Spitfire Women of World War II (17 page)

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.

Edward R. Murrow, chief reporter for the American Columbia Broadcasting System, was speaking live to both coasts at 11.30 p. m., London time, on 24 August 1940 in the middle of the Battle of Britain. During the Phoney War, Murrow had tired of British inaction and wondered aloud if it was not a mask for ineptitude or worse. But as the raids began and Londoners started to show their mettle under attack, Murrow swung behind them. By New Year's Eve, 1940, in the middle of the Blitz, he was needling his listeners to come and help: ‘You will have no dawn raids, as we shall probably have if the weather is right. You may walk this night in the light. Your families are not scattered by the winds of war. You may drive your high-powered car as far as time and money will permit …'.

For some of the Spitfire women, the Blitz had been their first brush with mortal danger, and the fact that they had survived it toughened them. Kay Hirsch, who would join the ATA in 1944,
spent the early part of the war working at Allders department store in Croydon, directly under the path of the Junkers squadrons droning up the A23 towards Westminster Bridge. ‘One Blockbuster bomb fell at the end of the High Street, down South Croydon end,' she recalled.

Veronica Volkersz and Diana Barnato drove ambulances with the Red Cross. Mary de Bunsen desperately wanted to drive a fire engine. She had to make do with the running boards as an Auxiliary Fire Service Volunteer, but she still found her baptism by bombs exhilarating. Called to a Palmolive perfume factory in Twickenham after a direct hit, she distributed hot chocolate, wearing dungarees and a tin hat, as ‘all the perfumes of Arabia wafted up into the smoky air'.

De Bunsen was enthralled by the extraordinariness of war. This brainy onlooker at a dozen coming-out balls, who embraced flying as an escape from the dreadful expectation of a good marriage, embraced the just war as fervently as any soldier. In most of her writing she is whimsical, as if she knew whimsy was what would be expected of an overgrown schoolgirl and did not want to disappoint. But on the role of conflict in history and her life, she switches without warning to righteousness: ‘I believe that fighting is a law of nature without which we rot, and I know that, under tyranny, worse things happen than death.'

And pity the softies who didn't understand. ‘After the panicky people and most of the rich ones had run away,' she wrote, London life became ‘tolerable and then positively inspiring'. It was a city ‘purged of parasites and cleared for action', hushed and tense between the sirens and the start of the anti-aircraft guns, ‘not
with fear and self-pity… but with the awareness of danger and the imminence of death, without which none of us are truly alive'.

Parasites! De Bunsen was so thrilled to be shot of them that she invited her mother to visit from the country and see what Battle Station London felt like. Lady de Bunsen happened to choose the night of the worst raid of the war and loved every minute of it. They lunched voraciously at Claridge's the next day to celebrate being alive.

One imagines Ed Murrow would have found the de Bunsens good copy had he encountered them on a Mayfair rooftop admiring the air-bursts and inhaling deeply of the cordite. And one imagines Ann Wood listening to Murrow in Waldeboro, Maine, and picturing herself in his adopted hero city. ‘I wanted to be a part of that, however I could be,' she said. It would be a good fit in her mind. She was not unduly modest, and she had a hunch even before the Cochran telegram arrived that a twenty-four-year-old college graduate and flying instructor, unintimidated by men, women or rank, could make herself useful in the defence of freedom. And it was a good fit in reality. Perhaps more than any of the other woman pilots, Wood squeezed wartime London for all the education and excitement it could offer. In the process, she came to see Murrow's assessment of the place as so much propaganda.

For most of 31 May 1942, it rained. In London this at least washed the smog out of the air. Up the A1 at the new ATA training pool in Luton, established after the De Havilland factory at Hatfield had switched from building Moths to Mosquitoes, the weather meant flying was washed out. And for the latest recruits – Americans – that meant ground school; navigation and mechanics with a Captain Sloper, even though it was a Sunday. Afterwards, most of them trudged or bicycled back to their billets. Thanks to double summertime the night was young, even if the weather was sodden. The RAF had sent more than a thousand bombers to Cologne
the night before and reprisal raids were expected over London. Undaunted, Wood took the 7.15 p.m. to St Pancras under a balloon barrage that ringed the city at cloud height. She shared a compartment with a snooty and facetious Englishman (a fellow pilot), had a quiet supper at the Grosvenor House Hotel with friends (the reprisals hit Canterbury, not London), and spent the night at the Red Cross Club on Charles Street. She wrote in her diary before bed: ‘Somehow these jaunts to London fill me with utter glee.'

It is not hard to see why. Wood had the heightened awareness of the newcomer and the heightened status of the well-connected American. Never mind that Austin Reed's hadn't yet finished her uniform. That would turn heads and turn them again in due course, as civilians mistook her for Free French and then clocked the gold ‘USA' flash on her shoulder and realised she was altogether more exotic. She was already informally connected, through Jackie Cochran and an early upbringing in polite Philadelphia society, to the American military and civilian elite now pouring into West London with a budget for expensive leases and an assignment to ‘meet Hitler and beat him on his own ground'. She was also a natural networker. After being greeted by General Eisenhower at the US Embassy's Fourth of July party on Grosvenor Square, she found herself ‘infatuated' with Crown Prince Olaf of Norway. So she buttonholed him in the garden before the General could extricate himself from the receiving line and do the same thing.

Wood was a frequent visitor to the Red Cross Club, as much for heady talk about affairs of state as for the milkshakes and Coca-Cola on offer there. The club was run by a Mrs Biddle, wife of the former US ambassador to Poland, with whom Wood became firm friends. She also greatly impressed Mr Biddle, whose new role was as Roosevelt's liaison with the Polish government in exile. Biddle later used Wood to set up a meeting with the radiant Jadwiga Pilsudska, who he hoped might open back-channels to the Warsaw underground. It is not clear whether the meeting changed the course of history, but it is clear that Wood was tickled
to be involved. ‘Little does Biddle know, that's right up my alley,' she wrote in her diary, firmly underlining it.

Through Cochran, Wood met and befriended Colonel Peter Beasley, Cochran's minder in her dealings with Whitehall. And it was while dining with Beasley and his wife in Mayfair in September 1943 that Wood found herself sitting a few feet from Clark Gable and a girlfriend (whom she didn't recognise). ‘Poor guy,' she wrote. ‘So stared at that he couldn't take his eyes off his lassie without confronting a hundred other pairs of eyes.' Gable was still mourning the loss of his wife, the actress Carole Lombard, whose plane had crashed into a mountain near Las Vegas the previous year. In London, he was desperately trying to blend in while on a hybrid mission to make a movie about the brave air gunners of the 8th Air Force, while at the same time being one himself.

Unlike most of her fellow diners, Wood was nonchalant about Hollywood royalty; though less so about the real thing. She was fascinated by King Peter of Yugoslavia, with whom she had been invited to dine by a mutual friend: he was ‘nervous and excitable' and she was gratified that His Majesty was so ardently pro-American. ‘It was a big night for me and I loved every minute,' she wrote afterwards; ‘have terrific desire to meet all kinds of people, and love it when you can find what makes them tick.'

For people anxious to meet people, London was, of course, the only place to be. Blacked-out, dirty and haunted by balloons, it was teeming with half the world's exiles. Wood went ‘up to town' whenever she had leave.

Pilsudska and Barbara Wojtulanis – two thirds of the ATA's female Polish contingent – opted to live in rented rooms near Paddington and commute to White Waltham to be closer to their exiled compatriots since they were the only source of news from home. ‘If it happened that somebody came from Poland and you were there in London and met them, they would give you the personal information,' Pilsudska said. ‘If you were not in London, you just didn't get it.'

It was at Polish dinner parties, cobbled together from ration
books and carefully hoarded vodka, that Pilsudska and Anna Leska met the brave young officers who became their husbands. Pilsudska's served in the Polish navy on one of three ships to escape from Gdynia before the port's capture. Leska's was an air force navigator who was shot down over Germany and spent two years in Stalag Luft III.

In London, even Margot Duhalde could find a familiar accent – the Chilean ambassador's. ‘His name was Manuel Vianchi, and he regarded me as his daughter,' Duhalde recalled with a smile. Days off without her boyfriend, Squadron Leader Gordon Scotter, meant trains to Waterloo and hot baths and long evenings unwinding at the official residence, where His Excellency made an apartment available for Margot's exclusive use. Ambassador Vianchi often hosted all-night fiestas at which guests would be expected to join him on the dancefloor for the conga.

Bombs or no bombs, London was a standing invitation to live for now and forget tomorrow. There were two largely irreconcilable views on whether the Spitfire women should do so. ‘People who were sensible would cut out parties and do nothing but try to keep themselves in good shape for flying,' said Rosemary Rees, who had had her fun on the pre-war European party circuit and at Hamble would play the role of prefect (she was second-in-command to Margot Gore). But not everyone was sensible.

Most of the Americans were inclined to work hard and play hard, and to think that the Brits did less of both. Ann Wood stayed up late, but her preference for milk and cookies with Mrs Biddle was exceptional. Winnie Pierce and Suzanne Ford, both New Yorkers, would gravitate to bars at the Dorchester or the Savoy when on leave, and to the Lansdowne at Hyde Park Corner for the music. Even the demure and ‘unsophisticated' Bobby Sandoz liked the Lansdowne, because she loved to dance – and so did her fellow ATA flyer, Opal Pearl Anderson – a rough-tongued Chicago lady on a sabbatical from motherhood; she had left a three-year-old son behind in the care of relatives. Sandoz well remembered the time when Opal brought the Lansdowne to a shuddering halt
just by walking in and saying hello: ‘She saw me – now it was a big area – and she yelled, “Hi Bobby, y'old sonofabitch, how are ya?” and it got silent on the whole place; you know, “Who's this?”, because that was very offensive to some people, but that was Opal all over. She had a little boy and she swore a great deal.'

As much as anyone in uniform, the women of the ATA felt the recklessness of youth and deracination, and the knowledge that death could come at any time. Cockpit hangovers were par for the course, not least because drinking was by no means confined to days off. Suzanne Ford (known as a ‘flying socialite' before she even left New York) was posted to Prestwick at her own request to be with fellow Americans from the Atlantic Ferry Command. There she offered refrigeration services as well as convivial company, loading beer into suitable aircraft and cooling it unmercifully by spiralling up to 10,000 feet over the Firth of Clyde. She also rode to hounds and, as Ann Wood gathered from talking to her, ‘if you hunted you drank pretty well'.

No-one partied quite as well as Helen Harrison, however, and her alcohol consumption vexed and then simply baffled the more serious-minded Wood. The two of them shared a room at the Red Cross Club a few days before their first English Christmas, but kept different hours. ‘Was awakened by 8 a.m. to patter of HH just coming in,' Wood wrote. ‘Amazing what she can take night after night. Should think she would feel dreadful, but apparently it is worth it to her. She is in spite of all the best-natured soul and when happy far too generous.'

For her own part, Wood sought out men who wouldn't bore her. One worked for the US Army's Signal Corps, carrying sensitive messages between Eisenhower's headquarters on Grosvenor Square and Churchill's on Horseguards Parade. Another flew bombers until he had to bale out of one over Kiel. A third was Jackson Kelly, Pan Am executive and old family acquaintance from Philadelphia. Ann married him in the end, but when she first bumped into him in London he was seeing Cathy Harriman, daughter of Averell Harriman, the American railway magnate and
Roosevelt confidante. Later in the war Harriman was posted to Moscow as US ambassador and took his daughter with him, at which point Kelly started thinking less about girlfriends and more about prospective wives. ‘And I guess that's how I came into the picture,' Ann said.

In the meantime there had been a fourth man, not romanced, but pumped for insights in the normal Wood way. He was John Daly, Ed Murrow's colleague and rival at CBS. Ann liked him initially for his name, which she assumed meant he was Irish and Catholic. He turned out to be South African-born and lapsed as far as religion was concerned. She admired his candour and his ‘sound, logical mind'. Like Ann, he had arrived in London with his mind full of Murrow soundbites about a city and people on the edge of the abyss, living a half-scavenger, half-troglodyte existence without soap, warmth, money or much sleep or food. But it was a template he found difficult to reconcile with the London he came to know best: a schizoid town that had seen real hardship, but where men still deferred reflexively to officers, and Embassy parties were livelier than ever, and the 400 Club never stopped serving steak and champagne to those who could afford it.