their bit’. Margaret would only venture that she had done her bit for England – and then only if pushed. But Ann was quite comfortable with the idea that she’d done hers for freedom; for a way of life she consciously held dear. She arrived in Liverpool in May 1942, one of twenty-five American women to join the ATA. She flew warplanes continuously until the end of 1945 and she told stories of craziness and courage that I had never heard from our side of the flower bed in Sussex; stories of upside-down engine failure and squeezing under bridges at high tide; of dodging U-boats and romancing Earls and cooling beer down for the Atlantic ferry boys by flying it to 10,000 feet. It turned out that she had also kept a meticulous, clear-eyed diary that serves as a case study of fearlessness, and of mutual Anglo-American incomprehension.
Ann died as this book was being written, and it would have benefited from her criticism. But she and her fellow Spitfire women still deserve to be remembered for the quiet revolutionaries they were; I hope this helps.
Monday, 22 September 1941 was a miserable day for flying. Low cloud covered England from Bristol to the Scottish borders. Where the overcast thinned an opaque autumn haze still blurred the horizon in every direction, and over the Midlands it mixed with smog from the munitions factories, turning the barrage balloons from a deterrent into an almighty trap. Even so, at about three in the afternoon, a lone Spitfire took off from Prestwick and headed south.
It climbed over the Ayrshire hills, then sped down the Nith valley to Dumfries and crossed the Solway Firth. It picked up the main west coast railway line at Carlisle and followed it past Oxenholme to Appleby, then headed east through the Pennines in search of clearer skies. Visibility did improve, but not by much. Reaching the London-to-Edinburgh line just south of Darlington, the plane turned south again and pressed on through the murk, England slipping beneath it as the enormous Merlin engine in its nose steadily drained its 90-gallon tanks.
The Spitfire was running almost on empty when, soon after 5 p. m., it descended towards Maidenhead and landed safely at what had been the peacetime home of the De Havilland School of Flying at White Waltham in the Berkshire countryside. It was now headquarters of the ATA. The figure who eased herself out of the cockpit once she had taxied to the dispersal area and cut the engine was perhaps the finest woman pilot then flying for the Western Allies. There was no shortage of contenders in both Britain and America, and as Mother Russia fought for survival against the Nazi onslaught the following year her daughters excelled in the air, even in combat. But they had no-one quite like Lettice Curtis.
She was tall and slim, with angular features and a tentative smile. She was a triple Oxford blue (in tennis, swimming and lacrosse) with a degree in mathematics and a reputation, even at twenty-three, for extreme impatience with anyone she thought deserved it. Stepping off the wing of her Spitfire in the dark blue uniform of the Air Transport Auxiliary, she took her delivery chit to the operations room beside White Waltham’s grass airstrip and handed it over with nothing much to report. No-one had been killed. No aircraft had been damaged. There had been no sightings of the enemy even though the entire route was within range of the Luftwaffe and bombing raids were still routine a year after the Battle of Britain. No-one had even tried a loop or a roll for the hell of it – and that was the point. No-one else had been flying.
For most pilots the day had been a washout. That meant unflyable; not worth the risk of ditching in the Wash or sudden death on the slopes of Black Cwm or Shap Fell. In particular, a group of American pilots based at White Waltham, all of them men, had tried taking off that morning. Every one of them turned back.
‘It was many weeks later that I learned this, and of the consternation caused by the arrival of a female in a Spit’,’ Lettice Curtis wrote, and the sentence is laden with meaning. ‘Consternation’ is an exquisite understatement for the pique that a group of pilots apprenticed in barnstorming and crop-dusting across the American mid-west would actually have felt. And Curtis’s satisfaction at having pulled off what the Yanks had balked at may simply have been too intense to put into words. For she was a remorseless competitor despite an expensive education in schools that valued refinement above all, and she had an unhappy knack of seeming less than cordial to Americans. Most of a lifetime later I sat down with another woman pilot in a retirement home in Oregon to talk about her wartime flying. On most subjects she was thoughtful and diplomatic, but when I mentioned Curtis her first words were: ‘Lettice always looked on Americans as if they were a bad smell.’ Which was unfortunate, because more were on their way.
The war by this time was two years old; two years in which tenacity in the air had saved Britain from an invasion across the Channel, and superiority in the air had become Churchill’s obsession. On 12 July 1941 he had sent a note to Sir Charles Craven, Secretary of State for Air, under the command ‘Action this day’. It ended with this peroration:
We must aim at nothing less than having an Air Force twice as strong as the German Air Force by the end of 1942. This ought not to be impossible if a renewed vast effort is made now. It is the very least that can be contemplated, since no other way of winning the war has yet been proposed.
As a direct result of this memo, a gigantic chain of production was willed into being that would eventually rain fire on Dresden and give Eisenhower the air support without which D-Day would have been in vain. At one end of this chain were the bauxite mines of the British Empire and the Americas, from which the raw material for aluminium was dug in ever-increasing quantities. The next link was one of the great flukes of economic history – the astonishing potential for aluminium production created by the building of the huge Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams across the Columbia River in the American north-west in the depths of the Depression. Aluminium is produced by electrolysis; without the dams the Allies would have been hard-pressed to build the air force Churchill was demanding. As it was, from Everett in Washington state, now home town to the Boeing 747, to Castle Bromwich and Southampton, the miraculous silver metal, which in the nineteenth century had been as costly as gold, was banged and moulded into more aircraft in 1944 alone than Germany could produce in the entire war. Initially their cost was met from the Lend Lease loans signed by Roosevelt from October 1941 onwards as a way of aiding Britain without violating US neutrality. Then Pearl Harbor consigned that neutrality to history and rendered the whole question of payment secondary. Pilots were queuing up to fly the aircraft into combat. All that was missing were people to deliver them to the front line.
The first beneficiaries of this desperate need for ferry pilots were, inevitably, men. Thirty of them had been recruited in September 1939 on the initiative of Gerard ‘Pop’ d’Erlanger, an air-minded young merchant banker with an immaculate parting and a strong sense of duty. D’Erlanger was also a director of British Airways and a keen private pilot, and had been worrying for at least a year that hostilities in Europe would bring an acute pilot shortage if flyers like himself could not be used.
‘Dear Balfour,’ he had written in May 1938 to Harold Balfour, then Parliamentary Under Secretary for Air, ‘I know how busy you must be and therefore have hesitated in worrying you, but there is a question which for some time has been puzzling me …’. Was there a reservists’ Air Force in which people like him could enlist? The answer was no, and so, in August 1939, d’Erlanger suggested forming such a unit from holders of private licences with at least 250 hours in the air. The Director General of Civil Aviation, Sir Francis Shelmerdine, agreed, and put d’Erlanger in charge of it. One thousand licence-holders were contacted. One hundred of them replied, and thirty were selected after interviews and flight tests held at British Airways’ wartime base at Whitchurch, outside Bristol. The first intake included a publican, a motorcycling champion and an animal lover who had recently flown back from Africa with two new pets – a cheetah and a chimpanzee.
D’Erlanger had envisaged the ATA as an aerial courier service for VIPs, medicines and the wounded, but even in the Phoney War his pilots were more in demand for ferrying. They called themselves the Ancient and Tattered Airmen because