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Tuesday 11 December 2018

WW2 Women Fliers in Fiction

Women Flyers at War: W.E. Johns and Dorothy Carter, Worralls and Marise.

by Stephen Bigger, Conference Paper, Bristol 2018

Thank you for the opportunity of writing this paper and my apologies that I cannot be with you in person because of my responsibilities as lone carer. I have had a research interest over the past three decades in stories written for children between 1939 and 1945, a time when no one knew how the war was going to turn out. Evacuation was occasionally mentioned as a topic, but apart from Kitty Barne’s Visitors from London using her WVS evacuation experiences, the evacuation stories we know best were written later. Barne’s other war stories We'll Meet in England (1942, refugees), Three and a Pigeon (1944, black market), and In the Same Boat (1945, sinking ships) have been neglected as their war context has retreated.
I focus this paper on female fliers in fiction in this period. The 1930s had charismatic examples of female pilots such as Amy Johnson which gripped the popular imagination. Mary Cadogan wrote Women with Wings: Female Flyers in Fact and Fiction (1992), linking history with fictional stories. I am going to deal with two examples she mentions there, the Worralls books by W E Johns, which I shall cover in broad outline only since Mary gave a reasonable summary, and I offer a fuller discussion of the war stories of ‘Dorothy Carter’ (pseudonym of Mrs Dorothy Eileen Heming nee Marsh).

Worrals

W.E Johns had his own experience of flying in wartime in the Royal Flying Corps and those primitive aircraft are never far from his Biggles stories. He kept up to date through his Popular Flying and Flying magazines, and he supported Churchill in the call for rebuilding the RAF in the 1930s. He received a favourable supply of paper during war years and was asked to encourage girls into flying careers. With women being recruited into the forces, the government were keen to motivate girls and women to join up. The Worrals books were a consequence of this. Flight Officer Joan Worralson (Worrals) of the WAAF had a friend Betty "Frecks" Lovell. He was not securely briefed. WAAFs did not fly (though Worrals and Frecks did) but did admin tasks. Women in the ATA transported planes from factory to airfields. Worrals did an SOE operation without her author having any clue of SOE training and operations. Johns knew Amy Johnson (married name Mollison which the name Worralson mimics) and former stunt pilot Pauline Gower, who established the women’s branch of ATA (Air Transport Auxiliary).

The wartime Worrals books took her to France, Mesopotamia and Australia. The factual basis was loose. WAAFs did not fly planes but Worrals flew a ’Reliant’ (clearly based on a Boulton & Paul Defiant). Frecks uses the gun turret in anger, another forbidden action for a WAAF. Two SOE style missions to France are a stretch of the imagination too close to the truth for comfort (SOE was a secret organisation). Maybe that is why he was encouraged to send Worrals and Frecks further afield, to the Middle East and Australasia. Johns was not paid well for his books so he wrote a lot. A chapter before breakfast, he claimed, a new book in three weeks. Worrals was rather like Biggles with a bra, with similar daring do, but going weak at the knees when with her beau. His representation of women would not have impressed Pauline Gower.
Dorothy Eileen Marsh/Dorothy Carter (Mrs Heming), 1901 - 1948. 

My first introduction to Mrs Heming’s books was through a recommendation to read Dorothy Carter’s Wren Helen (1943), named after Eileen’s daughter and grandmother or greatgrandmother of living family members. I was fortunate to correspond with members of her family and with their help listed and purchased her books. The 1930s depression was hard on the Heming family, with four young children to feed and clothe. Eileen had a typewriter and could type well. Writing books was a possible way out. School stories were popular, boys playing cricket, girls hockey. Jack Heming heard in the mid 1930s that stories of flying would sell, so the couple went up to London to talk to W E Johns, then a publisher. They came back enthused and began to plan books on flying, but without particular expertise in aeroplanes. Not all were happy politically. In Blue Wings, Jack places his heroes on the side of the Nationalists (Fascists) against the Republicans (democrats) who are stereotyped as vicious Soviets. It is a lively story, but doesn’t read well today. Mrs Heming opted to use different pen-names for different audiences (and publishers). Her family helped me unravel them, as they also helped Eric Bates to produce a privately printed (now unavailable) biography/bibliography Among Her Own People: Lives and Literature of Eileen Marsh, Jack Heming and Bracebridge Heming in 2005. Until my 2009 blog entry (in 1930-1960.blogspot.co.uk), booksellers were unaware that her pen-names were linked.
In Wings in Revolt (1939) she as Dorothy Carter includes a Captain Bigglesworthy, a humorous allusion that seems not to have annoyed her mentor. Mary Cadogan had an advantage on me in being able to use the British Library, whilst I had to seek out and buy the very scarce books. This paper focuses on Eileen’s war stories involving women fliers. Mary Cadogan, Women With Wings, ch. 7, pp.130-5 wrote:
“Efforts to find out more about Dorothy Carter, as a pilot and a writer, have proved abortive – but she was certainly one of the first authors to create really convincing flying stories for girls” (p.131).
By 2010 both judgements were incorrect and Mary and I met several times to discuss issues dealt with in this paper. Mrs Heming had no substantial flying experience, and was vague on details. The books also puzzled Owen Dudley Edwards in his study of second world war youth literature. I met and corresponded with Owen around 2010 and I introduced him to Bates’ book and the contents of this paper.

Eileen Marsh contributed to the Girls Own Paper (GOP) encouraging upper-middle class girls to learn to fly. From 1935 she wrote 102 books until her early death in 1948 (average 10 a year, one every five weeks) under many names. 25 were about female fliers. She often combining her real names Dorothy Eileen Heming (nee Marsh) or using other family names. She published 7 titles in 1936, 4 as Eileen Marsh, and one each of Dorothy Carter, Martin Kent and D.E. Marsh. Of the twelve titles in 1937, 5 were by Eileen Marsh, 2 by D.E. Marsh, and one each by James Cahill, Guy Dempster, Martin Kent, Elizabeth Rogers and E M Shard. And so one, year by year.

Altogether by 1948 there were 26 books by Eileen Marsh, 14 by Dorothy Carter, 9 by Elizabeth Rogers, 8 by Guy Dempster , 6 by Martin Kent, 6 by D.E. Marsh, and smaller numbers for the rest. After the war, when paper was more plentiful, she also wrote Sunday School prizes for Lutterworth, (a lucrative market) using the names Eileen Heming, Dorothy Marsh, James Cahill, Rupert Jardine, Jane Rogers and Mary St. Helier. Male or neutral pen-names were used for boy readers, and different publishers monopolised particular names, such as Collins with Marise titles, and Lutterworth with Eileen Heming titles. Guy Dempster books were blood-curdling Fleet Air Arm stories for boys, following troops in the armed service, maybe in collaboration with Jack who was away in the war. As Elizabeth Rogers, The Girls of Fort Tregantle (1946) was a romantic romp on an ATS training exercise, with the preoccupied girls giving too much away to a pair of German-Irish spies. The hot hormones wouldn’t pass any feminist test today. Her 15 adult novels, most as Eileen Marsh, offered a social commentary on the 1940s. These books are war related and of good quality. We Lived in London (1942) was a hard-hitting account of life in the blitz. The Walled Garden (1943) began a family saga. Eight Over Essen (1944) followed the lives of eight members of a bomber crew who failed to return from an Essen raid. I Had a Son, Barbed Wire and The Memorial showed social tensions.

Both Mary Cadogan and Owen Dudley Edwards praise the stories as giving an authentic picture of flying and presume Eileen was a flier. She was not. Her first two flying books, written in 1935, were Two Girls on the Air Trail and Peggy Parachutist in which details of how to fly were imaginative, such as managing to throw a small packet from the plane into an open window. Radio tuning is usually described as ‘twiddling the knobs’. When books began to sell and she had some spare cash, she took a few short lessons to get a sense of what dials and knobs did. She read first-hand accounts of flying and probably talked to pilots. The series we are mainly dealing with during the war are of Marise for Collins writing as Dorothy Carter. There were post-war flying stories focusing on a new heroine Jan.

The first three Marise books are implausible accounts of winning the Kings Cup Air Race, being in the movies and being taken for a goddess in the snowy Arctic. The three next titles concern us here:

Sword of the Air (1941)

Comrades of the Air (1942)

Marise Flies South (1944)

Marise has a plane in Croydon Airport and as Sword of the Air opens, the second world war will be announced next day, her father being in the secret service getting people out of Poland. Marise meets up with her father in between trips. Marise applies to join the WAAF (or WAFF, p.20) but is rejected but later invited to join the ATA as a ferry pilot, taking new planes from the factory to airfields. She is interviewed by a tall lady resembling Pauline Gower who developed the female section of ATA. Gower’s autobiography Women with Wings inspired Mary Cadogan’s title. Amy Johnson was one of her early recruits and died on an ATA mission. The casualty rate was one in ten, but these were the glamour girls. Marise’s first posting was to a Hawker ‘shadow factory’, presumably that built on Parlaunt Farm, at Langley near Slough developed in the late 1930s. She overcomes chauvinist banter with aplomb. Her first delivery was of a Hurricane to a camouflaged airfield (invisible from above). There was indeed a camouflage unit to deceive hostile aircrew, but such work was uncommon in 1940 when the story was set. Delivery of a four-engined seaplane to the east coast for Coastal Command gives the opportunity to describe convoy operations operating with radio silence. She begins to meet her male chums from previous adventures ‘doing their bit’. She delivers a Spitfire to pre-Dunkirk France (therefore before late May 1940) where she met two more male chums. The airfield was probably Calais Marck. The Spitfires delivered here were reconnaissance, and the story confirms that this is what her chums were doing. On the next trip her plane was lost in fog and strayed over German territory, brought down by flak, which following orders she set on fire. She hatches a mad plan to steal a Messerschmitt 109 but was apprehended. On hearing the news chum Jim went into action. Marise felt that ordinary German soldiers were kept in the dark by propaganda, whereas the SS were ‘scum of the earth’ and ‘scum rises to the top’. Her guide on the journey to Berlin tried to discover if she was a spy. She was kidnapped, and counter kidnapped by the resistance so meeting her father again. With no easy way home, Marise became ‘Magda’ cousin of an SS man working secretly with the Resistance, and sent to work in an aircraft factory. When compromised (with prime information) she and her father were spirited away home by the three chums in a night landing of a Wellington bomber.

The following year came Comrades of the Air, in which Marise discovers that her three male chums were going to Russia (shortly after Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia has begun). She persuades her ATA boss (Pauline Gower in real life) to let her deliver a plane to Russia. Details of the improbable journey over German occupied territory are vague. She meets up with Russian female pilots and in particular Katya Petroff. The Soviet pilots shoot down several Nazi planes before having to close down their base in the face of enemy advances. Marise flies a ‘sweet to fly’ Russian bomber (Mary Cadogan surmises a Tupoler SB-2, actually a Tupolov ). More likely it was a Petlyakov Pe-2. Eileen was a keen reader of aircraft magazines and rejoiced in new developments. Tupolovs comprised 95% of the Russian Air Force, but it was not remotely sweet to fly, quite the opposite. By 1940 it was largely obsolete though a few late marks minimised some problems. It was nicknamed Pterodactyl because its high wings were ungainly. Petlyakov was Tupolov’s deputy and set to work to design a new type which entered service around 1940. The Petlyakov Pe-2 was a high-altitude twin engine bomber what came into service in 1941 and were largely flown by women pilots. It was heavy on take-off, often a two-woman job, but after that it was sweet enough to fly. It was well-defended, more so over time and from the beginning was a match for Bf109s (although gunner casualties were high).
There are various escapades, the plane losing navigation devices and ending up at the arctic coast, Marise using her Canadian arctic skills to repair the engine, witnessed a naval war-crime, and eventually returning to habitation to find Nazi forces committing atrocities which we now know was not propaganda. Her three male chums turn up with her father, and they all overcome all odds. The story of the Soviet women pilots has been honoured in several books, listed below. Wherever Eileen took her information from, she told this story with deep respect.
The final Marise wartime story, Marise Flies South (1944) sees her ferrying a plane to Darwin, Australia and New Guinea. The Australian formula was similarly used after the war for Jan (Janice) and Wren Helen. Marise takes a B24 Liberator bomber to Darwin single-handed and is invited by two other female ferry pilots to take Typhoon aircraft to New Guinea. The story was undoubtedly suggested by the exploits of the B24 ‘Shady Lady’, from the 380th Bombardment Group, “The Flying Circus”. Darwin was bombed more severely than Pearl Harbour in 1942. Eleven Liberators attacked a Japanese fuel refinery on Borneo. Shady Lady was caught in tropical storms, flew for 16 hours 35 minutes before fuel ran out. The crew managed to patch it up enough to limp home and it became a national monument. The four-engined Liberator had a crew of ten and a range of 16 hour flying. The story assumes that Marise flew this heavy plane single-handed across the world without a co-pilot and navigator. Since the territory between India and Australia was occupied by the Japanese, refuelling half-way would be impossible. Jan Flies Down Under written four years later details the journey with several refuelling stops, including on Java, then no longer occupied by the Japanese. This story shows this to be a gruelling and dangerous journey even with a co-pilot and cooperative airfields.
These stories for girls foregrounded emotions and innocent romance. Marise gets two new male chums, Pete and Babe who are shot down by the Japanese, so the girls go in to rescue them. The girls are also shot down, and finding Pete and Babe, they all have a hard time before rescue. Marise’s father, posing as a German liaising with the Japanese, appears in the story from time to time. In all these stories the level of plausibility is low, and the detail about flying rudimentary. We don’t get to hear what the dials and gauges are for, or the rudder or joystick, or navigation techniques.

After the war Eileen wrote One Woman’s Life which was a fictionalised autobiography. In this the author received a fee (£50 per book) rather than a royalty contract. This was not unusual in the 1930s so even W E Johns had to renegotiate book deals in the 1950s and lack of royalties gave her no incentive to press for additional printings. Ten books a year would have grossed her £500 before tax, not insignificant but not a fortune. She described her writing day as starting when the children went off to school and domestic tasks completed, then on the typewriter for four hours before getting tea ready. She died of a brain haemorrhage on 5 Aug 1948 and is buried in Aldington churchyard near Romney Marsh. Aldington appears in many of her books about flying, as a kind of personal signature.

These books are can-do books for girls. No aspiration is too high, no skill cannot be mastered. Technology is not the preserve of men. The female ferry pilots astounded airfields by having flown so many types, including enormous 4 engines planes like Lancasters. We honour the real women who did these jobs.



Books for further reading

Pauline Gower Women with Wings (1938).

Mary Cadogan Women with Wings: Female Flyers in Fact and Fiction (1992).

Bruce Myles and Fergus Mason Night Witches (1981).

Lyuba gradova Defending the Motherland: The Soviet Women Who Fought Hitler's Aces (2015). 

Giles Whittell, Spitfire Women of World War II (2007).

Eric Bates, Among Her Own People: Lives and Literature of Eileen Marsh, Jack Heming and Bracebridge Heming ( 2005).

Worrals war stories (Johns):

Worrals of the W.A.A.F. (1941)
Worrals Carries On (1942)
Worrals Flies Again (1942)
Worrals on the Warpath (1943)
Worrals Goes East (1944)
Worrals of the Islands (1945)

Worrals post-war stories.

Worrals in the Wilds (1947)
Worrals Down Under (1948)
Worrals in the Wastelands (1949)
Worrals Goes Afoot (1949)
Worrals Investigates (1950)

Wren Helen books (Dorothy Carter).

Wren Helen (1943)
Wren Helen Goes South (1944)
Wren Helen Goes North (1946)

Marise books (Dorothy Carter).

Mistress of the Air (1939)
Star of the Air (1940)
Snow Queen of the Air (1941)
Sword of the Air (1941)
Comrades of the Air (1942)
Marise Flies South (1944)

Guy Dempster books,

The Phantom Wing (1937)
Secret of the Desert (1939)
Fleet Wings (1941)
Winged Venturers (1942)
Commandos Raid at Dawn (1943)
East With the Admiral (1945)
Southward Bound (1947)
The Stolen Cruiser (1948).

Eileen Marsh adult books referred to:

We Lived in London (1942),
The Walled Garden (1943),
Eight Over Essen (1944),
I Had a Son (1944),
Barbed Wire (1945,
The Memorial (1947),
One Woman’s Life (1949).