Giles Whittell - Spitfire Women of World War II

Given only a little more luck, Jackie Cochran might have become a thoroughgoing megalomaniac. She had grand visions of an all-female US military flying force answering to none other than Jackie Cochran, and throughout the war she worked tirelessly to make this vision a reality. But first she had to settle for hiring twenty-five competent women pilots with at least 350 hours’ flying experience to help ferry planes round Britain. By the time she started welcoming them to London she had travelled the length and breadth of North America to interview candidates whom she had canvassed in advance with long, excited telegrams.

‘CONFIDENTIAL,’ one of them began.

ON BEHALF OF BRITISH AIR TRANSPORT AUXILIARY I AM WIRING ALL THE WOMEN PILOTS WHOSE ADDRESSES AVAILABLE TO ASK IF YOU WOULD BE WILLING TO VOLUNTEER FOR SERVICE … EVERY FRONT NOW OUR FRONT AND FOR THOSE DESIRING QUICK ACTIVE SERVICE SHORT OF ACTUAL COMBAT BUT INCLUDING FLIGHT EXPERIENCE WITH COMBAT PLANES THIS SERVICE ABROAD SEEMS IDEAL CHANCE … WIRE ME 630 FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK CITY AND YOU WILL RECEIVE LETTER WITH MORE DETAILS … RELEASE NO PUBLICITY AS A RESULT OF THIS TELEGRAM.

When Cochran’s gals started arriving in England she was ready for them, at the Savoy. White Waltham must have seemed terribly humdrum by comparison, but when she drove down there, at the wheel of a borrowed Daimler, it was not so much the shortage of glamour that irked her. It was ‘Doc’ Barbour’s order to get undressed.

Cochran was livid. She was a bit of a prude, and she fancied herself as defender-in-chief of the good name of her handpicked representatives of dynamic American womanhood. ‘There he is,’ she wrote of Barbour, ‘adamant about his damn procedures. There I am – not about to take off all my clothes or let the other American girls be subjected to such ridiculous procedures. Where was it stated that England needed its pilots to be examined in the buff?’

In the end it didn’t matter. For both the British and the American governments, Cochran was an unclassifiable anomaly whose personal contacts and sheer force of will demanded attention. A pal of Roosevelt’s – blonde, rich, short-fused, married but without her husband in attendance – had taken up residence at the Savoy. She could not be allowed to storm home firing off tirades to the White House about British ingratitude. Instead, when she stormed back to London and started complaining to Pop d’Erlanger’s paymasters at the Air Ministry, he caved in. The message was passed to Doc Barbour at White Waltham that he would have to satisfy himself with stethoscope and tongue depressor. Dorothy Furey and her fellow Americans entered the Air Transport Auxiliary with their clothes on.

Cochran had won her first pitched battle with England’s ‘damn procedures’. But she had lost any hope of being accepted by the British Establishment into which she had barged. According to the splendidly sober Lettice Curtis, Cochran had ‘entirely misjudged the wartime mood of the British people’. And it was true. Ground down by rationing – of clothes as well as food – and with little first-hand experience of the United States, most Britons bought into the stereotype of American women as movie stars or gold diggers more readily than they let on. And Cochran’s presence only reinforced it.

American men were not much more graciously received. When GIs started arriving in numbers later in 1942 they looked so healthy that Londoners started calling them ‘pussies’. Margaret Fairweather was even blunter. ‘What a strange, barbaric lot,’ she sighed in a letter to her brother about the ‘cousins’. ‘So well up in bodily civilization and so dismally lacking in mind. They are really – the ones we contact at least – great over-grown wild adolescents.’

The disappointment was mutual. Ann Wood arrived in England as a twenty-four-year-old flying instructor infused with transatlantic solidarity by what she had seen in newsreels and heard in the CBS radio broadcasts of Edward R. Murrow. But the Brits and Britishness quickly drove her nuts. At first she gave them the benefit of the doubt. Landing in Liverpool a month after Dorothy Furey, she was impressed by the sight of ‘fifty cheery little men’ from HM Customs and Excise who came aboard her ship, a French Canadian freighter called the Indochinois . They were ‘wonderful – didn’t open a thing’. But once ashore she was immediately struck by ‘the blackness and dirt … and then the poverty’ of Britain.

She was unimpressed by the ‘pretence’ of the British labourer in his shirt and tie and ‘inevitable tan raincoat which is black and shiny with grease’; by the ‘puny moustaches’ on so many supposedly stiff upper lips; by the lack of variety on the BBC, not just compared with back home but also with German radio, to which she also listened; by the ‘utter and complete mess’ of the White Waltham canteen; and above all by the unwarranted superiority complex of the British officer class, which was happy to blame America for anything and everything while its members blithely gamed the system for a few extra petrol coupons. As she wrote more than once during her first British summer, when rain and mandatory navigation classes kept her grounded for days at a time, ‘sometimes I wonder about this war’.

The British, it seems, wondered less. (This, too, exasperated Wood. Her diary is peppered with pleas to her hard-pressed hosts to ‘sacrifice less and THINK more’.) But then, for the British, the war was a much simpler matter of life and death.

A few weeks after Ann Wood disembarked at Liverpool, another smart young woman took off from White Waltham in a strong crosswind. She was flying a low-winged monoplane with an open cockpit called a Miles Magister, and her assignment was to familiarise herself with southern England. She was to land at Henlow, then fly over RAF Debden in Essex, head north towards Wattisham in Suffolk, land again at Sywell near Northampton and be back at White Waltham in time for tea. That day, she got no further than Debden.

Diana Barnato was an exceptional, intuitive pilot who once landed a Typhoon at 230 mph with a clear view of the runway beneath her feet because the underside of the plane had been torn off in mid-air. She was also lucky, and very rich. The daughter of British motor-racing champion Woolf Barnato, and granddaughter of a South African diamond tycoon who had provided amply for his descendants before being ‘lost’ over the side of the SS Christiana somewhere off Namibia, Diana felt just enough fear to survive. But not much more.

High over Debden that April morning the wind began to throw the Magister around as if preparing to snap its fabric wings in two. She decided to land, and made her way unannounced towards the aerodrome buildings.

Thanks to her parallel existence as a socialite it was rare for Miss Barnato to enter an RAF mess and not know a face or two, and Debden did not disappoint. She immediately recognised Sas de Mier, a Mexican air gunner then flying with the RAF in Bristol Blenheims over northern Germany. He introduced her over lunch to ‘a well-built, thickset young man, dark with blue eyes [and] one of the worst haircuts I had ever seen’. This was Squadron Leader Humphrey Gilbert of the Humphrey Gilberts of Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire. ‘We got along fine,’ Diana recalled.

Gilbert had the Magister’s spark plugs removed and Diana was forced to spend three days at Debden, in which time she and Gilbert fell in love. Within three weeks they were engaged. Within a month, Gilbert was dead. He had survived the Battle of Britain to be killed giving a corpulent air traffic controller a lift in his Spitfire. As the ATA women were soon to learn, there was no spare room in a Spitfire cockpit even for the slimmest of them. Humphrey Gilbert, with a whole extra body in his lap, had found out too late that he couldn’t pull the stick back. The aircraft barely left the ground.