Sue Sheard 💙

Woman of the Day Mary Ellis born OTD 1917 in Leafield, Oxfordshire, one of the last surviving Air Transport Auxiliary pilots who delivered Spitfires and bombers to RAF airfields during WW2 and one of the first women to fly the UK’s first jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor. Born into a farming family close to RAF bases, Mary’s father paid a flying circus to take her up in a biplane as a special treat for her 11th birthday. That was it. “It sealed my fate forever." Mary started flying lessons as soon as she turned 16, achieved her pilot’s licence and flew for pleasure until the outbreak of WW2. In 1941, she heard a radio advertisement seeking female pilots to join the ATA. She became an Attagirl at the age of 24, a year after Britain allowed women to fly military aircraft but still prohibited them from combat missions. The decision to allow women to fly Spitfires and bombers during the war was met with widespread resistance in Britain. The farseeing editor of The Aeroplane magazine declared in 1940, “Women anxious to serve their country should take on work more befitting their sex instead of encroaching on a man's occupation.” Mary recalled in a BBC interview: “Girls flying airplanes was almost a sin at that time.” Her meticulously compiled logbook said otherwise. From 1941 onwards, Mary spent over 1100 hours flying over 1,000 planes of 56 different types including Hurricanes, Spitfires, Tempests and Wellington Bombers, from factories to RAF airfields and from the airfields to the frontline. Sometimes she delivered up to four aircraft in a day and often, she never knew until she walked out onto the tarmac which type of aircraft she was required to fly next. It didn’t matter. She could fly them all. Mary described flying her first Spitfire on 15 October 1942, "a date and time etched in my memory." "I decide to pull back on the power to plus-four boost and 2,400rpm and I fly away from the airfield at around 150mph to the delight of an enthusiastic ground crew waving in celebration at my successful takeoff. I soon realise the ailerons are very quite weighty but very responsive and the elevators refreshingly light in pitch. "I look down from the neat cockpit and for a few moments enjoy the view below. I see fields, tiny random houses and then a cluster of buildings, a small village and the lanes to and from it. I listen to the thumping hum of a happy Merlin flexing its power in the sky where it belonged. "But while my heart was completely fulfilled, my mind was busy in the cockpit of the fastest, most beautiful fighter aircraft in the world, as I was responsible for its safe journey to the RAF pilots who needed it." Attagirls were among the first women in Britain to achieve equal pay. 168 women including volunteers from Canada, Poland, the Netherlands and the US, served in the ATA. Fifteen women ATA pilots were killed during WW2 including one who returned to duty very soon after giving birth. Make no mistake, the RAF could not have won the Battle of Britain without the vital work of the Attagirls in the fight against the Nazis. When WW2 ended and the ATA was disbanded, Mary was seconded to the RAF and became one of the first women to fly the UK’s first jet fighter, the Gloster Meteor. In 1950, Mary moved to Sandown on the Isle of Wight, managing the island’s airport, helping to introduce passenger flights to and from the IoW to Europe, becoming the first female air commandant in Europe, and setting up the flying club. She employed Vera Strodl, a sister Attagirl, as the chief flying instructor. Mary died in 2018 at the grand old age of 101. "Everybody was flabbergasted that a little girl like me could fly these big airplanes all by oneself.”

Woman of the Day Polish Air Force Captain and Air Transport Auxiliary pilot Barbara Wojtulanis born OTD in 1912 in Warsaw. Her WW2 undercover work was crucial to the formation of the No. 303 Squadron RAF and she was the first Polish woman to jump with a parachute and to fly 1,000 hours in combat aircraft. Her real name was Stefania but she was Basia to her Polish colleagues and Barbara to her British ones. As a girl, Basia lived close to the airport and watched planes rising into the sky from her bedroom window. Flying lessons were expensive, places were limited to men as potential wartime pilots, but there was a way in. The only other group with priority on training lists were the students of the Warsaw University of Technology. That’s why she chose to go there. She studied mechanical engineering. By 1939, she held glider, balloon and motor aircraft pilot licences, and was a parachute instructor. Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. There was a scramble to get Polish pilots and planes to safety so that they could regroup in England. Basia had volunteered for the Army and on 3 September, was listening to the news of the invasion at the Warsaw Aeroclub. When an order came through for one of the pilots to deliver an urgent Army communication to Dęblin, south of Warsaw, she was the only pilot there. "I knew the airport near Dęblin very well, so when after a calm flight I found myself above the city, I was surprised that I couldn't recognize anything…I soon realised that Dęblin had been completely bombed and there was no sign of life anywhere.” She managed to deliver the order and set off back to Warsaw. "I felt strange, I started crying. I think I understood then what war was, real war, which I couldn't see on the flight to Dęblin." The next task was to evacuate Polish planes from Warsaw to Romania. Basia - along with sister ATA pilot Anna Leska - helped to fly them out. It meant saying goodbye to her mother and sister and it was the last time she saw them. They died in the Warsaw Uprising. Basia’s next assignment on behalf of the Polish Embassy in Romania was highly dangerous; posing as a fiancée searching for her beloved, she had to bribe her way into internment camps, identify Polish pilots, give them false passports and help them get to the West. It meant that the RAF was able to form No. 303 Squadron. She wanted to be a fighter pilot but in the Polish Armed Forces, she could only carry out admin duties. Basia made a pragmatic decision. The British were already organising the ATA and would take women pilots with sufficient flying hours. She managed to reach England via France. On 1 January 1941, Basia became Barbara, ATA pilot, along with sister Poles Anna Leska and Jadwiga Piłsudska, a friend from university. Some of the requirements were baffling: women pilots were ordered to fly around in skirts and black silk stockings, wholly impractical. The women took no notice. Think I’m joking? In May 1943, a male RAF officer with too little to do submitted a formal complaint to Commanding Officer Pauline Gower because First Officer Margaret Fairweather wore grey stockings not black. Pauline, always a staunch defender of her women, treated it with the gravity it deserved; she File 13’d it. Training was carried out in categories. Barbara was one of just twelve women cleared to fly Hudson and Wellington bombers and also flew Spitfires and Mustangs. Like all women ATA pilots, she flew in all weathers, without maps or radar, in strict radio silence. The bombers she flew were not armed until after she delivered them so she had no defence against the Luftwaffe. By the time she finished her service in the ATA on 31 May 1945 to rejoin the Polish Air Force in the demob department, she had clocked up 898 flying hours in British skies ferrying 830 aircraft and was the first Polish woman to fly more than 1,000 hours in combat aircraft. Barbara received the Silver Medal of Merit with glaive for the September Campaign, the Silver Medal of Merit for flying in Britain, the Polish Air Force Cross with four bars, the English Defence Medal and War Medal. She died in 2005, aged 92.