Spitfire Women of World War II

by Whittell, Giles

  By the time the Station Commander arrived at the watch office, the plane had landed and taxied up and the pilot had climbed out. To the amazement of the commander, the pilot was a woman. For a while he stood bewildered, then he sent the guardsman away and asked the pilot into his car and invited her to lunch at the officers’ mess. Still dazed at this new experience, and out of character, he bought everybody a round of drinks. To add to his amazement, the woman pilot was a young Polish girl – Jadwiga Pilsudska – the daughter of the Marshal of Poland.

  I showed Jadwiga a transcript of this account at her home in Warsaw, and she shook her head gravely. ‘Not true,’ she said. ‘Not true at all.’ It was nonsense. As the station commander in this fictional episode appeared to understand full well, at least in principle, this type of flying was strictly forbidden. There had been no aerobatics.

  At first I was unable to hide my disappointment. Then I realised she was not denying everything, only the aerobatics. Did she have any recollection of the lunch? She smiled, but only a little. She admitted that such hospitality was not unheard of.

  In fact, by pure chance it seems to be corroborated in this case by a written account left to the Imperial War Museum by an impressionable Edgar Featherstone of the RAF Volunteer Reserve, posted to RAF Millom between 1941 and 1943. ‘I was on duty crew when I saw my first (and only) World War II female pilot,’ Featherstone wrote,

  and she was at the controls of a Spitfire. I didn’t know the gender of the pilot as I marshalled the aircraft into the allotted space near the control tower, placed the chocks in front of and behind the wheels and then made to climb on the wing to see if I could be of any help with the straps etc. From my ground-level viewpoint I saw the helmet come off, and head give a shake, and the blonde hair come streaming out in the breeze. I was very impressed with everything that happened after that, including the ‘swarm’ of young officers, who seemed to come from every corner to see this ATA phenomenon. Where had they been hiding? I was right out of the scene, of course, but I would dearly have liked to have been very much a part of it.

  Glamour, it turned out, was in the eye and imagination of the beholder. Pilsudska would have known this even if she preferred not to admit it. Why else the constant presence of photographers during her weekend gliding trips outside Warsaw before the war? Maureen Dunlop learned the same lesson the easy way, stepping out of a Barracuda onto the cover of Picture Post and then, mercifully for someone so shy, never being bothered by the press again. Diana Barnato revelled in all the glamour she could generate, but in the end the self-effacers set the tone. Some might have carried powder compacts with their parachutes, but glamour in the form of ‘blonde hair streaming out in the breeze’ was the exception, not the rule.

  Consider the apparently workaday 50-mile ferry flight by Ann Welch on 3 February 1942, from Chattis Hill to Colerne in north Wiltshire in a Spitfire. Chattis was a heavily camouflaged grass aerodrome outside Stockbridge with a gentle hillside for a runway. Spitfires built at the original Supermarine works and its satellites in Southampton were assembled and test-flown there before being distributed to wherever they were needed. It had been snowing for three days by the time Welch climbed into her cockpit. Two of those she had spent in a freezing hut in her Sidcot suit, sipping tea from a Thermos flask, or just sitting, saying little. Visibility had been close to zero and the forecast gloomy. To have taken off without instrument training or the use of wireless would have been suicidal.

  Ordinarily, Welch’s commanding officer would have been able to ‘wash out’ and send her home at noon each day as long as the foul weather continued, but this Spitfire was a PW1 – a ‘Priority 1 Wait’. She had orders to stay by it from dawn to dusk and take off at the first hint of an improvement in the weather. The only clue to the reason for the urgency was the aircraft’s unusual colour scheme. It was pale blue on its underside and khaki from above. This was also a time when angry questions were being asked in the House of Commons about Germany’s increasing strength in North Africa and the Allies’ apparent inability to do anything about it.

  That month, 1,300 miles to the south, in perfect weather, the island fortress of Malta was being bombed back to the Middle Ages. For an island so critical to British control of the Mediterranean its aerial defences were pitiful. The RAF had started the Battle of Malta with four aircraft, all biplanes – Gloster Gladiators borrowed from the navy. When one was shot down, the others were named Faith, Hope and Charity. By March 1942 Malta was defended by twenty serviceable fighters, of which no more than six were likely to be flyable on any given day. Each day that month, Field Marshal Kesselring, based less than 200 miles away in Sicily, sent over 150 bombers with orders to destroy the Grand Harbour at Valletta, all three of the island’s air force bases, and anything that moved. The pounding was having its desired effect. German convoys were getting through to North Africa again.

  Worse still, there was every chance that Malta would be lost. Six weeks before Welch got her PW1 Spitfire, Lord Cranborne, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, had written to Churchill warning that if the island were not resupplied within two months it would only be a matter of time before it fell. Since then a supply convoy had set out for the island, but only two ships had reached it and they were bombed in the harbour. At Churchill’s pleading Roosevelt had loaned Britain an aircraft carrier, the USS Wasp, for one trip only, to deliver Spitfires to Malta. The war could not be won as long as Germany was undefeated in North Africa. Victory there was hard to imagine without the island. Malta was desperate for food, fuel, ammunition and, above all, Spitfires. The Wasp was waiting in the Clyde to take them there, but none had arrived. Welch was sitting in one of them, waiting for a break in the weather.

  She knew what was at stake; the parliamentary questions had been reported on the BBC. But she could not even see the trees at the top of the hill that served as a runway, and snow was still falling. There was nothing she could do and nothing much worth saying. Lettice Curtis, not often given to sympathy, was sympathetic. Everyone who took off that day ‘frightened themselves in a way that is known only to those who, of their own free will, pit their lives against the clearness of their thinking’, she wrote. ‘And there can be few things more frightening than finding oneself committed to chasing through the sky … pressed down by a vast greyness, knowing that if reference with the ground is lost even for an instant one’s chances of a safe return to Earth are not worth the proverbial row of beans.’

  Welch had a plan. If the trees at the top of the hill appeared she would take off and follow a memorised sequence of roads and railways that would get her to Colerne as long as she stuck to it rigidly. The route included a double loop in the Savernake Forest branch railway line as it went through the hills on the north side of the Vale of Pewsey. She would follow every yard of each loop, circling as if lost in order not to get lost. And she would fly as low as necessary to keep the tracks visible beneath her.

  A slight improvement in the weather was forecast for mid-morning, and soon after 11 a.m. the trees did appear. Visibility extended briefly to 700 yards under a sagging, sodden blanket of dark cloud. A snowplough cleared a strip up the middle of the slope and Welch warmed up her engine. She took off with the cloudbase at 300 feet and headed north by north-west, flying lower than she ever had before, peering intently down to her left, then her right, then her left again as she banked to follow each curve of her route.

  The plan worked. ‘I flew as slowly as possible, flaps down,’ she recalled. ‘It was not possible to fly with the wheels down on a Spit for extra drag as the undercarriage leg obscured the oil cooler. The weather did not improve, but neither did it worsen, and I picked my way along the roads and railway tracks at 140 mph, flying the last mile along a lane uphill to the aerodrome.’

  On arrival she was pulled from the cockpit by engineers waiting to fit out the aircraft with a full complement of instruments and weapons before it continued to Renfrew. No other Spitfire made it to Colerne that day;
the only other one that had been able to follow Welch into the air from Chattis Hill before the fog closed in again had turned straight round and even then had fallen out of the murk and back onto the cleared strip more by luck than skill. Ops Officer Alison King, waiting for news at Hamble, feared Welch was dead until she heard her voice on the telephone, and even then was not convinced she wasn’t talking to a ghost. Her voice was ‘bleached and expressionless … it was as though she was drained of feeling and didn’t want to talk about it’. What she actually said was: ‘It was very bad indeed; worse than I’ve ever known.‘

  It wasn’t combat, but Welch had run a series of risks that combat pilots rarely ran. It wasn’t glamorous in the peer-reviewed sense, since no-one was watching her terrifying slow-dance over the Savernake Forest to ascribe any glamour to it (though the engineers waiting for her at Colerne may have recognised something special in an uphill final approach). But it was exceptionally brave, and, unusually for an individual ferry flight, it had its own toehold in history.

  The USS Wasp finally sailed from Port Glasgow carrying forty-seven Spitfires on 13 April 1942. It passed through the Strait of Gibraltar six days later with an escort of three cruisers and eight destroyers. Starting at 5:45 a.m. on the 20th, all forty-seven planes took off with nearly 700 miles still to go to Malta. (Half of them were led by Lord David Douglas-Hamilton, a 6 foot 4 former Oxford University boxing champion, and a tighter fit in a Spitfire than Audrey Sale-Barker, who married his brother after the war.) The Spitfires landed without incident and their pilots went to get some lunch. Immediately, Kesselring attacked: 300 German bombers hit the new Spitfires where they were lined up on the ground. The following morning six were still serviceable. It was a terrible, avoidable disaster, watched by many of the pilots themselves as they stood outside in their tin hats. But the RAF did learn from it. An SOS went back to London for ‘Spitfires and more Spitfires’. Roosevelt allowed the Wasp to make a second trip. The ATA flew forty-seven more Spitfires up to Renfrew, and this time they were back in the air above Malta within ten minutes of arriving. Kesselring had lost his chance to conquer Malta, and the tide in Africa soon turned.

  There was also a less grand footnote to Ann Welch’s heroic hop from Chattis Hill to Colerne. Once she had landed, the operations room at Hamble had to work out how to get her back. Ordinarily a taxi aircraft would be sent to pick her up. That did not seem possible given the weather, but a junior pilot volunteered. She was Third Officer Bridget Hill, not long out of Wycombe Abbey Girls’ School, ‘wise and mature beyond her years’, according to a friend, and very promising in the cockpit. She astonished Welch by puttering out of the murk at Colerne in a Puss Moth twenty minutes after Welch had got there in a Spitfire. She had the advantage of a much lower stalling speed and a better view of the ground, but it was still an achievement not to have crashed, and Welch rewarded her by letting her fly the return leg, too.

  Hill flew back to Hamble at treetop height along two sides of a large triangle via Oxford. When Welch asked why, her chauffeur replied calmly that her parents lived in Oxford, so she knew the way. Less than a month later, Hill was dead. Another taxi plane in which she was a passenger crashed into a house near White Waltham after being roughly handled by its male pilot. He, Hill and another ATA pilot, Betty Sayer, died. Three more ATA pilots were killed on the same day, two of them while trying to find a way round the rugged lobe of western Scotland between Prestwick and Kirkbride in zero visibility. It was the ATA’s blackest day. It was also a jolt for many newer recruits; confirmation that they were in the war, not watching it. A moment’s lapse in concentration, as Ann Wood wrote to herself, and you were apt to be a goner. Or maimed or burned beyond recognition, which many considered worse.

  It did not help morale that Bridget Hill and Betty Sayer spun into the ground so close to White Waltham. Three months later it happened again in plain view of many on the ground. Flying Officer Castle recorded the aftermath in his diary on 6 June: ‘Joan Marshall was killed today. She was solo in a Master, doing a circuit … she made her final turn into wind, went into a normal power approach and then turned off to the right in a steepening turn which finished in a spin.’

  Marshall crashed within five minutes’ walk of Castle’s billet. That evening he and three other pilots went along to see the wreck. ‘It is between the houses in a garden. And is a dreadful sight. The whole tail unit has broken off and the rest is just small pieces. Why it did not burn is a mystery. It is a great shock to everyone … I wonder how many more of us have been marked out for the same fate.’

  Over the course of the war, the ‘wastage rate’ of female pilots was fewer than one in ten, twice as economical as the men, who lost nearly one in three of those enrolled by February 1940 (a rate comparable to that of Fighter Command). But it was still death on a significant, non-civilian scale, close to what the Romans called decimation; and it took some getting used to.

  The women of the ATA were living the days of their lives. They were often embarrassed by the intensity of the thrill of flying such ‘lovely, powerful, fast, exciting war aeroplanes’. Ordinarily, the experience might have forged a special bond between them and with many it did – but this mainly came after the war, once they had had time to reflect. Until then their comrades – their partners in flying, bridge, filmgoing, cocktailing and line-shooting – were people who might on any given day let their mind wander for a moment from the railway line below; or hit an unforecast fogbank and then a steeple; or pull a dud chit from their operations officer and climb into a dud Spit with gummed-up spark plugs; or they might just lose a propeller – watch it detach in front of their eyes and disappear in a useless spiral ahead of them – and panic, and perish in a matter of seconds.

  For many the best defence against falling apart was not to get too close to one’s comrades. Margaret Frost, convivial by nature (and my grandparents’ neighbour for many years) knew this intuitively. When asked who her closest friends were during the war she didn’t have to think long. ‘I don’t know that you made close friends,’ she said.

  Alison King at Hamble tried to help by rubbing out the names of the dead in the left-hand column of the giant blackboard on which she wrote out each day’s programme. Each name below would quickly move up a line. But she and the pilots she dispatched still had to acquire that ‘strange philosophy of life where friends went out on their appointed tasks and did not return’.

  Unlike combat pilots, the ferry pilots flew without radios, instrument training or weapons in aircraft that were nonetheless legitimate targets for any Luftwaffe pilot who saw them, and they flew in any weather except the certifiably foul. They flew continuously, not just when grand strategy demanded it. They were sometimes mistaken for enemy aircraft by bored ack-ack units. They were frequently required to fly badly damaged planes to maintenance units for repair or to be broken up, and they took special pride in being able to fly a new type of aircraft with no notice or familiarisation apart from twenty minutes alone in the cockpit with their ring-bound A6 bible – the official ‘Ferry Pilot’s Notes’. With no surplus syllables and hardly a verb anywhere, these cards gave take-off, flying and landing settings for every knob, flap and fuelcock in every aircraft flown by the Allies into or out of Britain in the war. They fitted neatly into the breast pockets of the ATA uniform. It was ‘all THERE’, as Ann Welch once put it with the delight of a pirate clutching a treasure map. Even pilots trained from scratch later in the war used them to fly dozens of different types before it was over, and sometimes three or four in a day.

  For passengers foolish enough to ask what was going on, being flown by a pilot who had to bury her nose in a ring binder before take-off and again before landing because she had never sat in this sort of cockpit before could be a disquieting experience. Nothing similar was ever asked of combat pilots. It was a sustained aerial stunt that one seasoned British Airways instructor long after the war called, simply, ‘mind-boggling’.

  In all, the ATA delivered 308,567 aircraf
t, including 57,286 Spitfires, 29,401 Hurricanes, 9,805 Lancasters and 7,039 Barracudas of the type that took Betty Keith-Jopp to the dark floor of the Firth of Forth. In mid-1942, when British aircraft production reached its peak, the ATA was moving more planes each day than British Airways did on a typical day in 2006. Its taxi Ansons alone covered ten million miles with no fatal mechanical failure. But this was not achieved casually. The pilots – the best of them, at any rate – lived in a continual state of stress. Keeping themselves and their aircraft in one piece was a nervewracking business.

  When asked, aged ninety, if she would like to have flown in combat, Lettice Curtis rolled her eyes and groped for words. She would clearly have liked nothing better than for her interviewer to leave. When she had composed herself, she said: ‘This is the sort of imagination I am very much against. There was no question of it, and it was not a question you asked. It just never came up.’

  I left it at that. But a few months later I asked Sir Peter Mursell, director of training at White Waltham for the last three years of the war, if he thought any of the women whose progress he was responsible for monitoring would have made good combat pilots. ‘I’m sure Lettice would have,’ he said without hesitation.

  Apart from a week’s rest at Cliveden hospital after a crash that almost killed her, Curtis flew continuously from July 1940 to September 1945; thirteen days on, two off, for sixty-two consecutive months. In that time she ferried nearly 1,500 aircraft including 331 four-engined bombers. She was never given command of a ferry pool because she never got on with Pauline Gower, but she was still the alpha female of the ATA. If Margie Fairweather was the Cold Front, Curtis was the Ice Queen, the Iron Maiden, the prima inter pares. More particularly, she was the embodiment of the ATA’s most important sociological discovery – that any man who clung to the view that aircraft were for men only was liable to be made a fool of.