of Nelson, at the northern tip of South Island, to welcome home their returning hero. When he descended from the bus they did their best not to show their disappointment.

  Dysentery and other tropical ailments had eaten away at his body, dropping his weight to eight stone. ‘My family was shocked at the sight of me – they were expecting a tall handsome RAF officer but instead got a faded man in a faded, ragged uniform, thin as a rake, only eight stone and not very communicative. My younger brother John got quite tearful. The crowd waiting to greet me were shocked and simply disappeared. This was not the image of a returning war hero they expected.’

  When he had headed off to war, his younger brother John had been a diminutive eight-year-old, but now he was almost twelve and growing into a man. He also had the sensitivity to see that Alan was in poor shape. ‘He was in a very bad state psychologically and extremely thin,’ John recalled. ‘This little, decrepit, bowed person stepped off the bus and my mother burst into tears.’

  John also found his oldest brother could become very aggressive if he was startled or felt threatened. ‘He was very on edge.’

  Alan admitted that he was in a poor condition, just dumped back home with no form of rehabilitation. ‘I think my family thought I was possibly psychotic because I was withdrawn and just wanted to sleep and to rest. My parents tried to give me space and quiet but I found I couldn’t relate to people for a long time – perhaps years. I found it difficult to trust people; as I had spent so much time in hostile territory I was constantly in fear of a knife in the back.

  ‘My mother fed me my favourite meal of a wonderful roast dinner. Something I’d been dreaming about for years. But because of the terrible food we’d had for so long, crawling with insects and bugs, I’d got into the habit of pulling everything apart and sorting through pieces, inspecting every mouthful for intruders. I still did this and my mother was not best pleased. After just a couple of mouthfuls I was sick. I was smoking heavily and lit a cigarette in the middle of a church service, which didn’t go down well!’

  In his father, Alan found someone to talk to about the shared experiences of the fighting man. Cuthbert Peart had served as a sapper in the horrific trench warfare of WWI, surviving being gassed and blown up. Alan talked with his father for the first time about the horrors they had both seen and their shared acquaintance with near-death experiences. Despite his family’s support, Alan took a long time to return to normality.

  ‘I had left New Zealand as a boy and returned a man. But I was a man with problems. I had lived among other men facing fear and death on an almost daily basis and now I had to simply go back to normal. It took me a long time to get back to normal.’ Peart had been away from home for almost four years, experiencing sights and emotions beyond the understanding of those back home. He had also had very little contact with his family as his squadron moved around the various battlefields, receiving just a dozen letters.

  Shortly before the war had ended, Peart was posted back to flying duties in New Zealand. He was co-piloting a Hudson bomber over the Cook Strait to North Island when news of Germany’s capitulation arrived. I thought to myself, I’ve made it. I am alive. I have survived.1

  ‘Dancing, drinking and cavorting around as others were doing just didn’t seem to me to fit the situation. I thought about all the chaps who had been killed and about my own very narrow escapes and just wanted to be alone. I had behind me over two years of operational activity without any but very short rests, somewhere between sixty and seventy individual combats with enemy aircraft, hundreds of sorties involving strafing of enemy positions and many episodes of being bombed and strafed, as well as surviving shocking flying and living conditions.’

  Peart asked to be demobilised. ‘I did my duty to the best of my ability – that’s all. I have no idea why I survived and others didn’t. I was blessed with superb eyesight, fast reactions, and perhaps I was a better pilot than I thought I was at the time. And I was lucky.

  ‘I found it hard to fit into a civilian way of life, to play a normal part in day-to-day social interactions. I was absorbed with watching my back and felt uncomfortable with having anyone out of sight behind me. It took me a long time to adjust to the safer environment of my home country.’

  Getting back to ‘normality’ was not helped by the feeling that the authorities cared little for his squadron’s contribution to the war after it was disbanded in early 1945. Despite having fought in Europe, Africa and the Far East, the men of 81 Squadron were simply posted individually to different locations with little fanfare or thanks.

  ‘There were no functions or parties,’ Peart recalled. ‘It was a terrific anticlimax. After years of operational service with 81 Squadron we were “given the boot”.

  ‘I was saddened by how it ended and shocked that my great mates, men I’d fought alongside and seen other friends die with, simply disappeared. It was a brutal ending to the war. We’d fought the war and now we were no longer needed – the powers that be didn’t seem to be concerned about us at all. I remember that my parachute that I flew with was never checked or looked at from the time I left Britain to the time I got back to New Zealand. Nothing.

  ‘There seemed to be no recognition of our service at all – many friends had been through the mill and given great service with huge courage but decorations were few and far between.

  ‘We had given so much and I felt as though we’d just been kicked out.’

  As many of those who had been affected by the war had to do, Peart put the sadness and trauma of the war years aside, immersing himself in a civil engineering degree. He then went on to oversee major New Zealand construction works, building dams, motorways and airports, before he retired to Hamilton with a legacy of three children and seven grandchildren. Speaking from his retirement home, he was sanguine about his experiences, telling me, ‘I thank the Lord for an exciting and very fulfilling life.’

  * * *

  In the summer of 1945, the future looked bright for Diana Barnato Walker. After years of hardship and danger ferrying aircraft in the ATA, she could look forward with some satisfaction to enjoying her wealth and starting a family with her RAF husband Derek Walker.

  They hoped to look back with mirth as they told their children of the days they flew Spitfires together over wartime Europe. Their children would learn too of their mother’s love of the Spitfire, born from delivering 260 of them to airfields across Britain, and that she was one of only 166 women pilots in the ATA. Diana had had a good war.

  A few months after the war’s end, the Walkers had their first and last marital row. Derek had elected to remain in the RAF and been given a Wi
ng Commander’s job. He flew his Mustang to Langley aerodrome, near Slough, and went to Diana’s glamorous family home, Ridgemead House in Surrey, to tell her the news, adding that they’d be living in a converted Nissen hut.

  Noticing her reaction, Derek was quick to qualify his remark. ‘We’ll only live in the Nissen until a permanent home is available, just a few months before they find us RAF married quarters . . .’

  After five years of shivering in drab Nissen huts Diana was not impressed. She had been looking forward to enjoying the luxury of Ridgemead and their comfortable River House flat in London. ‘The sudden realisation came over me that I would now have to cut my roots entirely in order to live the life of a serving officer’s wife, living permanently on one RAF station or another. And our first home was not going to be even a Wing Commander’s married quarters but a converted Nissen hut!’

  She shivered. And it was winter. Diana thought living in a Nissen hut was a lousy idea. Her mind went back to the thin, rounded, prefabricated steel structures with the corrugated iron roof in which she’d half-frozen to death during the war.

  But it was a converted Nissen hut, Derek vainly explained. It would be quite comfortable.

  Diana sat with her arms folded, pouting. She didn’t want to live in any sort of Nissen hut, no matter how well it might be converted. A Nissen hut, to her mind, was still a Nissen hut and she’d had ‘five stinking years of them’.

  Derek went to say something in reply but remained silent. He looked extremely upset and Diana wondered if it was because he thought she didn’t want to live with him any more.

  Later that evening Diana listened as Derek explained that the Nissen was beautifully fixed and ready for them to move in.

  By the next morning the couple had made up. And Diana agreed to move into the Nissen hut, as long as he gave her time to organise everything. Then they kissed goodbye. She treasured the look of gratitude and love Derek gave her. Then he set off for Langley to fly his Mustang back to base.