Spitfire Women of World War II

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Spitfire Women of World War II Page 10

by Whittell, Giles


  In this version, from the Birmingham Mail, the lead pilot then hurtled past the the dauntless women, forty yards from their wing-tip but heading already in the opposite direction and waving frantically at them to follow him,

  but on arrival at Moshi he found they had not done so. Since then, nothing … search is taking place in a wide area of plain … Jungle infested with big game … country that swarms with lions, elephants and buffalo … every Government post and railway station warned … appeals broadcast from Nairobi wireless.

  Overnight, in Fleet Street, Nairobi and along the thousands of miles of fizzing telegraph wires between them, all hell broke loose. For any ‘special correspondent’ brave enough to head out into the bush south of Nairobi, or, better, to pretend he had, there would be scoops aplenty. By the morning of the 17th, the Daily Mail had the stricken Moth upside down, a complete wreck and definitely ‘Among Lions’ – the aircraft having been spotted in ‘desolate wilds’ just forty miles from Nairobi by a Captain Tanner of the Rhodesian Aviation Company. That night, the London Evening Standard put the pilots – almost anticlimactically – in a Nairobi nursing home where they were said to be ‘very cheerful’.

  At least Sale-Barker had a badly gashed head. Page, with a compound fracture to the leg, had been carried by her rescuers through two miles of rough scrub to a waiting aircraft on a stretcher improvised from a section of the wrecked plane’s wing. The rescue plane had flown her to Nairobi and landed ‘by the light of flares’.

  The Express had been biding its time – but not wasting it. The following morning it surpassed itself, and the competition, with an eyewitness exclusive that occupied most of the inside front page. It was the pilots’ ‘Own Story of Their Jungle Ordeal’; it told of ‘Food and Water Exhausted’ and a ‘Poison Arrow Threat’; of the Moth flying smack into a hillside and somersaulting to a halt in the dark; of the ‘notorious Lions’ only a mile away. And above it all, the headline: ‘Injured Girl Flyers Send lipstick SOS.’

  According to the Express, after two hideously painful nights without food, water or human contact, Miss Sale-Barker spotted a Masai herdsman who was so alarmed by this pale apparition that he stopped her approach by threatening to use his bow and arrow.

  Eventually by signs Miss Barker made him understand their plight, and by the gift of a flying coat, which he afterwards wore in the rescue operations, she induced him to agree to walk 50 miles to Nairobi with her appeal for help, which she wrote with a lipstick.

  There followed detailed descriptions purportedly from Sale-Barker herself of trying frantically to fly on instruments alone through thickening mist, of being frightened to death, sleepless from pain and terror and ‘thrilled by the sight of the native’, only to have her joy snatched away when, ‘at the sound of our cries, he threatened me with his bow and poisoned arrow, then turned on his heels and fled’.

  ‘Desperately,’ she was quoted as saying, ‘I leaped in pursuit …’.

  Afterwards, Sale-Barker disavowed almost every detail of the Express’s ‘scoop’. There had been no interview, she told Aeroplane magazine, no somersault, no about-turn by a mail plane, no poison arrow threat and no ‘notorious Lions’. Puffed up by its own mini-scoop six months after the event, the Aeroplane concluded that ‘the British press at home and in Africa behaved disgracefully over the whole affair. Apparently the newspaper people were unable to understand that two young English gentlewomen might like to make a tour by air without publicity or self-advertisement.’

  Perhaps. And yet the disavowal itself does not ring quite true. Page and Sale-Barker did crash, in the dark, in zero visibility, having lost sight of another plane they had been following. They did suffer grave injuries and a grim night in the bush. There may even have been lions around. On waking, they did meet a Masai herdsman, and Sale-Barker did write out for him, in bright red lipstick, the SOS that saved their lives. ‘Please come and fetch us,’ it implored whoever read it. ‘We have had an air crash AND ARE HURT.’ It hangs today in the family home of Lord James Douglas-Hamilton, Sale-Barker’s nephew, a few miles east of Edinburgh.

  The pilots recuperated in Nairobi. On their return to Europe by boat the racing at Schilthorn was over. But the snow was still worth a visit – the giant cliffs separating Lauterbrunnen in the valley floor from Mürren on the alp above provided some protection from the press. Sale-Barker went there to readjust to society and to mourn Lord Knebworth, who had been killed in her absence. Her eventual return to England in May 1933 was written up by the ‘Talk of London’ columnist in the Daily Express:

  She is slender. Her face is ethereal. She has a quiet voice. She looks unadventurous. She is extremely modest about her achievements … Yet she is physically one of the most courageous women I know. It is worth going to Switzerland simply to see her choose the most direct line down a steep hill and ‘take it straight’.

  Wendy was a ‘name’, whether she liked it or not. She also had style, and a marked preference for plus-fours and puttees over a full-length trousers on the slopes. Inevitably, the build-up to the next ski season found her featured in full-page advertisements in the Tatler for Fortnum & Mason’s latest skiwear: Sale-Barker is pictured standing on artificial snow, most of her face in a shadow cast by her thick blonde hair.

  Her sartorial flair never left her. When the time came to be measured for her ATA uniform, in June 1940, Sale-Barker shunned Austin Reed, went to her own tailor in Savile Row and stipulated a scarlet satin lining for her jacket. It was a characteristic flash of colour, wisely hidden. For the women of the ATA still had to prove to the RAF, and men in general, that they were serious about flying.

  8

  ‘We LIKE You In Your Harness!’

  The spring of 1940 was bitterly cold, which made it an ordeal for the First Eight in their Tiger Moths. It was also a particularly anxious time for Pauline Gower, because by no means all the publicity generated by the Hatfield photo opportunity of 10 January had been as helpful as she had hoped.

  It made no difference that the women pilots were not, at this point, to be allowed anywhere near frontline operational aircraft. The Moths were RAF machines, and the news that women would be flying them spread fast. It spread outward from the Hatfield aerodrome, then started bouncing back again. On 17 January 1940, a week after the chilly photocall, the Nazi propagandist William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, read out the gist of the Daily Express’s report on the day over the wireless from Hamburg. He was still trying to dissuade the British from fighting at all, and he picked up on the money angle. He quoted an envious RAF man as saying the ATA girls would be getting £8 a week, and mocked this as ‘a novel plan for getting back some of the money the fathers and husbands of these young ladies have paid, and will pay as taxpayers to the Government for this war’. Nor did he let the young ladies off the hook. He called them unnatural and decadent, and Goebbels himself pitched in, calling them ‘perverted’.

  To begin with, plenty of Brits were inclined to agree. Taking their cue from Aeroplane’s flatulent editorial blast against women who fancied themselves as bomber pilots when they lacked ‘the intelligence to scrub the floor’, readers let rip in numbers. ‘Someone has erred grievously … The present ATA is nothing more than a tea party – yess’r and they are getting paid for drinking tea.’ ‘I am absolutely disgusted … When will the RAF realise that all the good work they are doing is being spoiled by this contemptible lot of women?’ They were ‘overpaid show-offs’, mere imitators of the true titans of aviation. The National Men’s Defence League agitated for the question of women pilots encroaching on men’s work to be discussed in Parliament.

  It did not make Pauline Gower’s life any easier that her brave young flyers were, in fact, earning substantially more than many RAF pilots. Junior flying officers conducting operational sorties over northern France were earning the princely sum of £4, 7 shillings and sixpence a week. The ATA women were on £6. This was less than Lord Haw-Haw claimed, 20 per cent less than
their own male colleagues were paid – as per Treasury rules – and less than Americans of either gender would receive as of 1942. But it still seemed an awful lot to new RAF recruits and to middle-aged men casting about in vain for moderately exciting war work, especially when most of the women to whom it was being paid seemed to be the type who received aeroplanes from their fathers as gifts.

  Gower appeared to understand this. ‘You never know,’ she told one reporter, ‘it might cause ill-feeling with men in the RAF or other services if how much we receive is made public.’ But of course it was made public, and in the meantime the initial headlines after the Hatfield event seemed to have been calculated to irritate the air force. They had enthused about ‘Ace Girl Pilots’ and fantasised about girls ‘out to show the RAF’ in ‘350 mph fighters’. To top them all there was a photograph taken from behind one of the Eight, a parachute swinging against her bottom as she walked away, captioned: ‘How d’ye like the togs, girls?’

  The Sketch’s answer was: ‘We LIKE you in your harness, and the bustle which is a parachute. We like your air. In fact, we LIKE you flighty!’

  With coverage like this there was, for a few months, a real risk of the RAF running out of patience with the whole idea of women in their planes. Never mind that the aircraft these women had been assigned to fly could barely manage 80 mph and that their pilots were under intense pressure to make every last landing perfect. ‘We carried an appalling burden of responsibility,’ said Rosemary Rees. ‘If one of the men broke an aeroplane it was a black [mark], of course, and much to be deplored, but after all people do occasionally break aeroplanes, don’t they? But if one of us had broken one it would immediately have been, “There, you see, we always said they couldn’t do it and they can’t.”… We dared not put a foot wrong.’

  For months none of them did. Their task was to deliver Tiger Moths from the De Havilland factory at Hatfield to RAF training stations and storage hangars. The snow did not start melting that year until April, and the delivery destinations were mainly in Scotland and Wales. Sometimes the women – and those men handed the short straw of an open cockpit – had to be lifted bodily from the aircraft, catatonic with cold after three hours in minus thirty degrees’ windchill. At No. 4 Ferry Pool at Prestwick, not yet the swaggering transatlantic terminus it would become, they would ‘warm up’ in the derelict carcass of a motor bus. In Whitchurch they used a converted wooden crate. Later there would be clever people at White Waltham and in an RAF hut on Salisbury plain to crunch the air movements data for 800 airfields and tens of thousands of planes, and provide taxi aircraft to bring the ferry pilots home at the end of a day’s work. But that numbing winter, and for most of the following one, standard procedure was to trundle south on the freezing night sleeper to St Pancras in time to do it all again next day. Occasionally berths were available in the sleeper carriages, in which case the ATA would foot the bill. But just as often ferry pilots would spend their nights sitting on their parachutes in the corridor. When the trains were that full, Lettice Curtis preferred to climb up and stretch out in the luggage rack.

  The women were, at least, allowed to dress appropriately. D’Erlanger had initially argued that they should fly in their official uniform of jackets, skirts and black silk stockings. (According to Rees, he simply disliked the sight of women in trousers.) Gower pointed out that this would not only be unbearably cold in winter, but immodest. Pop relented. As long as they changed immediately on landing, the women could fly in trousers or Sidcot suits, depending on the weather. Rees felt the cold particularly badly and kept it at bay with multiple layers of shawls, blankets and furs. The requirement to change on landing was eventually relaxed – though d’Erlanger continued to insist that skirts be worn on leave and in London, and women pilots continued to stuff them into their overnight bags wherever they were flying.

  For months, the First Eight performed with epic stoicism and an unblemished accident record. Pauline Gower ensured that d’Erlanger and Sir Francis Shelmerdine at the Air Ministry knew this, and they never resisted her efforts to get her pilots into newer, more powerful planes. They knew, apart from anything, that the pilots’ logbooks never lied. They were masterworks of disinterested data in old-fashioned pen and ink; the incontrovertible core evidence in the women’s case to the male maharajas of the flying establishment. If their 500-plus hard-earned hours were more than enough to put a man in a Spitfire, why could they not do the same for a woman?

  In the end there would be no answer to that. But in the summer of 1940 there were still plenty of officials, civilian as well as military, who believed, as Rees put it, that ‘“Women can’t fly fast, complicated, heavy, fighter aircraft. They are not built or conditioned for it”.’ And then, as if to prove them right, Mona Friedlander landed heavily in a Lysander.

  The Lysander was a high-winged monoplane with a 50-foot wingspan and an exceptionally low stalling speed, designed for dropping spies behind enemy lines, and, if necessary, picking them up. With a strong enough headwind it could take off in 250 yards.

  When Friedlander bounced in one and burst a tyre, a dark cloud descended over Hatfield. As the women’s perfect safety record had extended into the summer of 1940, Gower’s softly-softly approach had begun to yield dividends. Her pilots were given chits for Miles Magisters and Masters, then Percival Proctors and, eventually, low-performance operational types including the Lysander. Now one of them had been ‘bent’. Here was the told-you-so moment that they had all dreaded and the harrumphers had been waiting for. Before the women were allowed to resume flying anything heavier than a Tiger Moth, a full inquest was held into their leg strength, powers of concentration and reaction times when hit by windshear.

  The Mayfair Minx had come dangerously close to jeopardising the whole insanely daring project, the one that consumed the daydreams of every one of the pioneers, even though they spoke of it only sotto voce for fear of hexing it. Mona, alone among them, had actually dared breathe a word of it to a reporter. ‘Oh,’ she’d said airily when the Daily Mail had asked what she hoped to achieve in the ATA. ‘We’re all waiting to fly a Hurricane.’ Even she did not yet dare say ‘Spitfire’. Women in Spitfires? Given that they were still officially restricted to trainers, and then only on their best behaviour, the idea would have invited ridicule. Before women would be allowed to fly fighters of any kind, the world would have to change

  9

  ‘Brab’s Beauties’

  So much changed so quickly in 1940 that the world seemed to have surrendered to a monstrous experiment in time-lapse photography. Holland and Belgium succumbed to the blitzkrieg in six days. Italy sided with Germany. France and the Channel Islands fell. Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister and Churchill replaced him. Half a million British and French troops were evacuated from Dunkirk, and, under Emergency Regulation 18B, 763 members of the British Union of Fascists were interned.

  It was the human cost of the Battle of Britain, however, that brought forward the day when women would fly aircraft worth bragging about. In the two weeks between 20 August and 6 September 1940, Fighter Command lost 103 pilots killed and 128 seriously wounded. By mid-September its total pilot strength of 1,000 pilots at the start of the battle had been cut by a quarter, and Churchill was deeply worried that those being scrambled to replace them were ‘ardent but inexperienced pilots drawn from training units, in many cases before their full courses were complete’.

  On 15 September Churchill woke at Chequers. It was a clear morning, ‘suitable for the enemy’. He had had a special train fitted out with a bath, bed, office, radio telephone and staff quarters to enable him to visit the busiest fighter stations in Kent and Sussex on a couple of afternoons a week ‘to see for myself what was happening’ (and to raise morale). But on this particular day – a Sunday, he noted, like the day of the Battle of Waterloo – he asked to be driven to RAF Number 11 Group Headquarters at Uxbridge on account of the weather, which held the promise of unusually intense action. He was not disappointed.
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br />   The nerve centre from which Luftwaffe movements were monitored and the RAF’s response for the whole of south-east England directed comprised just a small amphitheatre, two storeys high, arranged round a giant blackboard divided into six columns, one for each of London’s main defensive fighter stations. A swarm of officers fielding incoming intelligence and issuing orders to the squadrons filled the ‘stalls’. Churchill sat in the ‘dress circle’, enthralled. The day started quietly, but by mid-morning all twenty-five squadrons under Number 11 Group’s immediate command were in the air, most for the second time after refuelling, and three more squadrons had been scrambled from Number 12 Group, based at RAF Stanmore. Wave after wave of German aircraft showed up in the Uxbridge amphitheatre as signals representing groups of 20-plus, 40-plus, 60-plus and even 80-plus aircraft.

  ‘Hitherto, I had watched in silence,’ Churchill wrote. ‘I now asked: “What other reserves had we?” “There are none,” said Air Vice Marshal Park. In an account which he wrote about it afterwards, he said that at this I “looked grave”. Well I might … the odds were great; our margins small; the stakes infinite.’

  In such circumstances, no RAF pilot could be spared for anything but combat. And no RAF commander who objected to women ferrying his aircraft could look anything but foolish, which was just as well for Pauline Gower.

  By the beginning of June 1940, a letter from Gower had lain unanswered on Pop d’Erlanger’s desk for three weeks. In it she asked what she should do with suitable women applicants whom she had turned down on orders from above but who would surely be useful if the RAF’s pilot shortage worsened any further. It is possible that the ever-chipper Gower was getting on d’Erlanger’s nerves, pushing the women thing again after her ill-advised hiring of Lady Bailey earlier in the year. More likely, Pop simply had other things on his mind as his main client, the RAF, geared up for its epic defence of the realm.

 

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