Read Online Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whittell - Free Book Online Page A

dumbfounded as I recognised the face that had inspired me during my brief flying career and had flitted on the world’s headlines for a decade. I rushed over to her and gushed: ‘Miss Johnson, may I have your autograph?’ She stared at me. There was a painful silence. Oh God, I wished the floor would open up and devour me. How could I have behaved so inanely? Suddenly she grinned: ‘My dear child, I’ll swap it for yours.’
    There was something else that gradually endeared Johnson to the ATA besides the return of the old adulation – the prospect offlying Spitfires. For all her experience, Wonderful Amy had never flown anything faster than a De Havilland Comet, maximum speed 200 mph. The war was forcing up speeds. By the summer of 1940, when Fighter Command’s precious Hurricanes and Spitfires were being tested daily to destruction by the Luftwaffe’s formidable Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s, the Vickers Super-marine factories in Southampton and Castle Bromwich were already turning out Mark V Spitfires capable of 400 mph when straight and level and no-one knew quite how fast in a dive.
    Johnson never flew one. She died too soon. One reason for her death, oddly, was national security. Before the war the Lorenz company in Germany had devised a beautifully simple radio navigation system based on corridors of land-based transmitters. The transmitters on one side of the corridor would broadcast, continuously, only the Morse signal for A – a dot and then a dash. Those on the other side would broadcast only the signal for N – a dash, then a dot. Suitably equipped aircraft flying straight along the corridor would know they were on course because of antennae mounted at opposite ends of their fuselages: one tuned to the N signal and one to the A. As long as each antenna was the same distance from its signal’s source, the dots and dashes would overlap into a continuous tone, dull but infinitely reassuring. If the plane drifted off this radio ‘beam’ in either direction, its antennae would slip in relation to their sources. The overlapping would become imperfect, the tone interrupted, and the pilot would be snapped out of her daydream or funk.
    If you had an ordinary voice radio you could also call up the nearest radio-equipped aerodrome and ask it where you were. Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown, the finest test pilot Britain ever produced, once did this over a fogbound patch of Kent, and it probably saved his life. But in that Airspeed Oxford at Squire’s Gate, with her chit for Kidlington in Oxfordshire, Johnson had no radio of any kind, and nor did any other ferry pilots. As the spliced-in newsreel puts it in They Flew Alone : ‘No radio of course. Too useful for Jerry.’
    The other reason Johnson would never fly a Spitfire was theweather that was keeping her on the ground at an aerodrome near Blackpool on that miserable Sunday in January 1941; the weather that would have made the radio navigation option something of a life-saver; the sodden, all-pervading, bloody-minded British weather.
    Johnson finally lost patience and took off at 11.49 a.m. Not many others ventured up that day, but Jackie Sorour did. ‘That same afternoon I took off from South Wales in a twin-engined Oxford aircraft bound [like Johnson] for Kidlington,’ she wrote in Woman Pilot .
    The weather … lay like a blanket over the Southern Counties. Drizzle and low cloud was forecast for most of the route to Kidlington but with a promise of improvement. Reluctantly I headed into the curtain of rain and, a few hundred feet above the ground, searched for the promised improvement. It was non-existent. I should have turned back but valleys beckoned invitingly. I flew into one and peered ahead but the trap had sprung. The other end of the narrow valley was blocked with a wall of cloud. I rammed open the throttles, pulled the control column back and climbed steeply. With unnerving