Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War II

And we continue with our American Stories. There are many significant dates in American history. May Eighth marks the anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. This is the story of the remarkable American women pilots who helped secure that victory.

I’m Becky Aikman, and I’m the author of the book Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War II. This is a story about some young women who were pilots back before World War II started, and they very much wanted to serve their country and help in the war. But the United States military would not allow women to be pilots. But they heard that they could go to Great Britain and serve there. The British were desperate for help. They were in the middle of being attacked by Germany by the air. They were being bombed relentlessly, and the United States hadn’t entered the war yet, so the British were really desperate. They could have lost the war right there. They decided to accept pilots who were foreigners and pilots who were women to do one of the most dangerous jobs of the war. Dorothy Fury was a great beauty, but she came from a poor background, and she only had an eighth-grade education. ‘I felt that this would be the only justifiable war in my lifetime,’ Dorothy later wrote. ‘So I began to think of ways in which I could be useful.’ She settled on the most dramatic role she could imagine: a pilot. ‘I didn’t envision flying combat,’ she wrote, ‘but thought that women could be useful in transporting the wounded to hospitals and in general helping transport planes wherever they were needed.’ This was a pipe dream. Well under a thousand women in the country held pilots’ licenses at the time. Many women didn’t even drive cars. Besides, the United States wouldn’t enter the war for a few more years, and women were not permitted to fly for U.S. forces anyway. But Dorothy wanted to prepare, should the chance arise. She drove out to an airport on Lake Pontchatrain in New Orleans and spotted a sign: ‘Maynard School of Aviation.’ It wasn’t easy for a woman to talk her way into flying lessons in that era, let alone a woman who couldn’t afford them, but Dorothy knew well the effect she had on men, and it gave her remarkable self-assurance. She approached the owner with cool reserve and told him she wanted to learn, but couldn’t pay. ‘Is that your car?’ he asked, pointing outside to the beat-up Ford City she had bought with her newspaper salary. ‘Yes,’ Dorothy said, ‘and it’s free and clear.’ He gave it a glance. ‘Well, you give me your car,’ he said, ‘and I will teach you to fly.’ When she went to England, she decided this was her chance to reinvent herself. She managed to pass as sort of an American aristocrat by having an imperious attitude and recycling a single red party dress, and eventually worked her way into the British aristocracy. They went to England in early 1942 and joined what was called the Air Transport Auxiliary. This was a unit that took brand new aircraft from factories and flew them to frontline airfields of the Royal Air Force. They also took damaged planes that had been damaged in battle and flew them back for repair. These were planes had missing doors, missing windows, bullet holes through them. There was little understanding of what was wrong with those planes until they would be high in the air. One reason that the British had women performing these duties was to keep the pilots who were trained to fly in the war free to fly in the war, and to have this work done by someone else so that it would save the lives of these pilots who were doing bombing, who were piloting fighters.

So, it was a very, very dangerous job that took a great deal of skill because the pilots were expected to fly up to one hundred forty-seven different models of aircraft with very little advanced training. They often got to the airfield and were handed an aircraft that they had never seen before. They were given a one-page list of instructions, and they had a few minutes to take off and go. Here’s a letter that one of the pilots home during the war: ‘Mother, if you could know how happy I am when I fly a plane. I never feel so completely close to God as when I’m up in the blue. So, if you ever get a message that I’ve been in a crack-up and have been killed, don’t grieve for me any more than you can possibly help. Just know that I died the way I wanted to.’ As a result of this and many other dangers of flying in wartime, one in seven pilots who did this kind of work were killed and crashes, and almost all of them, at one point or another, had to make spectacular saves when engines failed or they flew into a cloud bank where they had no visibility. One day, Hazel Jane Rains, who had been a former stunt pilot back in Georgia, was flying a Spitfire fighter on what should have been a normal mission. Suddenly, the engine of the Spitfire failed right at the moment that she was hurled into a cloud bank and lost all visibility. So the aircraft gradually tipped on its side to the extent that it entered a vertical spin that was going to drive it straight into the ground. When she did break out, she was very low, and many people would have been unable to do anything, but Rains was a stunt pilot, and she had performed spins in air shows and knew how to get out of one. She worked very hard to break the spin and get the aircraft parallel to the ground, but it was still too late. She said to herself, ‘I’ve had it,’ right before she crashed into a cottage in a small town. When people in the town came to the wreck in hopes of, as they said, ‘digging the dead man out,’ they opened the canopy on the Spitfire, and they were shocked when Hazel Rains popped up, blood streaming down her face, but clearly alive and speaking with the accent of a woman from the American South. They drew back in shock, not only that the pilot was alive, but that the pilot was a woman — an American woman. It was the kind of impression these pilots made wherever they went. They were mostly quite young. Some were crop-dusters, some were debutantes who were wealthy and flew for pleasure. Some were college girls. Some were performers in flying circuses. One of them performed a mock striptease in an air show where she would fly over the field and throw out items of clothing as the audience cheered below. When she landed and was fully clothed, they were usually disappointed. But they were a real mix of backgrounds, rich and whore, educated and uneducated, mostly young, mostly in their twenties; Couple in their thirties. Ann Wood was twenty-three years old and a college graduate. She wanted to have a career in aviation, but she didn’t have as much experience as some of the others. However, she did have the kind of personality that made her a natural leader. She had been the president of her college class. When she got to England, she emerged as the person who spoke up for the Americans and looked after them. After someone was injured in a crash, Ann would go to the hospital and make sure they were taken care of. Ann Wood was a practicing Catholic. Every Sunday morning, regardless of where she was, whether in some remote airfield or in London, she would walk off in long distances to the nearest Catholic church to attend Mass. She never missed it. She was based with a lot of men who liked to carry on hijinks in the air, and one day two of them said, ‘We’re taking Spitfires to the West Coast, and why don’t you come along and follow and do what we do?’ So she said, ‘Okay.’ They were going over a river, and suddenly the two in front of her swooped down very low over the water at a high speed, heading toward a bridge, and gradually realize they are going to fly under that bridge. This would be strictly forbidden behavior. She knew she shouldn’t do it, but it was oh-so tempting.

And you’ve been listening to Becky Aikman tell the story of the women pilots of World War II who in the end found themselves in England, at first. Because the American military, well, they didn’t have a place for women at the time. Becky Aikman is telling the story. She’s the author of Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War II. And my goodness, Darroth, the Olsen story is just phenomenal. So too is Anne Woods and this mix of women, as were the army, civilian, and professional alike that fought against the Nazi war machine and the Japanese Empire. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of the women who flew in World War II, here are now American Story. And we continue with our American Stories, and Becky Aikman sharing the stories of the American women who flew in the face of danger. During World War II. When we last left off, Ann Wood was about to maybe fly under a bridge with two pilots who brought her along for the ride. Let’s find out what happens.

They were going over a river, and suddenly the two in front of her swooped down very low over the water at a high speed, heading toward a bridge, and gradually realize they are going to fly under that bridge. This would be strictly forbidden behavior. She knew she shouldn’t do it, but it was oh-so tempting. She saw the first one shoot under it, the second one shot under, and she said, ‘I’m going for it!’ She went down low over the water. She shot under that bridge with little room to spare. It was quite exhilarating. So the next time she took a Spitfire on that same route, she said, ‘By myself, I’ll do it myself this time.’ So she went down low. She was going fast. She was heading toward the bridge, and suddenly she realized the river was a tidal river that could go up and down as much as seventy feet time to time of day, and it was at high tide, so the opening to get under that bridge was really small. It was too late to change her mind. She concentrated; she steered very carefully. She got under the bridge. That was the last time she did that particular maneuver. But she was quite well known around her aerodrome for being the person who had the courage to do that, and she was always kind of proud of it. When they got to England, the British were pretty skeptical because they found the Americans to be rather raucous and a little wild. Most of the British women who flew were aristocrats who could afford to take flying lessons, and they assumed the Americans would be similar. But in fact, they were a wilder crowd, and they were enjoying the freedom that they had being far from home and being in the middle of a war. They were able to reinvent themselves because they were far from home and they were living outside the expectations that people had for women in the 1940s. I found through their diaries and letters very personal accounts of what it was like to be a woman at that time doing such extraordinary work. That they were living in a bubble that ended for many women after the war, but they took full advantage of it at the time. When the Americans first arrived at the airbase that was the headquarters for the transport unit, they had been traveling for weeks on ships. They had been on trains. They were really tired and not looking at their best. The workers at the aerodrome, mostly men, lined up to gawk at the arriving Americans and made no effort to hide their disappointment. ‘Hollywood had given them a picture of American womanhood, and it was all blonde, all glamour, all singing and dancing,’ wrote one of the British flyers. The men were expecting Ginger Rogers or Betty Gable, but got reality instead. Virginia Farr remembered, quote, ‘the walk past the windows filled with silent male faces, all dropping as they saw the travel-stained girls arriving.’ ‘You could feel their thoughts: “Why, one’s fat; one’s definitely strapping. No glamour, no glamour anywhere.”’ That was actually not true, because some of the American women were very attractive, and news photographers loved to photograph them next to the planes. This was just a down moment for the group. They were ultimately quite celebrated by the British public, which appreciated everything that these women did, how brave they were. They were invited to the country homes of lords and ladies. They, on their leave days, went into London and danced in blackouts. During the blackout in nightclubs that had coverings over the windows that they wouldn’t be subject to bombing, they lived very fully when they weren’t flying. When they were flying, they made it a very important contribution to the war. World War II was an aerial war to the extent that no other previous war had ever been. The flying, the bombing, the fighter planes that were used to protect the country, the bombers that were used to take the battle to the continent and ultimately to Berlin were a huge phenomenon and unusual in the history of war. So getting a huge supply of these aircraft where they needed to go was a crucial element of the struggle. Themerican women took on a heavy duty before D-Day to get aircraft into place. During the Battle of the Bulge, they were on twenty-four-hour notice because it was a battle late in the war in early 1945, when the Germans overran the Allied forces and inflicted terrible damage and killed many soldiers, and fortunately it happened during a cold spell and bad weather, so it was very hard to get aircraft there to support them and soften up the German forces. So the transport pilots had to work very long hours and be ready to go out on a moment’s notice to get those much-needed aircraft where they had to be. During the course of my research, I was struck by how unknown these pilots are today. They were actually the very first American women to fly military aircraft, and at the time they were quite celebrated for this role. But somehow, after the war, the busy world moved on and almost completely forgot about them. When I first started to do research, it was hard to find anything. There were very few things in museums or very few things written about these American pilots who did this. The first name that I came up with of one of them was named Mary Zerbel, and I learned that her papers were at the San Diego Air and Space Museum. I went there with rather low expectations because the librarian told me that no one but me had ever asked to see these files. When I opened them up, she came alive to me. She was quite famous before the war as being the youngest woman flying instructor in the United States at the age of 19. She was featured in many newspaper stories and photographs. During the war, she also was covered around the world as being the bride in the first wedding of two Americans who were serving in the war zone before other soldiers got there.

After the war, she did more daring flying, and she was so well regarded and her life was so exciting that Lana Turner starred in a movie about Mary’s life. By the time I got to the end of the file, I found her obituary, and I saw that it was only three sentences in a newspaper in Idaho, and it mentioned nothing about her flying at all. So somehow this story was so forgotten, and I said to myself, ‘I’m on a mission now to make sure people know about this.’ People who served in the Air Transport Auxiliary, which was kind of a pedestrian name, made up other names for themselves. Some women call themselves the Always Verified Air Women, but the nickname they liked best was the Atta Girls. The American Atta Girls were an independent lot. After the war, they rarely got together, but when they did, they all agreed flying in a war in a faraway land was the best thing they ever did. Roberta Sandoz had come up with the idea for a reunion after she found herself hailed as a trailblazer at the WASP convention a couple of years before. Most of them stuck to the old story. When they answered the call to serve in 1942, they did it for themselves and for the free world. They gave no thought to advancing the status of women. But thirty-seven years later, it was clear that, however inadvertently, they had opened doors, even if some of them shut again. ‘We were unique,’ Roberta said. ‘We were aware of our options when most women were not.’

Had a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Angler, and especial thanks to Becky Aikman. She’s the author of Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War II in what’s known as the Airport Transit Auxiliary. ‘Flying into war in a faraway land is the best thing we ever did,’ one said. The story of the American women pilots of World War II. Here on Our American Stories.