Spitfire Women of World War II (26 page)

Equipped with brown suede leather flying boots, leather helmets and leather gauntlets with white silk liners, Katie Stanley Smith and her fellow
ab initio
recruits signed contracts with the ATA in May 1944. Less than a month later, the women of No. 15 Ferry Pool at Hamble awoke on what was nearly the longest day of the year to learn from Central Ferry Control at Andover that there would be no flying that day regardless of the weather. As it happened, it was overcast with occasional drizzle. Some of the Hamble pilots mooched in the usual way at the aerodrome: headstands, letters, bridge, perhaps some knitting. But in the late afternoon some of the others walked through the village and down a lane which ran parallel to the Hamble River. On the water was an armada of patrol boats, corvettes and landing craft that had been gathering for weeks along the river's shady edges. Now, for the first time, they were full, laden with hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers conjured into them from the surrounding countryside. One by one they were heading out to sea.

Maureen Dunlop was among those who stayed at the aerodrome. ‘We were having a coffee in the mess,' she said, ‘and someone came to the door, very quietly – I can see her face now – and she said, “It's started.” And we all knew.'

Preparations for the Normandy landings had been evident around Hamble since the spring. At the yacht club, a squadron of American bulldozers had arrived without warning and built an
artificial harbour almost overnight for repairing landing craft. In the woods around the village temporary encampments appeared and quietly filled up with a type of soldier Hamble hadn't seen before, quite different from the fresh-looking GIs disembarking at Liverpool and Prestwick with their ‘Instructions'. These were Allied veterans of the desert war, sunburned, lean, without swagger, husbanding their strength for a last big push.

It became pointless to venture into Southampton except by bicycle; day and night, the streets were blocked by convoys. At the airfields to which Hamble delivered, invasion stripes – white, black, white round each wing like ribbons – began appearing on new and newly serviced aircraft. In the operations room a new set of invasion orders arrived on Alison King's desk, this time for ‘our' invasion. All were marked ‘Top Secret'. So was the old set, the ones that assigned No. 15 Ferry Pool four tents and a potting shed on the edge of Salisbury plain in the event of Germans wading up the Hamble River, but that secret was already history.

‘They were thrilling and nerve-tingling days,' remembered Violet Milstead, a Canadian who had made her own way to Montreal to join the ATA in 1943. They were, perhaps, especially nerve-tingling for her and the other North Americans whom Churchill had so assiduously courted. God's good time had come, he told the House of Commons, and the New World with all its power and might was stepping forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.

No-one could have been prouder to be part of the great rescue than Ann Wood. In June 1944 she was still based at Ratcliffe, but on the 5th she was given a Spitfire to deliver from Castle Bromwich to Eastleigh on the outskirts of Southampton:

Ordinarily, she would have been found a bed for the night at Hamble, but being Ann Wood she had options. A friend from Cincinnati was helping to run a Red Cross rest and recuperation centre for American pilots in a nearby stately home.

The following morning Dorothy from Cincinnati, who had access to a Jeep, formed a plan to use it to distribute strawberries. ‘We're going to go up and down the line where they're waiting to get into the barges,' she told Ann. ‘And that's what we did, and it was the most powerful thing that ever was.'

Alison King was ‘filled with a certain sadness' on D-Day. This, too, was on account of the men; the lives she had seen packed up in camouflage webbing, clambering into barges on the Hamble River, that would be ended within hours by machine guns across the Channel. But soon a different sadness would creep into the women's thoughts. It was harder to acknowledge because it was selfish, and self-effacement was the ATA's principal unwritten standing order. But as the Allies fanned out across northern France to begin their long march on Berlin, and the trainloads of
wounded began returning to hospitals across the South of England, this secret sadness grew. For some of the women it was no more than a niggle. For others it was a full-blown foreboding. Their part in the great, meticulous mobilisation for D-Day may have been small, but it was a good part: well played and revolutionary in its way. It had given them the time of their lives. How long could it go on now that the boys up and down the line had had their strawberries and left? Would there ever be another part like it?

When the news that D-Day had started came quietly to the door of the Hamble mess, Maureen Dunlop knew at once that something else was finishing. ‘It looked,' she said, ‘as if it was the beginning of the end.'

Some of the ATA women were so utterly unconstrained by convention that they took their wartime flying for granted. They knew they were ‘lucky'. They knew that thousands of girls would have given everything they had for the mere chance of pilot training. But they had also assumed from the outset that since they could fly, and since there was to be a war, they would, somehow, be wartime pilots.

They weren't particularly interested in the battles that Pauline Gower and Jackie Cochran had to fight to get them into their ‘lovely warplanes'. They knew, if they stopped to think about it, that they were operating at the very limit of what society could tolerate, even in war. But they weren't much interested in society either, or in stopping and thinking about their place in it, and they were so used to being unusual that anything else would have been unsettling, unsatisfying – and soul-destroyingly dull.

Maureen Dunlop was one of these women, hotfoot from Argentina because a war's ‘not something you hang about over'. Ann Welch was another. (‘I had to be involved: and it had to be in flying. Nothing else could even be contemplated.') Veronica Volkersz, raised riding polo ponies in the foothills of the Karakorams, was a third. On the day before war was declared – 31 August 1939 – she was airborne over Hampshire, taking a friend on a business trip to Portsmouth. She returned to Woodley aerodrome outside London after dark to be given a furious dressing down
by the chief instructor of the local flying school. In her absence, Hitler had invaded Poland and all civil aviation had been grounded.

‘No news could've excited me more,' Volkersz wrote. ‘Already, I could see myself flying fighter aircraft over to France.' Five years later, it seemed that the chance to do just that had come. As the Allied armies advanced across Europe they commandeered every usable airfield and built hundreds more. Churchill, in a personal note to Pop d'Erlanger in May 1944, thanked him for the ATA's first 200,000 deliveries and told him to be ready to deliver to the Continent as well. Aston Down in Gloucestershire and White Waltham had been designated ATA invasion pools. Pilots had begun learning how to parachute with life rafts dangling between their legs. Volunteers were solicited for Continental ferrying, and the first to be accepted received their inoculations. From the women's point of view there was only one problem. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, in charge of both the RAF's Second Tactical Air Force and the Ninth US Air Force, adamantly refused to let women cross the Channel, and for no better reason, apparently, than simple prejudice.

Leigh-Mallory was stubborn, humourless and ruthlessly ambitious. The younger brother of George Leigh Mallory, the superhuman mountaineer who came within a hundred yards of the summit of Mount Everest in 1924, he doubtless considered himself blessed with the same genetic reserves of strength and courage. Perhaps he was (though Montgomery considered him a ‘gutless bugger').

Leigh-Mallory, who sported a very similar moustache to Hitler's, criticised Sir Hugh Dowding's tactics during the Battle of Britain and plotted afterwards, successfully, to replace him as head of Fighter Command. He was convinced that the best way to defeat the Luftwaffe was with massed fighter formations that would be able to defend themselves and destroy German bomber groups at the same time. In 1941 he was able to put his ‘big wing' concept to the test, and lost four RAF aircraft for every German one shot
down. He never took the fall for this disastrous strategy and instead secured for himself the most senior RAF post in Europe after D-Day by energetically cultivating British and American army top brass.

The only thing that can be said reliably in Leigh-Mallory's defence is that he was never able properly to defend his reputation. In August 1944, having been assigned the command of Allied Air Forces in South-East Asia, he and his wife were killed when their Liberator hit a mountainside above Grenoble en route to Burma.

By then, one of the women pilots had already registered her opinion of this unreconstructed mysogynist by quitting. Her name was Betty Lussier, and part of the reason for her readiness to sacrifice her job was that she had alternatives. Lussier was Canadian-born but raised on a farm in Maryland where she paid for her flying lessons by working the night shift at a nearby assembly plant, building B-26 bombers. She heard about Jackie Cochran's recruiting efforts and applied, but was rejected: at nineteen she had only 200 hours in her logbook. So she crossed the Atlantic on a freighter called the
Scebeli
in 1943 with no firm offer of a job. She joined the ATA by visiting the Ministry of Labour on her arrival and announcing that she was a pilot; they directed her to White Waltham and the business-like embrace of Pauline Gower, who deemed 200 hours more than enough.

But 2,000 hours would not have been enough for Leigh-Mallory to let her follow the invasion across Europe. When the women pilots at Hamble and White Waltham realised they were not being inoculated or briefed for Continental ferrying, Lussier called her godfather, Sir William Stephenson (who later became better known to filmgoers as
The Man Called Intrepid
). He was a friend of Winston Churchill's, but also of Lussier's father, Emile, having served with him in the Royal Canadian Air Force in the First World War. By 1943 he was supervising the operations of the Office of Strategic Service – or OSS – the forerunner to the CIA. Betty was still barely twenty-one. But she was a natural linguist,
desperate to be tangled up in the war and apparently not afraid of it. He signed her up.

Lussier became the only ex-ATA woman to work for OSS. Her first task after D-Day was to convey ‘Ultra' intelligence generated by the Enigma codebreakers at Bletchley Park to US combat headquarters in Europe, inventing separate cover stories for each intercept so that any German mole who might gain access to it would not have to assume the Enigma ciphers had been broken. Lussier also dabbled in counterintelligence. She teamed up with Ricardo Sicre – a fellow OSS officer and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, whom she would marry – to ensnare German spies in France and turn them into double agents. One of them, a suspect who had not broken under interrogation by the French or British, revealed to Lussier that his fondest ambition was to go to Hollywood and meet Charlie Chaplin. She promised to arrange it in return for his confession, then had him arrested.

The Chaplin fan never made it to Hollywood. The women of the ATA did, however, make it to Europe. And their trailblazer was not Lussier, but the inimitable Diana Barnato.

In Hamble, Diana had shared digs with two fellow pilots. Like Diana, Anne Walker and Faith Bennett moved in elevated fighter pilot circles, living daily with the cruel paradox that the most fabulously eligible men were also the most likely to be killed. Anne was in love with Group Captain W. G. G. ‘Smithy' Duncan-Smith, a Battle of Britain ace (whose son, two generations later, would become leader of the Conservative Party). Faith, a blonde and glamorous returnee from 1930s Hollywood, was seeing Air Marshal Sir William Sholto Douglas, KCB, MC, DFC. Formerly Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, he was by 1944 in charge of Britain's aerial defences and a regular visitor to Hamble in his staff car.

Smithy was based nearby at RAF Tangmere, and through him Diana met a blue-eyed, twenty-eight-year-old officer with light brown curls, a ‘swashbuckling, springy step' and a record of inspiring leadership from Kent and Cyprus to the Western Desert. This
was Wing Commander Derek Walker. Though not related to Anne, he too would become a frequent visitor to Hamble.

At first, Diana made Anne issue the invitations to Derek so that he would not know who was after him, but chemistry quickly removed the need for acting. On a visit to the Barnato estate at Ridgemead in the spring of 1944, Derek found Diana in her father's study. He perched on the arm of her chair and said he couldn't live without her. They were married in May, two years to the day after the funeral of her first fiancé, Humphrey Gilbert. The courtship had been brief but intense. ‘Our love was very real and very deep,' Diana wrote. ‘Many of my admirers had, by then, been killed in the war, so I thought I should hook him quick in case one or other of us got bumped off whilst flying.'

Most of No. 15 Ferry Pool attended the wedding at the Church of St Jude's in Englefield Green in Surrey. Diana wore a perfect sail of white silk; Derek his uniform. The reception was at Ridgemead, where several of the men fell into the lily pond and a few of the women into the swimming pool.

With no time for a proper honeymoon on account of the imminent invasion of Europe, Mr and Mrs Walker drove down to Devon after the wedding and spent three days in a hotel in Totnes. But the new bride had never let the war get in the way of japery and she was not about to start. Her husband was of the same mind: easily bored. He was on an official break from combat operations after four consecutive frontline tours, but after D-Day he was appointed personal assistant to Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Mary' Coningham, KCB, DSO, MC, DFC, AFC. For all the initials after his name, Coningham was not from the same subspecies of commander as Leigh-Mallory. For one thing, he did not object to being called Mary (it was a contraction of ‘Maori'). Having been brought up in New Zealand, he had returned to the old country to fly Sopwith Camels in the First World War, but his taste of life so far from the Imperial Metropole had infected his soul. He took the subversive view that military regulations should not be taken too seriously unless they contributed directly to the winning of
the war. He also believed in the critical importance of morale, and was aware through his new assistant, Wing Commander Walker, that the women of the ATA were more than miffed at having been left in England for no logical reason while their male colleagues started flying aircraft to the advancing European battle lines. They were hurt and angry. As Diana Barnato Walker put it in her memoir (and presumably to her husband): ‘For many years the women pilots had been flying – and dying – in the same aircraft types and in the same conditions as the men, yet now we were being denied these foreign trips. You can't imagine the dismay that we felt.'

By the end of September 1944, Coningham had succeeded Leigh-Mallory as head of the Second Tactical Air Force. Derek asked Diana if she would be prepared to join him on an important semi-secret mission on her next leave. He had to deliver two photo-reconnaissance Spitfire F VIIs to newly liberated Brussels to enable the RAF to take better pictures of the retreating German lines. But he was short of one pilot. Diana said she would love to help but was barred from doing so. Derek produced a letter:

That was enough for Diana. She would be in uniform but on leave, breaking rules but also exposing them as fatuous. On 2 October, Mr and Mrs Walker, each in a Sptifire, took off from RAF Northolt and flew wingtip to wingtip over the White Cliffs of Dover. A few minutes later they crossed the cratered beaches
between Boulogne and Cap Gris Nez and set course east by southeast for Brussels' Evere airport. It was Diana's first escape from Britain since her ski trip to Megève with Lorna Harmsworth at the start of the war. She wrote that she wanted to sing and ‘throw the aircraft about in celebration of her freedom'. She desisted, but only because the risk of colliding with Derek was too great. Her only previous experience of formation flying had been the unsolicited and terrifying arrival alongside her of three Free French Spitfires from No. 340 Free French squadron, en route to Kenley in Surrey. The French pilots had been laughing at her red woollen pixie hat, exposed beneath the canopy because her helmet had blown away on take-off.

The free Belgians were also in party mood, and the Walkers completed their honeymoon among them. London may still have been blacked out and living on rations, but Brussels, fifteen miles from the German army, had sugar, wine, leather handbags, chocolate in its shops and lights on all night. Small wonder that ‘Mary' Coningham had located his headquarters there. He had even moved his wife out to be with him. But after six days, Diana had to go home. The plan was for Derek to escort her. A thick fog had settled over much of northern Europe, but he knew the route intimately from years of combat sorties and had wireless navigation to fall back on should anything go wrong. Diana did not, but all she had to do was stay on his wing.

They took off. They had agreed that if the fog looked as bad once they were airborne as it did from the ground, they would turn back. Diana thought it looked worse, but Derek pressed on, leaving her no choice but to stay with him. He flew faster than she was used to (ATA cruising speeds were designed to save fuel) and she lost him within a few minutes.

When asked much later whether at any point on this flight she had felt completely lost, Diana said airily that if things had got that bad all she would have had to do was fly up the North Sea and turn left.

It did not seem so simple at the time. The first decision was
easy enough: she could not turn back. The chances of overshooting Evere and ending up behind German lines were too great. Then there was the choice of continuing on a compass course that might or might not deliver her to RAF Northolt depending on wind and visibility over north London; or going as low as she dared and nosing around until she recognised something from her map. She chose to descend and eventually saw the hills of St Omer rising to meet her. Soon afterwards she crossed what she hoped was the French coast south of Gris Nez. If it was, seven and a half minutes on a course of 295 degrees should put her over Dungeness. She adjusted her course and began counting down. But the Channel was covered in sea fog thicker than anything so far, right down to the water. She climbed to 4,000 feet to get over it, and started finding distractions – another aircraft, which she dived to follow hoping it might be Derek's, only to find it was a Dakota flying in the opposite direction; a change from white fog to yellow fog beneath her (did that mean land?); a gap in the yellow fog just where Dungeness should have been (if she had managed to get back on the right course and allow for the right number of lost seconds after chasing the Dakota).