In the middle of the cocktail party the ship received an order to change course because of submarine activity, though the captain took three hours to find the code book to work out which way he was supposed to turn. Otherwise, the U-boats left the Indochinois alone. Indeed, they spared all the ships carrying Cochran’s girls.
By the end of the voyage Dorothy Furey had become engaged to one of her fellow passengers – chiefly, she claimed, to keep the others at bay. ‘He wasn’t handsome,’ she said of Lieutenant Richard Bragg, a Canadian and the first of her four husbands, ‘but he was sweet and charming and well-educated and of all the men who would queue up to see who would take me to dinner, Rick did it the most times. And I got to liking him.’ They were married a month later.
On the Mosdale Roberta Sandoz – already engaged – romanced no-one, and neither was she romanced. But she did spend a night playing poker with Emily Chapin under a lifeboat, fearful that they might have to use it as their ship lurched and zigzagged across the ocean without explanation. She found out later that the point of the manoeuvres had been to avoid a convoy, not a U-boat; the Norwegians preferred to sail alone. The Mosdale was also carrying Mary Nicholson, of Greensboro, North Carolina, formerly Jackie Cochran’s most trusted personal secretary and now her final ATA recruit. The ship was last of the five that brought Cochran’s pilots from America. It arrived off Liverpool at dawn on 10 August, to be guided into port through thick fog along an avenue of upended wrecks. A breakfast of oily yellow kippers awaited the young women at the Adelphi Hotel.
After more than a year of planning and an exceptionally good few months for the bar at the Mount Royal Hotel in Montreal, Team Cochran had landed.
13
Over Here
Several months after disembarking at Liverpool – possibly on 27 March 1943, but she was coy about it in her letters home out of respect for the censors – Ann Wood took off from Castle Bromwich in a Spitfire. By this time she had been posted to No. 6 Ferry Pool at Ratcliffe Hall in Leicestershire, a friendly, popular place owned by Sir Lindsay Everard, a brewing magnate and Conservative MP.
No. 6 Pool had been set up expressly to clear the great Castle Bromwich factory of its Spitfires before they could be bombed. Sir Lindsay was passionately air-minded. He had relinquished the use of his private aerodrome together with many of its outbuildings to the ATA for the duration of the war, and Ann was billeted above his eight-car garage in digs originally intended for visiting cricketers. She made good friends at Ratcliffe, and among them was Johnnie Jordan, the wealthy and strong-willed grandson of the Bedfordshire manufacturer of breakfast cereals.
Wood and Jordan would remain friends until their deaths within weeks of each other sixty-three years later, but even after that other ATA veterans were at pains to stress that Johnnie’s flying style did not reflect that of his comrades. Most ATA types took their mission of delivering planes intact extremely seriously. Jordan was different. Though skilled as a pilot, he was utterly undisciplined. Having chafed at his grandfather’s draconian way of running the family business, he had left the firm. He was later court-martialled by the RAF for ‘borrowing’ a Swordfish biplane in order to escape from his bomber squadron’s base, to which he had been confined for hedge-hopping.
The ATA gave him much greater freedom ‘to express himself in the air’ – and to lead other pilots astray. He loved the feel of his weight on his shoulder straps and blood rushing to his head so much that he once spent ten minutes inverted in a Spitfire before force-landing it at Edgefield when its engine failed. At Castle Bromwich it was said that Alex Henshaw, the test pilot, liked to hold his aircraft down until it gained enough speed to pull up into a half loop that left him upside down but above the barrage balloons and heading in the opposite direction. Henshaw denied the story, but the more exuberant Ratcliffe pilots liked to emulate what they had heard about him and Jordan surely would not have missed the opportunity. (Wood was not averse to the occasional loop, either. ‘I always believed that aerobatics was a good way to familiarise yourself with your aircraft,’ she told me, and she once lost all power while upside-down in a Miles Magister. Like Jordan at Edgefield, she told no-one about the inversion and was commended for not losing the plane.)
Jordan was with Ann at Castle Bromwich that spring day in 1943, in another Spitfire; so too was a third pilot whom Wood remembered as Don Spain, although his real name was probably Leslie Swain. They took off in quick succession into a corridor of barrage balloons that dead-ended a mile or two beyond the runway.
Initially Wood followed normal ATA procedure, executing a smart 180-degree turn before climbing out of reach of the balloons. All three Spitfires then turned south towards Bristol, heading, as far as Wood knew, for the ATA’s No. 2 Ferry Pool at Whitchurch. ‘We didn’t have any radio so we couldn’t communicate with one another, but before we took off we organised that we would fly in line,’ Wood recalled.
I was to be tail-end Charlie and Johnnie was number one and Don was number two, and of course when we get down near to Bristol and we see the Severn Johnnie goes right down on top of the river and you know very well what he’s about to do, and of course it happened to be low tide and there was lots of space. When I tried it [again] on my own a while later it happened to be high tide, and that just shows what kind of head I didn’t use.
The Severn Railway Bridge, with its twenty-one arched spans of girders, each a little over seventy feet wide and supported by stone pillars and giant lengths of iron pipe, was a deeply functional piece of engineering. After two barges collided with it and exploded in 1960 it was torn down, but until then its plodding, unambitious structure made it seem closer to the water than it really was. The sight of three Spitfires diving as if to strafe it, then choosing their span and skimming under it at 300 mph, would have been thrilling enough, especially if seen from above by the good people on the 9.15 from Cardiff to Paddington. But most would have found it hard to believe that the third aircraft was being flown by a rangy New England society gal and graduate of D’Youville College who was also a qualified flying instructor. And their disbelief would have turned to alarm had they seen Ann’s second, solo run. Between low and high tide the water level under the bridge rose by more than 30 feet – the second-largest differential in the world after Canada’s Bay of Fundy. And here was the same young woman, strapped legally and officially into one of His Majesty’s deadliest warplanes, barrelling down once more towards the surface of the River Severn so that she could pull off on her own the stunt that she had hitherto performed only as tail-end Charlie to two ungovernable fly boys who’d thought it funny to lead her into it without telling her; and finding, too late, in a moment of quiet terror, that she had 30 foot less clearance than the first time around. Truly she would have a line to shoot if she ever made it back to Ratcliffe alive.
In later years, when Jordan told his part of the story, he would say it transpired further south under the Clifton Suspension Bridge. He probably did fly under this bridge, and possibly more than once: it was clearly visible from the Whitchurch aerodrome, leaping the Avon Gorge as impudently as ever between Brunel’s stubby white towers. It was a magnet for daredevils throughout the war and after, until Flight Lieutenant John Crossley of the RAF’s 501 Squadron made the last confirmed fly-through one February morning in 1957, hurtling under the span at 450 mph in a Vampire jet and slamming into Leigh Woods on the south side of the gorge when he failed to get his nose up in time. The aircraft burned for two hours; afterwards only a smouldering clearing in the steeply sloping trees remained. But the Avon gorge is so deep that the level of the tide would have made little difference to Ann Wood’s clearance on her second run. And in any case, when shown a photograph of the Clifton bridge in her retirement she said confidently, ‘that’s not my bridge’.
It was only after her death that I learned from Chris Witts, author of Disasters on the Severn, that RAF Spitfire pilots made such a habit of buzzing the railway bridge that a policeman had to be stationed on
the front lawn of the Severn Hotel on the Lydney side to take down their call signs. Whichever bridge was ‘hers’, when asked why she went under it a second time, Ann replied that it was because the first had been ‘grand fun’.
Ann Wood had her disagreements with the English, with their ways of eating and relating to each other and to Americans, and with their approach to fighting wars. ‘I honestly believe,’ she wrote in her diary in September 1942, ‘that if there is an inconvenient or difficult way of doing something, the English will think of it.’ But on the whole she kept such views to herself and adapted easily to life on the edge of war.
Dorothy Bragg (née Furey) found the whole process harder. She was so incensed at having to sit through a talk on her arrival in London on how she would be expected to behave that she nearly turned straight round and sailed for home. And when she and the other American women from the Beaver Hill finally reached the nerve centre of the ATA at White Waltham, they had to run a gauntlet of chilly curiosity from the men there.
Besides the three one-armed First World War veterans and ‘Doc’ Barbour, the medic who liked people to strip for their physicals, there was First Officer Stefan Karpeles Schenker, an exiled Austrian businessman who had been interned on the Isle of Man at the start of the war until his bona fides could be established; First Officer Gwynn Johns, a world champion parachutist; Flight Captain Jim Mollison, the moody and reckless former husband of Amy Johnson; and Chief Supply Officer Captain F. Ellam, who had written in all seriousness to the Ministry of Aircraft Production seeking funds for two elephants being sold off by a circus in Horley. (The idea was to use them to pull aircraft stuck in mud. A budget was agreed and plans were made to enrol the circus mahout as a uniformed member of the ATA, but the purchase was cancelled at the last minute because of fears that the elephants might panic during an air raid.)
The place was ‘an utter madhouse’, Wood decided later. In fact it was a model of flexible management and improvisational genius, even if it sometimes felt like a boarding school for grown men. Before wondering about elephants – but after being bombed with no warning or defences in the first summer of the war – the ferry pool commanders had authorised the construction of a ‘tank’. It consisted of a truck chassis, armour-plating of welded scrap iron and the gun turret from a decommissioned Avro Anson.
White Waltham was a hive of functional and usually amiable eccentrics, but they could be intimidating. Their preconception of American womanhood had been formed almost entirely by Hollywood and it was ‘all blonde and glamour, all singy and dancy’, according to Ops Officer Alison King. When the time came to see whether the real thing measured up, the men did little to disguise their curiosity.
Virginia Farr from New Jersey said she would never forget her arrival at the airfield: ‘the walk past the windows filled with silent male faces, all dropping as they saw the travel-stained girls – you could feel their thoughts,’ she said; ‘why, one’s fat, one’s definitely strapping – no glamour, no glamour anywhere’. In a half-hearted show of solidarity, King noted that ‘actually, they were all good-looking girls, each in her own way, but when you expect Hollywood and you get instead ordinary flesh and blood. Well!’.
If ever the new arrivals needed a mother hen, it was now, and Jackie Cochran had assigned herself the role. She had rented a Chelsea apartment in which to entertain high-ranking members of General Eisenhower’s staff, but also to show her recruits that she cared about their welfare. She summoned each of them to dinner on their first two days’ leave – six weeks into their contracts – even if by that time they had settled in and wanted nothing more to do with her. For Dorothy Bragg it would have been comic had it not also been embarrassing: Cochran, after all, had faked a job application on her behalf. But Ann Wood was always loyal to Jackie and was repaid with frequent invitations which were worth accepting if only because they meant unrationed food and honest-to-goodness American company.
‘Bobby’ Sandoz, likewise, was appreciative. Her crossing on the Mosdale had been nervewracking; her first English billet, with a hard-pressed couple in Luton, depressing. And then she received the news that her fiancé, her college sweetheart of three years, had been listed as missing in action in the Pacific. When Cochran opened the door to her at her Chelsea apartment, Sandoz dissolved in tears: ‘Jackie said something like “What the hell is the matter with you”,’ Sandoz recalled, ‘and I lost it. I just lost it.’
Cochran took her in and cooked her southern fried chicken and told her everything would be all right, and in the end it was. Sandoz was ‘scared to death most of the time’ by the sheer power of the aircraft she had to fly, but she was skilled enough to tame them. Sometimes the gaucheries of her fellow Americans left her feeling mortified, but she was no killjoy. After her fiancé’s ‘missing in action’ turned out to mean ‘killed’ she mourned him in the breaks between flying, then let a British officer whom she had met in a pub in Mayfair pursue her all the way to a respectable London altar.
It was Cochran herself who never found her feet in England. She always maintained that she left on her own terms to lead her own all-American legion of uniformed airwomen. But even her staunchest supporters admit the fuller story of her time in London is one of a self-taught bull in a china shop of over-educated mandarins. According to Sandoz, she was let down by her ‘lack of background’. She was also let down by Brits who took thin-lipped delight in humiliating her.
Cochran was always on edge in London. Ann Wood realised this on her very first visit to White Waltham. She was overdue there herself: the ATA had failed to send anyone to Liverpool to meet the Indochinois, which Wood had taken as a signal that she was free to plan her own itinerary through the great blacked-out capital of free Europe about which she had read so much. Her fellow recruits, at Helen Harrison’s suggestion, checked into the Savoy. Wood opted for the Grosvenor House, and then went sightseeing. She took in Big Ben and a bombsite or two before making her own way to the aerodrome, where she found ‘La Cochran trés gaie in uniform’, but agitated. Cochran was, firstly, ‘greatly distressed that we were not met at Liverpool,’ Wood wrote in her diary; ‘then embarrassed on my behalf because I wasn’t with the other gals and she thought I was in London sobering up. But as I have quickly gathered she is conversationally and mentally in a dither all of the time.’
Cochran had been in even more of a dither with the first group’s arrival, over the vexed question of Dr Barbour’s nude physicals. None of the British women had objected to stripping for him. But Cochran did, so vehemently that Barbour was forced to back down. She won that fight, but lost any hope of earning the respect of the ATA rank and file by failing to ferry any aircraft herself. She awarded herself the rank of flight captain and the right to wear the ATA uniform, but never submitted herself to a flight test even with the indulgent Captain MacMillan. Dorothy Bragg believed this was because she couldn’t navigate from a map and was afraid of failing or flying into a stray hill. Wood insisted that ‘Jackie never intended to fly in the ATA. Her mission, strictly, was to convince the American generals that women could be used.’ But if so, she went about that mission in a way few could fathom. She would disappear to London for days at a time, then reappear at White Waltham unannounced to offer her unsolicited Pensacola dime’s worth of advice on how to run an organisation that thought it had been running itself rather well for three particularly stressful years. Wood concluded:
I think it was too bad that she wasn’t able to face up to it with Pauline [Gower] and say, ‘Look, this is why I’m here, this is what I’m not going to do. You may not like it, but there it is.’ Instead of which she remained silent on what she was up to to the extent that she was suspect. The ATA didn’t understand her. They didn’t like her. Why did she come? Why did she live so extravagantly? Why did she wear a mink coat?
She was a long way from the Coachella Valley and may have been feeling the cold; but she was also anxious to impress people at the Air Ministry, whom she visited as often as twice
a week in a borrowed Daimler with a full American colonel ‘to make sure she behaved herself a little bit’, and with Ann Wood sitting next to her in the back seat.
‘She always had a tiny dictionary in her pocketbook,’ Ann remembered, ‘and when she came out would throw it at me and say, “Annie, you went to college, look these words up for me.” And I recognised that she couldn’t look them up herself because she didn’t know the alphabet properly.’ They would practise five or six words at a time in the back of the Daimler; words the Air Ministry people had been using that she hadn’t understood. ‘And if you were with her any time subsequent to that she’d be chucking those words out all the time. She was a very fast learner.’
In July 1942, after six months in London during which US bomber squadrons based in Britain had suffered appalling losses in their daylight raids on Germany, General Arnold of the US Army Air Corps let Cochran know that he thought he might be able to use her women pilots after all. She threw a final, bittersweet dinner party for her charges, then packed her mink coat, returned the Daimler and flew at once to Washington. Thirteen years later ‘Bomber’ Harris warned in his introduction to Cochran’s autobiography that British readers would resent what it revealed about the behaviour of their own authorities, ‘who used her services and those of the American women pilots whom she brought over, and omitted to send her even so much as a thank you when she left’. The truth was that at the time, few were sad to see her go.
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 16
