The Spitfire Girls(101)
‘We did our country proud, didn’t we?’ May said, wiping her eyes.
‘We sure did,’ she whispered back, and they all embraced, holding each other tight.
‘You do know I received a medal from President Obama, don’t you?’ Lizzie said. ‘That outranks your little stunt in the air.’
May laughed. ‘She hasn’t changed a bit, has she?’
Ruby looked Lizzie in the eye. ‘Honey, I just flew a Spitfire the week of my ninetieth birthday. There’s no way you can beat that.’
‘You want to see if we can take the controls of a Halifax?’ Lizzie asked, as bright as she’d ever been, the rivalry still alive. ‘I might just win that first bomber flight second time around. What do you say?’
They all burst out laughing, heads bent together as they linked arms and walked off to find their families. Some of her friends had lost their lives in the air, had been cut down in their prime and denied the long life they’d deserved, but she’d had the privilege of living. And she’d loved every single moment of it.
We will not again look upon a women’s flying organization as experimental. We will know that they can handle our fastest fighters, our heaviest bombers; we will know that they are capable of ferrying, target towing, flying training, test flying, and the countless other activities which you have proved you can do . . . We of the Army Air Force are proud of you; we will never forget our debt to you.
—General ‘Hap’ Arnold, December 1944
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although this book is a work of fiction, it is loosely based on real women who dedicated themselves to the ATA and the WASP, and some of the situations they found themselves in during the 1940s as women fliers.
In the United States, two women were responsible for the creation of the WASP, and ultimately for women being accepted and encouraged to fly. Jacqueline ‘Jackie’ Cochran met Mrs Roosevelt and suggested that women pilots could help in the war by taking over military flying jobs, and this meeting resulted in Mrs Roosevelt writing a newspaper article stating that women pilots were ‘a weapon waiting to be used’. Despite the army disagreeing at the time, Jackie refused to give up, and General Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold asked her to deliver a twin-engine bomber across the Atlantic. At this time, the United States still wasn’t in the war, but they were sending warplanes over for use by British fliers. When Jackie successfully delivered the plane and returned home, she lunched with the president and Mrs Roosevelt, and the president himself asked her to find out how many other American women could fly well enough to handle American warplanes. General Arnold then went on to suggest that Jackie take a group of American female pilots to England to join the British women’s pilot group that was already flying non-combatant missions. Given this, Jackie’s career was a big part of my inspiration for the character Lizzie, and I’ve woven fact with fiction into some parts of Lizzie’s story.
Nancy Love was the other American woman determined to fly and see women assist in the war effort. She wasn’t as ambitious as Jackie in that she didn’t want to run a big air corps, but she was an excellent pilot and wrote to officials in 1940, suggesting that women could ferry planes for the army. The army wasn’t interested in her plan until Pearl Harbor was bombed on 7 December 1941. The army didn’t have enough men to fly combat missions and also deliver new planes, and so they announced the establishment of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron on 10 September 1942. Nobody had told Jackie of this development, and when she read about it in a newspaper, she immediately returned home to the US, shocked that a women’s squadron had been established and that she wasn’t the head of it!
On her return, General Arnold worked out a compromise: Nancy’s squadron started at the same time as Jackie’s training programme, which was called the Women’s Flying Training Detachment. By the summer of 1943, both programmes had combined into one big group – the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Despite the resounding success of the WASP, in December 1944 the programme ended, much to the disappointment of its members. Earlier in the year, Congress had defeated the bill that would have finally made the WASP part of the Army Air Forces. It wasn’t until 2010 that the leaders of Congress would present the Congressional Gold Medal to the WASP – the signing of the bill to award the medal was unanimously supported by Congress and signed in the presence of some WASPs by President Barrack Obama. The speech by General ‘Hap’ Arnold in this story, at the final graduation ceremony, includes much of what he actually said in his speech at the end of 1944.
In England, female pilots made faster progress during the early 1940s, mainly because there was such a need for experienced pilots to transport planes from a factory outside of London to Scotland. It certainly wasn’t because the general public was more accepting, as these pilots faced much criticism from all fronts, and had to prove that they deserved to be in the air. But after the Battle of Britain, during which a quarter of the country’s 1,000 pilots were either killed or seriously injured, they simply couldn’t spare RAF pilots for any non-combat flying. That’s when women ferry pilots became crucial to winning the war.
Pauline Gower, the daughter of MP Robert Gower, was an inspirational pilot who cleared the way for women in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). She was a pioneer in female aviation and insisted on women being paid equally to their male counterparts after finding out their weekly pay was 20 per cent less. Pauline welcomed Jackie Cochran to fly with them when she arrived from the United States, and although they were very different women, they respected each other’s abilities in the sky. This is another part of the story that is very much based on fact.