Twenty-five American women were part of a little-known corps that ferried planes for England during World War II. They had crossed the perilous wartime Atlantic in 1942 because the United States military, in all its wisdom, refused to accept women pilots, no matter how courageous and skilled.
Beset by death, blackouts, deprivation, and a perfectly rational fear that Hitler might wipe the nation off the map, the United Kingdom was so desperate for ferry pilots that it accepted some who had lost arms, legs, or eyes. It took pilots who were too old for the Royal Air Force, along with foreigners, members of any race, and yes, even women. Together they formed a civilian offshoot of the RAF that went by the rather pedestrian name of Air Transport Auxiliary. The ragtag flyers of the ATA cooked up nicknames that better suited the arch spirit of the organization: Ancient and Tattered Airmen. Anything To Anywhere. Always Terrified Airwomen. Atta-Girls.
The Atta-Girls got the ride of a lifetime. Joining up was a bold choice, but any woman who had the audacity to learn to fly back when flying was a risky gamble was already breaking a whole string of conventions. The group of young Americans leaped at the chance to fly up to 147 different models of the most advanced aircraft in the world, aircraft like the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters and the Wellington bomber. With little training and even less advance notice, the flyers took on whatever missions were thrown at them each day, often taking command of planes they’d never seen before with only a few minutes to read the instructions.
For women who often had to scratch and beg in their homeland to command single-engine puddle-jumpers made of fabric and wood—or to find any kind of job behind the controls of any kind of plane—this was an opportunity beyond their dreams. It made them the first American women to fly such military aircraft, let alone a whole slew of them, and in a war zone no less.