FEMALE pilots who risked their lives flying Spitfires during the Second World War are to be honoured for their bravery.
The women, members of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), played a crucial role in the war effort by ferrying aircraft from factories to airfields across Britain, freeing up the RAF's male pilots for operations abroad.
Flying unarmed, and without
wireless or instrument training, they were at the mercy of both the weather and the Luftwaffe, and one in ten members of the ATA died for their country.
Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, is expected to make an announcement today about the survivors, awarding them a special badge of honour in recognition of their wartime work.
Although the women did not play a part in the Battle of Britain, without their expertise in delivering planes to RAF squadrons to clear the skies of German bombers, the battle would never have got off the ground.
Freydis Sharland, 87, from Oxfordshire, is one of only 15 women pilots still alive. She told how she took up the government's offer to subsidise her local flying club, giving her the chance to fly. "You were aware of the mortality rate and you were told when your friends were killed," she said. "You had so much work to do…you just had to get on with it."
The ATA was the brainchild of Gerard d'Erlanger, a British Airways director who realised in the summer of 1939 that hundreds of aircraft would need to be positioned for the coming war. At first, the pilots were all men who were ineligible for the RAF, but later the call went out for women to do their bit.
Mr Brown was approached recently and asked whether the ATA, which also included men deemed unfit for active service, could be given some formal recognition.
Nigel Griffiths, the Labour MP for Edinburgh South, whose father was a navigator during the war, took up the cause. "These women combined bravery with modesty," he said. "Without them, Britain could well have fallen to the Luftwaffe."
Typists, actresses and ballerinas whose courage kept Allies flyingON A wall in a house in North Berwick hangs a note written in lipstick by one of the most remarkable Spitfire pilots of the Second World War. The house belongs to her nephew, Lord James Douglas Hamilton, and his aunt, Wendy Sale-Barker, is one of the unsung heroes of that war.
Aunt Wendy was a pre-war daredevil skier and flier. An actress's daughter who won a competition for flying lessons, she captained the British Ski Team in the infamous 1936 Olympics. In 1932, Wendy crashed her Gipsy Moth on the way to Capetown. She crashed again on her way back. Badly injured, she passed a message, written in lipstick and requesting help, to a Masai herdsman. It worked and, in spite of a broken back, Wendy lived to fly again.
Scotland was the unlikely point of departure for many of the women pilots rejected by the RAF on grounds of gender, but who made their mark by ferrying more than 300,000 fighters and bombers from aircraft factories to the key airfields involved in the Battle of Britain and liberation of Europe and the Far East.
These women served in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). Their peacetime professions ranged from typist to actress and sheep farmer to ballerina. They served alongside retired male fighter aces from the First World War and male commercial pilots rejected by the RAF.
In total, 167 women and more than 1,000 men kept our front-line supplied with planes – hundreds of thousands of them. And they flew damaged aircraft back to the factories for repair. These aircraft were not fitted with radio or arms and were defenceless if attacked.
Scotland's strategic role in the air war was a vital one. Prestwick was the main Atlantic bridge, receiving US bombers from 1941 under lend-lease, and more bombers and Grumman Wildcat fighters after the American fleet was bombed in Pearl Harbor and the US joined the war.
However, some American women pilots did not wait for the US to abandon its neutrality. They joined the ATA in 1942 without incurring the displeasure of their government, since the auxiliaries were not part of the UK military's flying services.
From Prestwick, the brave pilots of the ATA ferried their planes south – often in atrocious conditions.
Prestwick also sent planes to defend our northern sea routes. Betty Keith-Jopp recalls how she flew a Barracuda torpedo-bomber from Prestwick to Lossiemouth and had to ditch in the Firth of Forth. As it settled on the seabed, she calmly unhooked the canopy, undid her harness and floated to the surface. Her remarkable uncle, Stewart, also flew in the ATA, in spite of losing an arm and an eye flying in the First World War.
The ATA had its share of characters. The portly Glaswegian patent agent Douglas Fairweather could barely squeeze into a Spitfire. He flew Ansons, the minibus of the ATA which taxied pilots back to base after they delivered their warplanes.
In 1941, he was flying a group of Englishmen south and barked the instruction: "All passengers stand up!" While they were on their feet, he advised them, "When we're passing over Bannockburn laddie, every bloody Englishman has to stand up."
Douglas perished later that year while flying a badly injured airman to hospital.
His wife, Margaret, was also a pilot in the ATA. She too died, during a forced landing.
Lettice Curtis was one of the most prolific female pilots, flying more than 400 four-engine bombers and over 150 of the legendary Mosquitos – which my father flew in during the war.
After the war these women – and men – just faded back into civilian life. They received no special honours, no campaign medal, no badge of valour. And for six decades, their exploits have gone unrecognised, while the Bevin Boys and the Land Women have had their rightful dues.
Churchill's minister of aircraft production, Lord Beaverbrook, summed up the ATA's achievements at the end of the war, telling 12,000 guests at the farewell pageant at its HQ, White Waltham: "They were soldiers fighting in the struggle just as completely as if they had been on the battlefront."
• Nigel Griffiths is the Labour MP for South Edinburgh
The full article contains 1061 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
