Spitfire Women of World War II (14 page)

‘I always wanted to fly,' she said simply. ‘I nearly broke my neck a couple of times jumping off a ledge at the top of the hill behind our house, until I was absolutely forbidden to do it when I was eight or nine years old.'

As a teenager she was shy, but comfortable with horses and with people who flew: people with whom she had a connection that had nothing to do with other people. ‘They were a marvellous bunch. They mostly belonged to the Aeroclub Argentino.' They were mostly men, and mostly in oil, cattle or sheep. When she was fifteen, a local Shellmex manager got her into the Aeroclub, which entitled her to cheap tuition. She had her licence two years later.

Maureen now raises Arab horses in Norfolk, but still speaks wistfully of her Patagonian childhood. Once the war came, and soon afterwards an issue of
Flight
magazine with an article about the women of the ATA, there was little discussion about where the Dunlop daughters' duty would take them. ‘My father said a war's a war. It's not something you hang about over.'

Six years after gaining her licence in the Argentine, Maureen Dunlop climbed out of a Fairey Barracuda at No. 15 Ferry Pool in her summer flying uniform and became almost famous. She was wearing a white shirt and dark tie with her sleeves rolled up above her elbows. It was hot, and she was relieved to be able to unclip
her harness, sling a parachute over her shoulder and shake out her hair. Many of the pilots at the all-women's pool at Hamble had chosen to cut their hair short for reasons of fashion and convenience, but Miss Dunlop had left hers long even though it could be a nuisance to gather up into a flying helmet. As her hair tumbled out, backlit by the afternoon sun, the waiting photographer from the
Picture Post
could hardly believe his luck. Maureen didn't look at him, but she did smile and raise a hand to run through her newly liberated tresses, her long fingers looking as if they had just emerged from a manicure rather than a torpedo bomber's cockpit. As she did so the sun glinted on a gold bracelet on her wrist, contrasting with the functional steel ring on the end of a loose harness strap. It was her cover-girl moment, literally. More than any other single image, the impromptu portrait of Maureen Dunlop that appeared on the front page of the
Picture
Post
on 16 September 1944 cemented in the public mind the idea of the ATA as an all-women's outfit, and an intensely enviable one at that.

Maureen became fast friends with ‘Chile'. They were posted together to Hamble and there they would talk in the fast, fluid Spanish of the world they'd left behind, a dialect that sounds as if it has been stripped of all consonants by the wind. At Hamble they both found a kindred spirit in a third exotic bird of passage, Jackie Sorour.

Sorour had arrived from Cape Town in 1938 aboard the
Julius Caesar
– ‘an overture of sparkling white and expectancy' – making her the only ATA woman of any nationality to leave her native country for England before the war simply to fly. She was also the only ATA woman who confessed freely to wanting to be a celebrity, and was one of the few who had what it took. She had a baby-doll cuteness, an iron will, an ego of solid brass and a deeply conflicted attitude to men that, by her own account, infuriated every one of them who tried to make a pass at her. She took up flying at sixteen as a declaration of independence from two taunting stepbrothers, and of victory over fear – a simple fear of flying that had landed
her breakfast in her lap on her first flight as a passenger the year before.

Sorour's need to prove herself brave could easily look like exhibitionism. Soon after her seventeenth birthday, with permission obtained in person from the South African Air Minister, she performed a parachute jump from 5,000 feet over the Swartkop military aerodrome outside Pretoria. She waited a few seconds too long before pulling her ripcord, landed hard, knocked herself out and broke her ankle. The stunt was watched by thousands who had been alerted to it by a radio announcement the night before.

It would be rash to nominate Sorour as the most obsessive woman flyer in the ATA, since obsession was practically a prerequisite for joining. Still, she was a contender. Already an instructor by the age of twenty, she competed fiercely for ‘types', which meant jockeying to be the first to fly a new design of aircraft when it came onto the books in the Operations Room at Hamble. After the war she would be the first woman in Britain to fly faster than 600 mph, to captain an airliner and to admit she wanted to break the sound barrier – an admission that immediately disqualified her in the eyes of the RAF, who alone could have made it happen.

In September 1939, she was lodging with a family called Hirons in a farmhouse outside Oxford – digs chosen by her mother for its proximity to the Whitney aerodrome where Jackie was studying for a commercial licence. When the outbreak of war brought her studies to a halt, Sorour wept with envy as the men with whom she had enrolled at flying school went off to join the RAF. Then she turned her feelings of frustration on herself:

No ATA woman was ever quite so confessional – not even Jackie Cochran, the most outspoken woman pilot of them all.

To understand why a group of young American women crossed the Atlantic to fly Spitfires for the ATA, it helps to know about the last flight of Betty Taylor Wood. Betty was a WASP – a Women's Air Force Service Pilot – posted to the US Army's Camp Davis in the swamps of North Carolina for a ‘special assignment' towing targets for trainee anti-aircraft gunners. Originally from California, she was a recent graduate of the WASP training programme set up at Avenger Field near Sweetwater, Texas. The WASPs were the outcome of a titanic struggle between the Pentagon and Jackie Cochran, the aviatrix and cosmetics mogul who had returned from London and the ATA the previous year. Betty was not as well known as Cochran, even at Camp Davis. She was considered shy. She had been married a month.

One clear September afternoon in 1943 she went up for a routine training flight in a Douglas Dauntless A-24, a workhorse of the dangerous but necessary target-towing business. On her final approach she overshot and told the control tower she was going round again. She opened the A-24's throttle but its engine failed to respond. The plane landed hard and too far down the runway. It bounced and turned over, crushing Betty in her cockpit.

Cochran was immediately alerted in Washington. She flew down the following morning. Meanwhile, another WASP who had had problems with exactly the same A-24 walked over to the Camp Davis maintenance hangar and asked for its records. On an earlier
flight this pilot had experienced a delay of several seconds between opening the throttle and feeling an increase in power; when the power came she had had to stamp on the right rudder to stop the plane rolling onto its back as result of the sudden surge of anticlockwise torque on the fuselage. She had duly noted ‘sticky throttle' on the plane's service record, but when she looked at it again she saw no mention of repairs. It appeared that Betty had died through simple negligence on the part of the mechanics.

She was buried the following afternoon. Before the funeral, Cochran held a private meeting with the hangar staff and left Camp Davis without telling anyone what she had discovered, fearing it would trigger an insurrection. Everyone at the Camp Davis meeting agreed that the A-24 had not exploded. In fact, its fuel tanks had not even ruptured – but in them had been found traces of enough sugar ‘to stop an engine in no time at all'.

It is possible, of course, that the sugar story was concocted by maintenance staff anxious to avoid disciplinary action. But Cochran was convinced the aircraft had been sabotaged, and for no better reason than that it was being flown by a woman. She knew at first hand how women pilots were regarded on both sides of the Atlantic, and on the American side sabotage seemed all too plausible. Indeed, the US Army Air Corps in the middle years of the war was tainted by an institutionalised and potentially murderous misogyny that did not exist in the ATA and was subordinated in the RAF – if it existed there – to the overwhelmingly urgent demands of war.

It was the air war in Britain that gave Cochran the opportunity to show what American women were made of before she was allowed to demonstrate it at home. But even after that, at the time of Betty Taylor Wood's death, she was under no illusion that any of her work would eradicate a deep conviction among American military flyers that they were a brotherhood, and sisters be damned. She knew that some of the men who resented the WASPs most bitterly were those who had to work with them in the US Army Air Corps and felt belittled by the experience. There had
been other similar incidents of sabotage: loose throttle quadrants that had started coming away in WASPs' hands at Sweetwater; severed rudder cables that nearly killed a woman pilot of a B-13.

And there had been Cochran's own experience in the cockpit of a Lockheed Hudson in Newfoundland two years earlier.

Rich and successful beyond her wildest dreams, Jackie Cochran was, by 1941, accustomed to being taken seriously. Yet when the war came she felt something was missing. She had yet to find a role that used her undoubted talents or adequately reflected her accomplishments as champion air racer, entrepreneur, industrialist's wife and all-purpose rags to riches inspiration. For all her clout, the war had so far proved a frustratingly male and European affair.

Then she was invited to the White House. The occasion was the presentation of a medal to the designers of a high-altitude oxygen mask. Afterwards, at lunch, the conversation turned to the urgent need for pilots for transatlantic ferrying. Someone – probably the US Army Air Corps' General ‘Hap' Arnold – suggested that Jackie fly a bomber to Britain to boost recruitment. It is not too uncharitable to suggest that visions of headlines swam before her eyes. Immediately she cabled Lord Beaverbrook in London. She and her husband had known him socially before the war, dining occasionally at his London home with Churchill and Viscount Castlerosse (who went on to write the screenplay for
They Flew Alone
in memory of Amy Johnson, and who, Cochran wrote in her memoir, ‘usually had his 300-lb body encased in an evening suit of coloured velvet with velvet shoes to match').

Beaverbrook, then Minister of Aircraft Production, gave his approval. He asked the British Embassy in Washington to issue the necessary clearances and help this formidable friend of aviation find a bomber. There were none handy; none, at any rate, with an empty captain's seat and a co-pilot willing to be flown across the Atlantic by a woman with fancy friends but no experience on two or more engines. In the end Floyd Odlum had to rent a Lockheed Lodestar for his wife to practise in over Long Island.
She proceeded to Boston, where a friend at Northeast Airlines put her through the tests used to select pilots for their Boston to Iceland route. Finally she headed to Montreal, where Atlantic Ferry Command tried everything to ground her.

‘You think you're pretty hot, don't you?', a Captain Cipher said before Cochran's first official flight test in a four-engined plane. This was an understatement, and she did not deny it. Unable to fail her at first, Cipher wore her out with emergency stops while taxiing, and then recommended vetoing the transatlantic flight on the grounds that Cochran's right arm had become sore from heaving on the handbrake. She claimed she had been made to perform no fewer than sixty emergency stops and swore she would make Captain Cipher and his Ferry Command cronies sorry they had ever heard her name.

The truth was they were already sorry. More than that, the other Atlantic ferry pilots based in Montreal were incensed that a woman would volunteer to do for free something that earned them danger money and a certain amount of swagger. They called a meeting and threatened to strike. They called the
Boston Herald
in the hope of embarrassing her; the Germans would shoot her down to make an example of her, they said. They even called the US State Department to try to prevent her being allowed into a war zone – but they had no real idea who they were dealing with.

‘In a contest of power and friends, I knew I could win,' Cochran boasted. Sure enough, her visa arrived on time at the US Consulate in Montreal and the Atfero boys appeared to give in. One of them was cleared to act as her co-pilot on the condition that he take the controls for take-off and landing. Cochran wasn't pleased, but she knew when to compromise.

As it turned out, compromise wasn't enough. On the morning of her planned departure from Montreal, her Hudson's antifreeze tank was drained and its oxygen supply was hooked up the wrong way round. In case she thought to check it while still on the ground, which she did, a socket wrench designed exclusively for turning on the oxygen once airborne went missing from the
cockpit. Cochran checked that too, and bought another one. At Gander, her first refuelling stop, the wrench disappeared again. She bought a third. The cockpit window was broken when her back was turned. She fixed it with duct tape.

‘I wanted to scream, as only I knew how,' she said. But instead she flew for twelve hours at 135 mph, peering through the Perspex into the short northern night, with the inky Atlantic below her and the Aurora Borealis above and to her left, to the west coast of Scotland. It was a stunt, a first, a point scored for women and an act of homage to Lindbergh and her lost friend Amelia Earhart all at the same time.

After landing at Prestwick, Cochran travelled down to London to call on Lord Beaverbrook and thank him for his help (she also bartered two Florida oranges for a framed cartoon of the great man as the Pied Piper of Hamelin). At his suggestion she then visited Pauline Gower at White Waltham to find out how she had finagled women into military aircraft. She then returned to New York in the bomb-bay of a B-24 Liberator, arriving so frazzled that she instructed the maid at the Cochran-Odlum residence on East End Avenue that she was not to be woken before noon, even for the White House.

Roosevelt phoned at nine the next morning. Pearl Harbor was still half a year in the future, and the President, summering at his Hyde Park estate in upstate New York, was preoccupied with finding ways to help Britain while remaining neutral. He asked Cochran to join him, his wife and Princess Martha of Norway for lunch. With help from police outriders she covered the seventy miles up the east bank of the Hudson just in time. After the meal she was debriefed privately by the President for two hours. He wanted an American's unvarnished view of the country whose Prime Minister was so eloquently – and desperately – seeking his assistance. Oddly, one of the things she remembered explaining to him with great confidence was that England could not afford to plough up all her pastureland for wheat and potatoes. (Her brother-in-law was ‘one of the great agriculturists in England … and had just
made these things plain to me in terms of overall economy'.)

Cochran took the opportunity to bend Roosevelt's ear on the subject of women pilots. Fired up by the sight of Pauline Gower's heroines in blue and gold, she proposed an American equivalent: bigger, better and answering to Jackie. The President and First Lady endorsed the plan. But his generals emphatically did not and it was not enough of a priority for Roosevelt to force the issue. Cochran's consolation prize was that she would be to be allowed to start recruiting women pilots for the Brits.

Cochran never flew a Spitfire during the war, but without her none of her protégées would have flown one either. To this extent, she and Gower were equivalents. They were both busybodies and enablers, tireless opportunists and fervent believers in women. On this level of generality, they were so alike that their coming together at White Waltham, and then at the cinema on Leicester Square, might look like fate. But they were not alike. As people, they could hardly have been more different.

The opening line of Cochran's story, wherever she told it, was: ‘I am a refugee from Sawdust Road.' By that she meant the back roads along Route 231 that ate into the logging country of northern Florida, sprouting camps that paid able-bodied men a dollar a day to turn pine trees into planks. She also meant the wrong side of the tracks anywhere. It was certainly a long way from Gower's Tunbridge Wells. She was an orphan. Eventually she hired a private detective to trace her natural parents, but she handed his report unread to her husband, who never read it either. So neither of them knew where or to whom she was born, or when.

This singular life started sometime between 1906 and 1910. She would tell rapt audiences that she wore flour sacks and no shoes as a child, running wild by day and sleeping on the floor of the couple who adopted her. She referred to herself as ‘a real harum-scarum ragamuffin'. Nastier types called her ‘white trash', but her whole existence was geared to confounding them. She had
no formal schooling. Instead, she started twelve-hour shifts at a Pensacola sawmill aged eight – or thereabouts – graduating to a hair salon in Montgomery, Alabama, where she chose a new name more or less at random from the phone book and became much requested for her Nestlé perms.

Though obsessed with beauty, Cochran was not regarded as beautiful (Dorothy Furey said she had ‘a face like a dog'). She did have beautiful skin, which one friend described as like ‘the loveliest whipped cream‘. She also had an unshakeable faith in the power of cosmetics and used them almost as heavily as she promoted them.

When she tired of Montgomery she took her perming skills to Philadelphia, and added to them, learning the Marcel wave technique. Eventually she reached Manhattan, hairdressing capital of the world, where Charles of the Ritz blew his chance of hiring her by insisting that she cut off most of her own hair. But Antoine of Sax Fifth Avenue accepted her terms.

During the winter hairdressing seasons Cochran would travel with Antoine to Miami, where he had a salon on the beach. And it was in Miami, as ‘the much-needed extra woman' at a dinner party hosted by Stanton Griffis, a former US ambassador to Spain, that she met Floyd Odlum. He was a pale, freckled, sandy-haired son of a Methodist preacher who had studied hard for his law degree and anticipated the Crash. That enabled him to buy up near worthless trust funds, whose holdings, once American capitalism had dusted itself down, turned out to be anything but worthless. He acquired major stakes in RKO pictures, Hilton Hotels and Consolidated Aircraft, and as the war progressed he invested heavily in uranium. He acquired a nickname in lower Manhattan, ‘Fifty Percent', which was the margin he liked to insist upon before reselling a business. That evening in Miami he was tired of small talk, and when he heard that one of the women present actually worked for a living he asked Griffis to be seated next to her. Jackie Cochran had no idea who he was, but she liked his style.

The story they were to agree on states that that very night she saw in him her destiny, and he said that if she really wanted to start her own cosmetics business she would have to learn to fly in order to keep track of it as it expanded. They reconvened for dinner in New York on the day Cochran had chosen as her birthday. Floyd was charmed and fascinated. They married four years later. Before that she followed his advice and took up flying. She went solo on her third day of lessons and headed for Canada on her first flight beyond the confines of Long Island's Roosevelt Field.