Wood twigged immediately that the ‘so-called social bracket type’ regarded themselves as a breed apart. Their sense of entitlement and disdain for others bothered her whenever she encountered it. So did British inertia. ‘Mustn’t rush them,’ she reminded herself after visiting London’s oldest church to find that it had not been cleaned in the year and a half since being bombed. Like a true American revolutionary, she recoiled at a health system that seemed to assign private rooms to cut-glass accents and ward beds to Cockney ones, and she saw in the bombsites round St Paul’s the tragedy of lives lost, but also ‘the folly and greed of the men with money – who contrived to draw rent out of condemned slum areas that weren’t fit for animals’.
But nothing irritated her more than the idea that setbacks in the war, and in particular in North Africa before El Alamein, were somehow America’s fault.
Thursday, June 25 [1942] Beautiful Day Did a final circuit in Hart trainer with my pal Rockford, and that being OK was checked out. Then on to Maggie [Miles Magister] test with Captain Woods which consisted of turning on magnetic headings and then estimating to Broxbourne and Henlow, then a forced landing …
Stockhams had guests and man played piano beautifully and all was well until War Conversation came up – always there is tension – America blamed for anything and everything – I gather it is insinuated that had we supplied Africa better it might have held – they forget it held previously with much less, but the average citizen rarely questions their government and so must look about for the fault.
Two weeks later the news from Libya was little better. All the same, the dinner conversation at the Stockhams turned to England’s ‘glorious stand’ there. Wood kept her thoughts to herself but scribbled them down later:
Had I been English it wouldn’t have seemed glorious … for the life of me can’t help but think there is tremendous and rank incompetence in many places, and the slow old methods of everyday life make one wonder: if they do the same in battle it is little wonder that the outcomes are so adverse.
Like most of her fellow recruits, Wood went into the war and emerged from it an Anglophile. They all made English friends, though perhaps fewer than some of them expected to. In the interim, they and their hosts were treated to the same feast of contrasts that the American war machine provided with the British home front. To the Brits, the GIs may have seemed overpaid, oversexed and over here but to the Cochran girls they were wonderfully familiar. ‘Real men,’ Ann reckoned. Smart, clean, honest-to-goodness Americans. She was immensely proud to be one; proud of Mrs Biddle’s gleaming oasis on Charles Street; proud of the free donuts at a US base that she visited with a (for once) appreciative English ‘lassie’ at Bovington; proud of the gigantic magnets that only the Americans could supply to lift several tonnes of old nails out of a top-dressing of new soil applied to the White Waltham runway in 1943; proud of the Jeep that screeched to a halt beside her Spitfire when she jazzed over to another US base at Aldermaston; and proud of FDR, who John Daly assured her was every bit as splendid and farseeing as she hoped he was.
‘DON’T BE A SHOW-OFF,’ the servicemen’s instructions warned GIs. ‘The British dislike bragging.’ Wood was smart enough to know this. But others bragged, or so Bobby Sandoz thought. ‘The British couldn’t help but be offended,’ she said, and she couldn’t help but be ashamed. ‘I liked England. I liked the British and I liked the dependable, organised life, and my heart bled at the things I saw happening around me … Someone would say, “Oh, you’re an American,” and I would say “yes, can you forgive me for that?” And it would bring us to a level communication.’
One of many embarrassments Sandoz’s ATA compatriots caused her was their penchant for motorbikes. Winnie Pierce bought one and quite quickly put herself in hospital because of it. Wood thought long and hard, and then bought one too. Sandoz considered motorbikes to be bragging on wheels; few Brits could afford them, and petrol was strictly rationed even if you were unscrupulous enough to siphon the odd gallon of 100 octane out of your Spit. But to the others, motorbikes meant freedom from clanking, freezing trains and ever-stopping buses, and excitement when the Brits or their weather threatened to ration that too.
To Jackie Cochran, bragging was no more than public relations. She expected it in others and practised it herself, and it never occurred to her that the ‘Instructions for Servicemen’ might apply to her as well. She bragged about her first trip over in a bomber. She bragged about winning the Bendix race, to those who had heard of it and those who had not. And she bragged about the bigger, brassier women’s flying operation she was going to set up in the States as soon as she had proved the worth of women flyers.
On her return to Washington in the summer of 1942 she started recruiting again almost at once – ‘clean cut, stable young women’ with at least 200 hours in their log books, this time for what became the WASP. In her account of this, she is practically begged to take on the new role by General Arnold after dinner with him and Lord Beaverbrook in London earlier that summer; she reluctantly assents. Another version has her browbeating Arnold into promising her the command of any American women’s flying outfit, then storming back to the US on hearing that Nancy Harkness Love (an altogether more reserved and elegant aviatrix, with award-winning legs) has beaten her to it. The upshot was the same: Cochran and the ATA parted company, too baffled by each other to go on pretending they could work together.
Cochran’s departure from London would have left Ann Wood in the role of Queen Bee or at least sorority president to the American women, had she wanted it. She was the only natural leader among them. In the event they were not much interested in being led, and Wood preferred to think of herself as a lone wolf. But it did fall to her to restore morale and soothe flared tempers when pilot Helen Richey was effectively sacked by Pauline Gower in January 1943 for damaging one too many planes. Wood did this by floating the idea that Richey was actually taking the flak for Cochran, who had driven the ATA slowly nuts but had been impossible to remove because of her connections. Richey spent three weeks at Claridge’s on full pay, then flew home and joined the WASPs. (She was well-known in the States, having been hired by Central Airlines as the country’s first female airline pilot in 1934. But she seems to have been inconsolable when her wartime flying ended and nothing as exciting came along to fill the void. One Saturday in January, 1947, she gave a small party in her rented New York flat at which, guests said, she seemed depressed. She died the following evening from an overdose of pills.)
Wood had lost one of her two London bolt-holes – the Cochran pied-à-terre in Chelsea. But there was compensation: she was posted to the mixed ferry pool at Ratcliffe, where she stayed for most of the war, shovelling Spitfires away from the great Vickers factory at Castle Bromwich before the Luftwaffe could destroy them. It was at Ratcliffe that she learned to love the Brits, perhaps because a different sort tended to gravitate there – mainly male, more worldly and less snooty than those she had encountered at Luton and White Waltham, and diluted by large numbers of Americans and other foreigners. She would shock some of them by standing up after dinner in the oak-panelled dining room in Ratcliffe Hall to help clear the dishes. But the fact that she and other pilots were dining there at all spoke volumes about the unusually grown-up ambiance of the place: it was a flying club mobilised for war, rather than a boarding school with aeroplanes for hockey sticks.
It was at Ratcliffe that she first met Johnny Jordan and Don Spain, her partners in the illicit 300 mph bridge-buzzing and general treetop hell-for-leather japery. (‘Sat. March 27 – 1943 – Luscious day – not very busy. Spit to Sherburn, went up with Jordan – had fun shooting up things en route – got Proctor back to Rat. – then got a Spit Castle Bromwich to Hucknall. The latter was deserted, so I practised circuits and bumps until the Anson came …’) Ann also approved heartily of the rich, suave and handsome Frankie Francis, assigned to Ratcliffe from White Waltham in 1943. She considered him a ‘nifty’ commanding officer and
established by gentle probing that his wealth derived from being half American; he was related to the Marshall Field family of Chicago. And she clicked naturally with Sir Lindsay Everard, MP, the gregarious Lord of the Manor, who, in return for lending the ATA his private aerodrome, had been allowed to keep his domestic servants. That, and the clever use of ration books and his own market garden, enabled him to host lavish dinners to which a broad range of politicians as well as pilots would be invited.
One of these gatherings got out of hand, with fatal consequences. After D-Day, with the end in sight, Don Spain got into a drunken brawl with the ferry pool’s second-in-command and choked to death on his vomit while waiting in hospital to have his face patched up. That cast a pall over Ratcliffe that never quite blew on for Ann, but it did not affect her friendship with her host.
On days when fog over the Midlands kept Ratcliffe’s pilots grounded, and parliamentary recesses gave Sir Lindsay nothing to do in London, Ann would help him prune his rose bushes, or take tea with him in the pantry. Later in the war he beckoned her conspiratorially, jangling an ancient set of keys, and led her down into a many-alcoved cellar, each alcove stacked high with wine, each bottle listed according to provenance and vintage. Sir Lindsay chose a bottle of champagne and they drained it together before resurfacing. ‘It was fun,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘a bit of the old world which is easy to take and a bit that I think I’ll incorporate into my life come peace.’
It was ‘fun’. It may also have been a mildly racy English gentleman’s way of saying thank you for coming all this way when no one forced you to, and risking your neck for us. If so, he was not the only one to show some gratitude to Ann as an American. On 13 April 1945, the day after President Roosevelt’s death, Wood had a delivery to make from Castle Bromwich. As she stepped out of the taxi Anson that had brought her from Ratcliffe and went looking for her Spitfire, the entire staff of the factory aerodrome downed tools, pens, telephones and cups of tea, and came out to offer their condolences. Ann was distressed by the news from Washington and had little faith in Roosevelt’s successor. On landing in East Anglia, she took out a pen and wrote to her mother that ‘the thought of Truman taking [Roosevelt’s] place makes it utterly tragic, for somehow regardless of what went wrong or what I might have disapproved of in his way of doing things, I always felt and hoped that he had the final answer up his sleeve’.
But for once, spring meant sunshine. Ann had rolled up her trousers and sprawled on the grass, waiting for another taxi plane to pick her up. As she wrote, pressing on her parachute, perhaps, or an overnight bag slim enough to fit in the four-inch gap to the left of a Spitfire pilot’s seat and behind the throttle, the momentous death was analysed and put aside. Within a page it had been dealt with, and a twenty-seven-year-old daughter, fulfilled, appreciated and warmed by an unusually generous English sun, felt bound to tell her mother, ‘this is really a most heavenly day’.
15
Hamble
After Rudolf Hess visited Ann Welch at the Rossfeld ski hut above Berchtesgaden, he made a more famous trip, to Scotland. His purpose was the same – to gauge Britain’s appetite for war and argue for an armistice. This time he flew in secret and apparently without the Führer’s knowledge or permission up the North Sea to visit a man he had once seen across a crowded room, but never spoken to – the Duke of Hamilton. Douglas Douglas-Hamilton was at once ogre and Adonis: huge, fierce, handsome and immensely strong. He was also fair. Hess must have thought of him as a Teuton under the skin. He was the first man to fly over Everest, then went to the Berlin Olympics as a former boxing champion and guest of the hosts. His brothers included David, hero of the Battle of Malta, and Malcolm, the man Audrey Sale-Barker would marry. He sent Hess packing, and at last the Nazis got the message.
They could equally have got the message by visiting the East End of London, of course – or Hamble, in Hampshire. In peace Hamble was timeless and bucolic. In war it was suddenly busy, brave and bristling with defences. It was also enlivened by the antics of its visitors.
Mary de Bunsen was a Hamble stalwart. Until she became embarrassed at having damaged one too many Spitfires and asked to be reassigned to the ‘salt mines’ of Kirkbride, she enhanced the place with a crackpot recreational style that appeared to be inherited. Her first act on arriving was to rent a collapsible canoe with blue canvas decks from her landlady, because she loved water and Hamble was hemmed in by it on three sides. Her weak heart never deterred her. One dark, sleeting November afternoon in 1943 she put her seventy-three-year-old mother in the canoe and paddled her towards Southampton as far as the port’s submarine barrage, surfing across the open water on the wakes of steamships and horrifying the rest of the ferry pool as they watched from the Yacht Club, trying to work out whether they were witnessing matricide or suicide. ‘Though apparently mad it was, of course, the perfect antidote to the tension of flying,’ de Bunsen wrote, and one can only believe her. The de Bunsens, after all, had watched the worst night of the Blitz from a Mayfair rooftop and loved every minute of it.
Hamble’s position on a neck between the Solent and the Hamble River, and its aerodrome, made it the obvious jumping-off point for the 8,000 Spitfires built at the Vickers Supermarine works in Southampton during the war. The business of flying them to camouflaged country airfields like the nearby Chattis Hill and High Post on the edge of Salisbury Plain, where they were test-flown and armed, could be monotonous, but it was never straightforward: for long periods Southampton was constantly under attack, and when the sirens sounded barrage balloons had precedence over aircraft movements – even of brand-new Spitfires lined up like ducks on the grass at Hamble. When the balloons went up, they left only a narrow corridor for friendly incoming aircraft, and the corridor’s alignment changed from day to day. Unlike test pilot Alex Henshaw at Castle Bromwich, the women ATA pilots were not trained in aerobatics. For most of them, a perky half loop to get out of balloon danger was not an option. But there were compensations. Day in, day out, they were flying the perfect lady’s aeroplane, and it seems that an enlightened Pop d’Erlanger chose Hamble for his first all-women’s pool precisely so that they would be flying the aircraft that suited them best.
D’Erlanger had been forced to begin moving his women pilots away from Hatfield by mid-1941, when the De Havilland plant there began re-tooling to build twin-engined Mosquitoes – which none of the women was yet cleared to fly – instead of Moths. In due course a second all-women’s pool was established at Cosford, near Wolverhampton, and women were posted on an ad-hoc basis to Ratcliffe, Kirkbride, Prestwick, White Waltham and elsewhere. But full integration was never an option. Sir Francis Shelmerdine, Director of Civil Aviation, had written to his director of finance in September 1939: ‘It will be necessary for obvious reasons to keep the women’s section separate from the men’s section of the ATA, and to have a woman in administrative charge of it.’ Sir Francis did not trouble to set out what those ‘obvious reasons’ were, and in truth the idea that most of her pilots should be lumped together geographically by gender was one that Pauline Gower never resisted. This was partly because those posted to Hamble were almost always pleased to be there.
For all the stinking refineries and sawtooth factory roofs spreading towards it from Southampton, Hamble was still, in 1941, an Anglo-Saxon seaside gem. When Margot Gore, the new commanding officer of No. 15 Ferry Pool, and Alison King, its operations officer, first set out from the airfield to explore it, they felt drawn into a timewarp. ‘A quiet hard drizzle had set in with a cold, eating wind,’ King remembered. ‘Suddenly we turned from a wide windy road round the corner and down the sloping lane into something that had been in a world of its own since the fourteenth century.’ The High Street led past ancient trellised porches on one side and Hookers the baker and Spakes the grocer on the other, and dead-ended in the water. The signs of half a dozen hostelries beckoned from the gloom, catering in peacetime to armchair sea dogs and now, in wartime, to nightly refugees from the air raids. I
t had its pubs, of course – the Ye Olde White Hart, the Victory, the King & Queen and, facing the water next to the yacht club, the Bugle, famous for lobster. ‘We stood in the rain to get our first full view of the river,’ Ops Officer King wrote, ‘and listened to the greedy, querulous sound of the gulls as they whirred, and to the ripple and lapping of the grey-green leaden water, opaque as the earth and empty now of its small bright boats. The far bank of the river hung still with blue mist, mysterious and silent,’
It was idyllic – and still in danger of being overrun by Germans. This was the official line, at any rate. The Battle of Britain might have been won, but if as a consequence Hitler had called off his invasion plans the news had yet to filter down to the mouth of the Hamble River. Here, in a large, sealed envelope marked ‘Invasion Orders’, were detailed instructions to Commanding Officer Gore on how to save her planes and pilots and regroup for the fightback when the sky filled with parachutes and the Solent with swastikas. The envelope was not to be opened until an attack was imminent. However, Gore knew the broad outlines of its contents already, having diligently organised a field trip to her ferry pool’s first inland mustering point. It was forty miles away: a former racetrack north-west of Salisbury. When she and Alison King arrived there one washed-out winter’s afternoon in their official Humber, they were shown a potting shed containing four large tents, four crates of tinned food and a hatchet. After being served a cup of tea, they signed for the shed keys and drove glumly back to Hamble. ‘There we were then,’ King wrote afterwards. ‘Ready for invasion.’ The next day Gore ordered everyone in her command to pack an invasion bag containing pyjamas, jersey, chocolate, toothbrush, mug, knife and a plate if desired, to be ready at a moment’s notice at all times.
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 18
