Cochran was trying to be helpful to Britain, but most of all she was out to confound the sceptics at home: ‘I went to England to prove to General Arnold and others in Washington, DC, that American women pilots were just as capable as English women pilots, ‘she said. ‘Twenty-five young American women and I did it to prove a large point to the folks back home.’
The announcement that Miss Cochran (she was Mrs Odlum only in private life) would be recruiting women for the ATA was made at a dinner she hosted at the St Regis Hotel in New York on 23 January 1942. The details had been ironed out at the White House the week before with Eleanor Roosevelt, ever the friend of women flyers, and a Captain Norman Edgar of the ATA. Cochran received him at her apartment before the dinner for cocktails and for photographs – which were released to the press that day and showed him looking variously condescending and bemused. In one of them either Cochran or the photographer persuaded Captain Edgar to join her at the globe in her trophy room and stare down at it, lit from below, as if planning to take over the world. Edgar earned his supper at the St Regis, however, thrilling his female audience with the news that some of the aircraft the Americans would be flying would have guns loaded and ready to fire; and predicting that if ‘Jerry’ sprang a surprise attack on any of them, they’d shoot back ‘just as fast as a man’.
Cochran was desperate to retain sole charge of the project. Her husband’s friend and publicist, Harry Bruno, who was also a neighbour of theirs in California, released a statement the same day outlining the recruitment plan and asking that applications for service in ‘the Cochran unit’ be sent to her newly established headquarters in Rockefeller Plaza. In fact, 125 women whom she considered prime candidates on the strength of flying records lodged with the Civil Aeronautics Administration in Washington had already received telegrams before the next day’s papers hit the streets. But Cochran would soon find that she had no monopoly on initiative.
Five months earlier, the spectacular Dorothy Furey had been killing time and hoping for stray joyride passengers at the airport outside New Orleans where she had learnt to fly. She was surprised to see two uniformed British officers walk in out of the sun. They had been observing US war games on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico, but Furey was more interested in the rumour they passed on that a British air organisation might soon be flight-testing women in Montreal. Furey instantly ingratiated herself with these unlikely messengers. ‘I said, “Well, what are your plans?” And they said, “We have to go to Washington, and we have to be there about a week, and then we’re going over to Montreal.” So I said, “How about if I pick you up in Washington?”’
The two men accepted this remarkable offer. That gave Furey about four days to quit her job, pack up her New Orleans life and head north for the nation’s capital in a nearly-new Studebaker she had picked up for interest-only payments of just $25 a month, and of which she was immensely proud. She kept her rendezvous with her new British friends and drove them to Montreal. There she became, by several months, the first American woman to be cleared to ferry British warplanes, and the only one to do so before Pearl Harbor.
In a sense this was only fair. Though a regular truant from high school, Furey had always been ahead of the game: she read Mein Kampf at seventeen, and when Hitler invaded the Rhineland the following year she wrote an editorial in the Louisiana Women’s Weekly forecasting war. But her speed off the mark infuriated Cochran.
‘She [Cochran] was livid with the way I went to Montreal without her stamp of approval,’ Furey recalled shortly before her death sixty-five years later. Then she told a story about how Jackie Cochran had faked an application form from Furey in her anxiety to show history that every last one of her twenty-five pilots was really ‘hers’:
It had all my statistics, the number of hours I had, everything … She never filed it. She was afraid to do that, but one of the girls who worked with her told me about it. [Cochran] wanted to make out that she had sent me the job, and many, many years later when we were both living in the same luxury apartment building in New York City I thought maybe I’d ask her and her husband up for a drink. She said no, she didn’t feel well.
Furey never liked Cochran. She felt she owed her nothing and she disowned her as soon as she arrived in Britain. But others owed Cochran the defining years of their lives, and never forgot it.
Ann Wood was one. Cochran’s telegram found her at home in Waldeboro, Maine, where she was living with her widowed mother while teaching cadets to fly in Piper Cub seaplanes as part of a government pilot training scheme. She had wanted to go to war as a reporter – and had written to all the names she admired in the New York Times to find out how to go about it. They had not been particularly helpful, and flying seemed a perfectly suitable alternative. Ann telephoned New York immediately and was summoned to the Cochran-Odlum apartment at River House. A Northeast Airlines Dakota from Portland and a taxi from La Guardia put her outside Cochran’s front door feeling, unusually for Wood, ‘a little timid’.
Inside, like Captain Edgar before her, she was invited to admire the trophy room. It had a giant inlaid marble compass on the floor and a glass screen shielding a wall of memorabilia that included a cigarette case encrusted with rubies and emeralds (a gift from Floyd). The emeralds formed Jackie’s winning route across America in the Bendix Trophy race; the rubies were her refuelling stops.
The whole place was humming. Odlum and Cochran each had separate staffs and tended to work from home. Wood struck Cochran as sufficiently presentable – each of her girls would have to serve as ambassadors as well as pilots – but insufficiently experienced in the air. Cochran said she’d be in touch. But it would only take a few candidates to fail the flight test in Montreal for Wood’s name to get to the top of Cochran’s list. When in May it did, she bade farewell to her mother and left for Canada: ‘My mother was very pleased that I’d managed to get going, that I was accepted and that I was going to do a useful job,’ Wood later reflected; ‘she was very keen about the war. She believed in it. She hated Hitler.’
Roberta Sandoz’s telegram had to be redirected in order to reach her. It was sent to the address she gave as home – Evans, a place twenty miles from the Canadian border in north-eastern Washington state. Evans was the last town on the Columbia River before the river slowed and broadened to fill its own valley along 120 miles of its length, held back by the Grand Coulee Dam. On reaching Evans, the telegram had to go upriver to a giant plant run by the Spokane-Portland Cement Company, just south of the border, where Roberta Sandoz’s Swiss stepfather was chief engineer. His status meant that she was not raised in Cochran-style destitution, but she still rode to school on a horse and the camp was still a hard day’s drive on unmetalled roads to the nearest sidewalk, in Spokane.
‘We lived at a great excavation place where limestone was dug out of the mountain and shipped to Spokane, where it was crushed up,’ she told me. ‘It wasn’t a town. There were three houses – a bunkhouse for the men who worked there, a cookhouse to feed them, our house and that was it.’ That was the isolation from which Roberta’s first real escape came, aged ten, in a barnstormer’s aeroplane above a little town called Marcus that has since been drowned by the Grand Coulee Dam. Before then she had paid annual visits to Spokane with her family to buy new shoes, but this was different: ‘It changes your perspective of the world, once you see it from the air. This was the sensation that interested me: a wonderful feeling of expansion.’
Sandoz left the camp to go to college – having dashed her mother’s hopes of making ‘a little Lady’ out of her – and set her heart on seeing the world. Her first job was as a San Francisco social worker, near Chinatown on Telegraph Hill. ‘Life began for me in San Francisco,’ she said. She led gymnastics classes for immigrant children, and broke up their fights, and in her spare time made a nuisance of herself among the window dressers of the Gump department store on Post Street, pestering them with questions about flower preserving and English country life. She also took an even
ing class in aeronautics and was rewarded for her diligence by being recommended for the cut-price Civilian Pilot Training Programme.
Talking in her room in a bustling high-rise retirement community in Oregon, Sandoz sounded a little dreamy. She had ventured to suggest on the telephone that she still had all her marbles, and she had a bucketful: a steel-trap mind that might have been inclined to rage against the dying of the light but for a rather humbling wisdom. Recalling her pilot training she laughed and rubbed her hands involuntarily. ‘Oh!’ she said, as if about to sing:
It was so exciting learning to fly. I get goosebumps just remembering. I had one forced landing while I was learning. My own darn fault. Ran out of gasoline and landed in a cow pasture. And the operator, the man who owned the airplane, was so delighted that I hadn’t wrecked it that he gave me five free hours. Do you know how much that represented? That was better than a diamond bracelet. Five hours. It was an overwhelming gift to me. I quit my social worker job and I worked for that operator, took letters, swept the office, gassed the aeroplanes, anything.
That gift took her to Belmont, a grass airfield halfway to San Jose. When she completed her training she went looking for any paid employment that would keep her in the air. She found a job in Corcoran in the Great Central Valley, where a farmer took her on to crop-dust and scare off pests in an old Porterfield Tandem that she had had to buy herself. It was in Corcoran – best known today for its exceptionally brutal penitentiary – that the Cochran telegram caught up with her.
‘Those were the days when you received a telegram, you sat down before you opened it,’ Sandoz recalled. ‘Telegrams were a couple of lines, usually bad news. Well, in Cochran style this was a page and a half. The stuff that really thrilled was the word “secret” in there: “Do not contact the press.” This was undercover stuff.’
In fact Sandoz was one step ahead of Cochran. She had already made enquiries as to how she might use her flying skills in the war effort. As a child she had spent summers in British Columbia and grown fond of what she thought of as British orderliness and accents: ‘I suddenly began wanting to go and help them win their war. I made myself ridiculous writing to the Royal Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force and the British Air Ministry, and got no useful response until someone in Canada said get in touch with Jacqueline Cochran.’
She replied at once to the telegram and the madly mobile Cochran flew to the nearest respectable airport in Fresno, California, to meet her. Ann Wood, no stranger to East Coast glitz, had found herself swept along by Cochran’s can-do, must-do dynamism; but Roberta Sandoz was less worldly and more inclined to doubt herself. Knowing something of Cochran’s reputation, she had made an effort with her clothes and hair and even plastered on a layer of unfamiliar make-up. The result: ‘I think I impressed her as the wrong type of person – a floozy’. Cochran misread the bundle of nerves and curiosity in front of her and lectured her sternly on the cold and hunger that came with the work she had in mind. She promised nothing, and Roberta Sandoz went back to inspecting crops in her Porterfield Tandem.
Luckily for her, Harry Smith, the check pilot whom Pop d’Erlanger had assigned to test the women Cochran was sending up to Montreal, was finding a lot of would-be recruits too bumptious for his taste. They had the hours – or they would never have made it onto Cochran’s list – but he just wasn’t passing them. Like the women climbing in and out of his big radial-engined Harvard AT6 trainer at Montreal’s Dorval airport, Harry Smith was American. But this did not mean any special favours. On the contrary, he made no secret of his view that a woman’s place was in the kitchen. If you were smart, you understood that arguing with him was likely to be construed as evidence of inability to fly. ‘He was not a monster,’ Bobby recalled. ‘He just wasn’t going to be pushed around by a lot of pushy women.’
Cochran had promised Sandoz nothing, but neither had she forgotten her. The invitation to meet Harry Smith came through in the spring of 1942, and with it a one-way train ticket for the Santa Fe Chief to New York, from where onward transport would be arranged to Montreal. By this time America had entered the war and Sandoz had become engaged to a navy cadet bound for the Pacific. She drove home with what possessions she could fit into his car, and told her parents she would write often and be careful. Then she drove back to California to catch her train.
Dorothy Furey cooled her heels in Montreal for the whole autumn of 1941. She had beaten all of Cochran’s girls out there, but then had to wait for them before embarking for England. There were two consolations: an ex-boyfriend now based at Dorval with the Atlantic Ferry Command had managed to find her a smart apartment in the city, and the grateful British taxpayer was paying for it. Furey spent most of her time in the library, reading up on her new employers. ‘When I got to England I knew more British history than the Brits did,’ she said proudly in her sunroom in Virginia, looking west towards the Shenandoah Mountains. ‘I could tell you every King and Prime Minister from Alfred and the cakes right on up to the present time.’ Little did she know then that one British Prime Minister not yet on the list would fall in love with her and in the process risk a career that took the world back to the brink of war at Suez. Meanwhile, she read history books and watched the leaves turn gold along the St Lawrence River, and waited.
In early January, Jackie Cochran set off from New York for England on a BOAC flying boat, travelling via Baltimore, Bermuda and Lisbon. She was determined to be in London before her charges and to meet them in style. Her trip was not a pleasant one, however. She had recently developed a suppurating leg ulcer which needed constant dressing and dousing with sulphur powder.
By February 1942, Cochran’s girls had started arriving in Montreal in numbers. Depending on their staggered departure dates for England, which started in the spring, they stayed at the Mount Royal Hotel for weeks or even months. And they partied hard on expenses. There were tales of all-night benders with the Atlantic ferry boys, and of shower curtains filled with water and dropped bomb-like down the hotel stairwell. Not everyone took part. Ann Wood found the whole scene unedifying and went back to Maine to wait for her crossing, while Roberta Sandoz and her new friend Emily Chapin, a fellow recruit from Rye, New York, sensibly took Harry Smith out for a quiet drink and urged him to talk about himself. (He passed them both.)
In fairness to the young lady hooligans at the Mount Royal, they may have wanted to distract themselves from the fact that, unlike Cochran, they would be travelling to England by ship when there was no surer way of tempting fate. Dorothy Furey had been told that the transatlantic convoy before hers had lost six of its ten ships. She would also have known that eleven male pilots had drowned the previous year en route to the ATA when their ship, the SS Nerissa, was sunk 200 miles from the English coast. Furey was told not to expect other ships to pick up survivors if her ship, the Beaver Hill, was hit, since that was what the U-boats would be waiting for. The ATA recruits were divided into four groups of five and one (the first) of four, so that they could not all be lost to one torpedo as on the Nerissa. In Furey’s group were Louise Schuurman, a Dutch national also from New Orleans whose father was an honorary consul there; Winnie Pierce, from upstate New York; and Virginia Farr, from West Orange, New Jersey.
The Beaver Hill spent the final days of January mustering with the rest of its convoy in bitter cold in the relative safety of the river downstream of Quebec, waiting until Canadian submarine spotters judged it the least bad moment to make a dash through the blockade of the Gulf of St Lawrence. Furey was fatalistic. ‘I had no fear,’ she said: the ship had carried coal and been converted to a troop carrier,
so we were all well below the waterline. I figured that if we were going to be hit we weren’t going to get out, especially considering we were five girls and the rest were men, and they weren’t going to stand back and say ‘you go first’. So I just didn’t think about it. Besides, I kind of felt nothing was really going to kill me anyway just then.
Ann Wood, likewise,
gave little thought to the likelihood of drowning, even though three ships were lost in the Gulf of St Lawrence the week before her departure. She had been briefed on the shipboard routine – lifejackets at all times; no stopping if other ships in the convoy were torpedoed, even to pick up survivors. But she preferred to focus on the far horizon, and the business of pitching in as part of the war effort when she got there.
It was a fine day when at last the Indochinois, with twenty-three passengers and a ‘cherubic-looking Frenchman’ for a captain, was cleared to head towards Quebec. It was delayed again at Trois-Rivières as the previous week’s wrecks were hauled out of the shipping lanes downstream. Ann cabled her mother to let her know her ship was still afloat. After watching a group of Flying Fortresses pass overhead, heading back towards Montreal, she wrote in her diary: ‘Perhaps some day it will be my chance to have a crack at one of those crates.’
The Indochinois passed the Heights of Abraham in a line of six ships late on 16 May 1942. It was another beautiful evening, and Ann had one final farewell to remember. She had a younger sister attending a convent in Quebec not far from the Château Frontenac, the city’s most opulent hotel. The hotel rose like a citadel from the Heights on the north bank of the St Lawrence. Next to it was a lawn with a clear but distant view of anything passing along the great river below. ‘My sister was anxious to get to the Frontenac to wave to me as I went by,’ Ann said. ‘I’m not sure she ever did, but we like to pretend we saw each other. I certainly was there, hoping she was there.’
The crossing to England took nine days. The food was good, plentiful (four meals a day) and French. The atmosphere was convivial, to put it mildly. Five days out, somewhere south of Iceland, a lady passenger celebrated her birthday with a cocktail party that Wood, a dedicated Catholic, considered ‘revoltingly wild’. Her cabin mate ‘went completely animalistic and was messing about with the captain’, Ann wrote in her diary. ‘It makes me wonder whether my unawareness is due to a so-called protected life – or am I to find out that twenty-five people out of every hundred are utter fools?’
Spitfire Women of World War II Page 15