Spitfire Women of World War II

Giles Whittell

Having read it

★★★★☆

Some great insights from the women involved in the RAF during the Second World War and a good read, which kept the metaphorical propeller spinning and flew along like a well-crafted, non-fiction story extremely well!

A good passage

More likely, he [Lieutenant Colonel J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon] simply telephoned d‘Erlanger and told him to get on with it. He was one of Churchill’s people, after all. He was an aviator’s aviator, a pioneer; the man who’d shown that pigs really could fly.

A second good passage

[Jackie] Sorour ... after the war she would be the first woman in Britain to fly faster than 600 mph, to captain an airliner and to admit she wanted to break the sound barrier – an admission that immediately disqualified her in the eyes of the RAF, who alone could have made it happen.

A third good passage

In all, the ATA delivered 308,567 aircraft, including 57,286 Spitfire, 29,401 Hurricanes, 9,805 Lancasters and 7,039 Barracudas of the type that took Betty Keith-Jopp to the dark floor of the Firth of Forth. In mid-1942, when British aircraft production reached its peak, the ATA was moving more planes each day than British Airways did on a typical day in 2006. Its taxi Ansons alone covered ten million miles with no fatal mechanical failure. But this was not achieved casually. The pilots – the best of them, at any rate – lived in a continual state of stress. Keeping themselves ad their aircraft in one piece was a nervewracking business.