Spitfire Women of World War II (18 page)

Daly walked into the Red Cross Club one Sunday evening in the summer of 1943 after the day's live broadcast to New York. Wood collared him for a ‘nice, meaty chat' and soaked up his broodings about ‘social climbing' journalists willing to report the news as fed to them, and the gulf between that and what he saw as reality. She wrote in her diary:

In 1942 the US War Department produced a pamphlet for GIs heading to Europe entitled ‘Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain'. It was a brilliant piece of propaganda, aimed not at the enemy but at bridging an Anglo-American cultural chasm that could have wrecked the most important alliance of the war. It was respectful but not deferential towards the Brits. It was informal but informed – or at least it appeared to be – and it quickly became famous.
The Times
even recommended it to British readers for ‘the spotlight directness of this revelation of plain common horse sense understanding of evident truths'.

‘Don't be misled by the British tendency to be soft-spoken and polite,' the Instructions advised. ‘The English language didn't spread across the oceans, and over the mountains and jungles and swamps of the world because these people were panty-waists.'

As it happened, no one was accusing them of being panty-waists, or namby-pambies, as the Brits themselves might have said. But nor did they seem to some of the American newcomers as tough, soft-spoken or polite as advertised. Ann Wood's sense of shock at the grime and dirt of England three years into the war was more or less as forecast in the Instructions. But her disappointment with Britain's puny-looking men, with their greasy macs and Kaiserish moustaches, went further. She was often aware of the British straining to eavesdrop on her conversations with fellow recruits, especially when the talk turned to pay. They were habitually rude about and to those whom they considered their social inferiors. Wood was especially angered by RAF officers' prevailing attitude to WAAFs, noting on one occasion that at least American officers treated their female colleagues as humans rather than animals. And she was appalled at the way some members of the officer class were happy to observe one set of rules for themselves and another for everybody else:

Wood's diary was no more than her version of the truth, but it is shot through with compelling directness and plausible indignation. She sympathised with her hosts when she was at the Luton training pool, the hard-pressed Stockhams. But she also chided them: ‘It does seem that the likes of them sacrifice and sacrifice and never ask why, while the so-called social bracket type do little or nothing … perhaps with more thought [their] sacrifices would be less and these made more fruitful.' That day's entry concluded with an assessment of the White Waltham catering operation: ‘The canteen is something to marvel at – it is an utter and complete mess and is so bad that you really don't want to eat at all.'

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.

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:

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'.