Meeting the Nazi test-pilot Hanna Reitsch

Published by the Alderney Literary Festival where Clare will be speaking in March 2019

One of the great joys of researching my two books about special agents and pilots in the Second World War has been interviewing veterans and witnesses to that conflict, and others who knew or met those who served in it. As the human coast erodes, as it were, it feels ever more important to capture these stories.

Occasionally after a book has been published, people get in touch with stories that I would love to have included in my books. With The Women Who Flew for Hitler, which tells the dramatic and still little-known story of Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg, the only women to serve the Nazi regime as test pilots in the Second World War, but who ended their lives on opposites sides of history, I have been lucky enough to meet two people who knew Hanna.  

Former diplomat, Treasury official and President of the European Investment Bank, Brian Unwin, met Hanna in the 1960s when he was serving the British High Commission in Accra, Ghana. He got in touch having been astounded by the very different picture he had gained of Hanna from reading my book. Over lunch at the Reform Club, Brian told me how he had been sent to deliver a diplomatic gift of books to the head of the Ghanaian gliding school outside Accra in ‘the dying days of Kwame Nkrumah’s totalitarian regime’. He remembered a few white buildings around the field, a crowd, the hot sun, and his giving a ‘stock speech’. Afterwards the ‘attractive silver-haired director of the school, in her 50s’ offered to take him up in a glider. Slightly nervous, Brian checked that she was qualified to do so. After her reassurances she took him up for a short flight. Only when he returned to the High Commission did he learn that she was Hanna Reitsch, ‘Hitler’s pilot’. 

Brian said that he had been rather proud to include this story in his memoirs, and to think that he was probably the last Englishman alive to have been flown by Hanna Reitsch. Having read my book, however, and learned ‘how unreconstructed’ Hanna was, he has reviewed his perspective. 

Last week, after I gave a talk at the Wimborne Literary Festival, John Batchelor, MBE, introduced himself. John is a military artist and technical illustrator who met Hanna at Edwards Air Force Base in California, around 1977. Hanna had got out of her Mercedes car, John told me, and soon had a crowd of people around her. Curious as to who she might be, John identified her by the two pieces of jewelry she was wearing. One was a senior gliding award with diamonds, the other a round brooch with a border of precious stones and a swastika at its centre. The woman could only be Hanna Reitsch and the second brooch her gift from Hitler, which she said she would wear for the rest of her life – even though it was now illegal to wear the swastika in Germany.

John introduced himself to Hanna, and found her ‘very helpful’ when he asked her about her war-time test flights. Fascinatingly, she told him that the one aircraft she would not fly under power was the Me163. This confirmed my belief that although she was happy to tell the BBC in an interview that flying the Me163 was ‘like riding on a cannon ball,’ her own flights with it had been when she was towed up to test the gliding landings. 

Hanna did not discuss the Nazi regime or politics with John, but when he mentioned her jewellery she told him that she had also kept her Iron Cross but did not wear it ‘every day’. It seems to confirm that Hanna was, as the brilliant British Royal Naval pilot Captain Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown had told me during my research, ‘a fanatical Nazi’ to the end. 

John was amused, however, when he left Hanna or, as he put it, ‘got rid of her into her waiting Mercedes’. A group of young aviation people, editors and writers, who were waiting nearby, asked, ‘Who was that old woman you were trying to date’, only to be astounded to learn that it was Hanna Reitsch!

Twice during my research for The Women Who Flew for Hitler I was told that I was just ‘two handshakes away from Hitler’; once by Eric Brown, who had shaken Hanna’s hand, and once by Major General Berthold von Stauffenberg, whose father Claus von Stauffenberg had led the most famous assassination attempt on Hitler; the 20 July 1944 Valkyrie bomb plot. It was an honour, as well as a great pleasure, to interview all these men, and it is always wonderful to meet other people who are willing to generously share their memories to help me gain the most accurate picture I can of my subjects. Perhaps, if I get the chance to have a new edition of The Women Who Flew For Hitler, I can add some further nuance to their stories!   

Ford Maddox Ford argued that if you open a book at page 99, "the quality of the whole will be revealed to you". Here Clare applies the Page 99 Test to The Women Who Flew for Hitler

Blogpost written for the Campaign for the American Reader.

Clare Mulley applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Women Who Flew for Hitler and reported the following:

Melitta posed for British press photographers “where the huge ‘D’ for Deutsche was painted, rather than beside the swastika on the tail” of her light aircraft, page 99 of The Women Who Flew for Hitler opens. In a way, this gets right to the heart of things.

This is a book about the only two women to serve the Third Reich as test pilots during the Second World War. That they were both brilliant pilots is a given; the Nazis would not have let any women near an aircraft if they did not need their skills. As the only female Flight Captains in Nazi Germany, and recipients of the Iron Cross, Melitta von Stauffenberg and Hanna Reitsch were also great patriots and shared a strong sense of honor and duty. Their concepts of ‘patriotism’, however, were very different. Hannah was a fanatical Nazi. Melitta was secretly Jewish and loyal to an older, pre-Nazi Germany. In 1944 she would become closely involved in her brother-in-law Claus von Stauffenberg’s plot to assassinate Hitler.

Back in 1938, where page 99 finds us, Melitta had been sent to England to show the British what German female pilots were made of. As it happened, her visit coincided with Chamberlain’s trip to Munich. British journalists were on standby for major news, and rather frustrated to be reporting on “two pretty young German pilots in cotton skirts and light woolen cardigans”. So when Melitta was suddenly ordered to report to her Embassy without delay, it caused something of a media frenzy.

“Nervous excitement grew around the possibility of being the first to hear the news, and break the story, that the whole country was dreading…”

By the end of the page, however, we know that the intriguing urgent call to the Embassy has come from Melitta’s husband, unexpectedly on business in London and hoping to arrange a dinner date with his wife. “We trust that the dinner went off satisfactorily”, the British papers dryly concluded their reports.

This is a book full of high drama in the skies, and collaboration but also courage and defiance down below. There is also plenty of humor and humanity in the small details of life. Above all, this is the true story of two real women with soaring ambitions and a searing rivalry, making seemingly impossible choices under the perverting conditions of war and dictatorship. While Melitta chose to position herself by the ‘D’ for Deutschland, Hanna would always stand by the Nazi swastika. They would end their lives on opposite sides of history.

"The Women Who Flew For Hitler".....a dreamcast of a movie adaptation

Clare Mulley,  September 2018

‘Blog post written for The Campaign for the American Reader’.

What could be more filmic? Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg both learnt to fly over the same green slopes of north-east Germany in the 1930s. This was the glamorous age of flight, when Amelia Earhart had her own fashion line and En Avion was the perfume of choice. Female pilots anywhere were considered courageous, but nowhere were they considered more extraordinary than in Nazi Germany, which promoted the idea that women’s real place was in church, the kitchen and the nursery. Hanna and Melitta were exceptional, and with the war they became the only women to serve the regime as test pilots, the only two female Flight Captains in Nazi Germany, and both recipients of the Iron Cross.

You might have thought, then, that Hanna and Melitta would have supported one another, but in fact there was no love lost between them. With her bubbly personality, blond hair and blue-eyes, Hanna seemed the perfect example of Aryan maidenhood, and she was soon an ardent supporter of what she considered to be the dynamic new Nazi regime. Melitta, by contrast, was dark, serious and seemingly shy. Her father had been born Jewish and she was officially categorised as ‘Mischling’, or half-blood, by the regime, but her skills were so valuable to them that they gave her ‘Equal to Aryan’ status. In July 1944, Melitta would support the most famous attempt to assassinate Hitler.

There could hardly be more perfect roles for two actresses today; both at the heart of the Third Reich’s war effort, risking their lives daily in the macho world of Nazi aviation. How about Emma Stone or Jennifer Lawrence for the blond Hanna, who once starred in UFA films for the Nazi the regime. Rachel Weiss or perhaps Gal Gadot could excel as her nemesis, whose quiet determination and moral courage drive the story forward.

There are plenty of supporting roles for the men here too. Hitler is hard to cast, although Bruno Ganz was excellent in Downfall. (The terrifying map room scene when Hitler/Ganz screams at his generals is one of the most adapted clips on YouTube.) Tom Cruise has already played Claus von Stauffenberg, Melitta’s brother-in-law, in the film Valkyrie, but perhaps he could be persuaded to reprise the role among the supporting cast?

Humour and Humanity: A day with 100 RAF veterans at Project Propeller

Clare Mulley,  July 2018

Mary Ellis as a Second World War ATA pilot, & with me at Project Propeller 2017

‘When women pilots cease to become news, the battle of equality will have been won’, the British ATA pilot Mary Ellis wrote in her memoirs, published last year.i Mary died in late July, aged 101, the last female Spitfire pilot who flew in the Second World War. I was among those honouring her, talking to Sky News, as her name rightly made headlines once again. I had had the privilege to meet Mary at the Project Propeller annual air veterans’ reunion last year where she told me stories of having been shot at twice in one day by anti-aircraft guns mistaking her for an enemy bomber, and of once being ‘stalked’ through the air by a Luftwaffe pilot who cheekily waved to her before ‘suddenly he was gone’. It was ‘all part of the job’ she told me in her matter of fact way, before striding over to chat with her fellow former ATA pilot Joyce Lofthouse and some of the male veterans at the reunion.

Mary had joined the women’s section of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) in 1941, the same year that C.G. Grey, editor of Aeroplane magazine wrote that ‘the menace is the woman who thinks she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when really she has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly’. In those early days the ATA women earned 20% less than the men and were expected to fly in skirts, even in freezing conditions. By the end of the war 166 women had enrolled, working alongside 1,152 men on equal pay and in uniform trousers. Last year the RAF became the first branch of the British military to accept women for service in any role, including close combat. The battle for equality is still being fought, but it is worth both remembering that we have come a long way, and the pioneers like Mary and Joyce who helped make the diversity of today’s RAF possible.

Joyce passed away last year, and Spitfire pilots Tom Neil and Geoffrey Wellum both died just a few weeks before Mary this July. As we remember these extraordinary men and women, wish them ‘blue skies’ and imagine a wonderful reunion in the clouds, we must also pay attention to those veterans still with us, keeping the Second World War within living memory.

Project Propeller 2018, Halfpenny Green

This year’s Project Propeller reunion was held at Halfpenny Green, Wolverhampton. Although most World War Two veterans are now in their early 90s, guest numbers have been rising as word of the annual event spreads. It now takes a team of volunteers to not only liaise with the host airfields and ATC cadets, make cakes and sandwiches and book the 1940s singers, but also coordinate a growing crew of volunteer light-aircraft pilots who fly the veterans over from their nearest airfield. This year I arrived in a little Cirrus SR20 piloted by Mark Williams and Nick Snow. Setting off from North Weald, we went first to Elstree to collect veteran Spitfire pilot Geoff Hulett. 

Geoff Hulett with me, and Cirrus pilots Mark Williams and Nick Snow

Geoff was waiting for us in Elstree airfield’s Wings Café, wearing his RAF tie, good aviation sunglasses, and only a slight air of impatience. At ninety-five, he was up on the wing and kindly offering me his hand before I had time to turn around. A quick evaluation of the relative merits of the Spitfire and Cirrus ensued… The Cirrus won on comfort. Geoff, a recipient of the Burma Cross, had been a ferry pilot, delivering Spitfires, Hurricanes and P-47 Thunderbolts in Egypt and the Far East. He remembered his machines getting so hot that when he stopped to refuel he could barely touch the metal harness to lock himself back in, and sometimes oil would slip out onto the floor adding hot fumes to the already heavy air in the cockpit. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly however, the Spitfire cleaned up in other respects. ‘We didn’t have this problem’, Geoff told me cheerfully when the warm engine of our Cirrus had second thoughts about firing as we waited to take off from Elstree. ‘If there were two aircraft, we would park one in front of the other, so that the slip-stream of one would keep the other cool, then reverse the order. That would keep them going.’ Then, once we were up in the air and Nick showed off his GPS navigation systems, Geoff simply pointed out the window saying, ‘that’s the best way actually.’ In Burma he had had no radar to guide him, only maps and a compass. ‘Monsoon season was awkward’, he admitted, ‘though low-flying on clouds is always fun’. Two minutes later Geoff had taken the controls, and we were ‘cloud surfing’ over to Wolverhampton in the very safe hands of a Second World War Spitfire pilot.

Spitfire pilot Geoff Hulett at the controls

Geoff disappeared as soon as we landed at Halfpenny Green. Many of the veterans I spoke with were keen to meet up with old friends, and I was also glad to see a number of familiar faces such as RAF Flying Officer John Alan Ottewell who advised me on my research for my last book, The Women Who Flew for Hitler.

With Flying Officer John Alan Ottewell

Like most of the veterans I spoke with this summer, John had flown with Bomber Command. Every one of these men had an incredible story to tell. 

Only eleven at the start of the war, Ron Applegate joined the ATC in 1942. Although he flew with trainee pilots doing what he called ‘circuits and bumps’, one of his most vivid memories was when he was out blackberrying with his brother. ‘All of a sudden there was a tremendous roar. It was Lancasters, flying at rooftop level… coming at us!’ Only later did Ron learn that they were practising low-level flying and flights over water in preparation for dropping the ‘bouncing bomb’, designed to destroy German dams. 

Radar specialist Stan Forsyth flew with heavy radar equipment, locating enemy radar stations to be bombed, and sometimes accompanying raids up above the bombers, trying to catch the frequency of enemy fighters to warn the crews below. In 1944 Stan was given a different target to locate: the German Navy's mighty 42,900 ton battleship, the Tirpitz. ‘Five aircraft went out, and I found it in the fjords’, Stan told me with understandable pride. ‘I didn’t see it, except on the radar, but I knew it was him. They sent the bombers in, and I got the DFC for finding it.’

Pilot and Warrant Officer Peter Holloway flew over 150 operations in Burma in what he called ‘Hurricanes and Hurribombers.’ Some ops only lasted ten minutes, he told me, as his airfield was right at the edge of the Japanese lines. ‘We were so close you just took off, lifted the wheels, dropped the bombs, and landed again.’

John Whitworth remembered being exhausted, flying a Mosquito back from a Hamburg bombing raid, when suddenly he felt his unflappable navigator, Canadian Bill Tulloch, nudging him hard with his elbow. ‘We were doing 400mph, and I was asleep!’ 

Several of the crew flying on long distance raids had been shot down. Wireless Operator and Gunner Fred Hooker’s first operation was on 3 September 1944, a bombing raid over Venlo in Holland. Bad weather forced them to land away from their base and they only returned on 10 September. The following night they flew to the Ruhr ‘which was hell’. On 12 September their aircraft was shot down on an operation to Munster. 

‘We were on a bombing run, when suddenly I was sitting in fresh air,’ Fred remembered. ‘No Perspex. No guns. In fact the guns were hanging from the tower turret.’ With no intercom, Fred moved down into the damaged aircraft. ‘The rear was full of flames, and in the portside was a bloody large hole.’ Seeing one of the crew bail out of the front hatch spurred him into action but the parachute he grabbed was already on fire. The last thing Fred saw before blacking out was the flight engineer who strode over, picked up a chute, put his arm round Fred, clipped on and pushed him out. 

Fred’s pilot and the tail gunner both lost their lives in the burning bomber, but the rest of the crew landed in a field of sugar-beet near Munster. Immediately caught, they were searched and put on a truck into the city. Walking past burning houses in the streets they had been bombing just an hour earlier was sobering. Some civilians tried to attack them and Fred believes his life was saved a second time that night, but this time by their two German guards. 

Like several of the veterans at the reunion, Fred had brought along some papers. Among them was his German prisoner-of-war ID card, with photo showing a ruggedly handsome but stoney-faced young man. When I asked what was in his mind when it was taken, he laughed, ‘Blue murder… I hadn’t had a wash for two weeks!’ He would spend most of the rest of the war as a POW, long months whose progress he recorded in pencil on brown paper ripped from a Red Cross parcel. 

Wireless operator and gunner Fred Hooker with his papers

Welshman Harry Winter was also shot down over Germany. Harry flew Wellingtons and Halifaxes with the 427 Royal Canadian Air Force, known as the ‘Lion Squadron’ and adopted by MGM because of their rampant lion insignia. In October 1943 Harry was in the second wave of the bombing run over Kassell, when German flares lit up the sky until it was like ‘going down a high street with the lights on’. Night-fighters proceeded to shoot down twenty-five bombers within five miles. 

Having been caught with his parachute still attached after baling out, Harry was taken to Luft 7. Later he would join the forced march to Stalag IIIA, south of Berlin, a camp that was eventually liberated by the Russians. Even then Harry was detained for a POW swap. Allowed to walk under guard into East Berlin, he knocked on doors asking for food. ‘Two girls saw my uniform was different and, when they found out I was British, they asked me to stay and protect them’, he told me. The women feared being raped by Russian soldiers. Harry was more than happy to swap the hard floor at the camp for a settee in Berlin, and eventually managed to flag down a US army truck and get sent home. When he finally got back to Cardiff, Harry found that his girlfriend had married another chap. ‘It was ok, I had disappeared I guess,’ he told me wistfully, before his eyes lit up again. ‘I got a London girl.’

All the veterans I spoke with this summer were pleased to share their time and memories, and some have published their memoirs, listed below. Ivan ‘Lucky’ Potter even signed a copy of his for me. None glorified war in any way, although most spoke warmly about the comradeship they found, and lit up at recalling their better memories. 

‘We were flying with a full bomb load, a Lancaster UMH2, and there was a thundercloud directly on track’, Rear Gunner Peter Potter told me, a large grin raising the curled ends of his glorious moustache. ‘It was too massive to go around, so we went up 24,000 feet to go over it.’ Soon they were caught in the turbulent centre of the dark cloud, then suddenly sucked out of it and falling 20,000 feet. The air was howling over the aircraft’s fuselage and the control panel shook so much it was hard to read the dials as they plummeted down, but somehow Peter’s pilot managed to pull the Lancaster out of their unintended dive. They had just enough power to limp back to base. ‘It tore the rivets out, its body was all twisted’, he added rather proudly. Later he got a letter from Lancaster design engineer Roy Chadwick, who had inspected the broken aircraft. ‘To have incurred this damage,’ Chadwick wrote, ‘you had to have been going at 520mph. Ps, You have probably flown the fastest bomber in the war’.

At Project Propeller 2018 with Lancaster Rear Gunner Peter Potter. Photo c. Nigel Whitmore.

There was also much moving talk about losing friends and colleagues however, the less fortunate who are also always remembered at Project Propeller reunions. ‘The worst was when we bombed Nuremberg,’ Wireless Operator and Rear Gunner Reginald Payne, now 95, recalled. ‘I have still my log-book. I did the ops without any real problems… the ground-crew found damage to the aircraft that showed we had been hit by enemy flak, but we were not aware of it… But we lost 94 airmen. We lost men in our hut. We lost a lot of friends. At night you would sleep next to another man, and you always said goodnight. Then they were gone. You would see all the empty beds, and a few days later “sprog” [newer recruits] airmen would come in.’ 

Wireless Operator and Rear Gunner Reginald Payne

Mary Ellis had shared similar memories with me the year before. Once, delivering a Wellington bomber, she had had to stay over at a Bomber Command airfield & enjoyed a fine meal in the mess with ‘all these lovely air crew.’ ‘The place was full of laughter and they were all such decent chaps’, she told me. The next morning there were only two or three men at breakfast, ‘solemnly drinking tea’. The others had not returned from their missions that night.

Other veterans spoke about the civilian casualties of their bombing raids. ‘At age 18/19 you don’t think’, Lawrence Rogers, now 96, told me. ‘Dropping bombs. It was our duty but so many innocent people were killed. Women and children.’ 

Most of the men were quick to tell me that their best moment was, in Reginald Payne’s words, ‘landing back at base after the last op.’ Reginald and his crew celebrated by going into Lincoln to have ‘a good old round of drinks, but not too much - you never knew whether, for certain, they wouldn’t want you again the next day.’ Between them, the veterans I met saw the end of the war on different dates in London, Lincoln, Berlin and Shanghai.

Pilot Eric Carter

At 98 ‘and getting on a bit’, Eric Carter, who had wangled his way into the RAF having originally been called up for the army, only to serve a gruelling year in Russia followed by postings in Egypt and the Far East, was the least sentimental about his war. ‘The best moment? I don’t think there were many… It was bloody dangerous, and it was awful.’ Like many, he had a clear message for the next generation: ‘Learn as much as you can from this period. It was not a party, not something to happen again. Make sure it does NOT happen again. Watch these politicians.’

Navigator Jim Wright greets the Lancaster bomber salute at Project Propeller 2018

A moment later our conversation was drowned out by the sound of rapidly approaching Rolls Royce Merlin engines. Eric automatically lifted his gaze, while Jim Wright in a chair beside us, a navigator who flew on 43 missions during the war, raised his hand in greeting. A Lancaster was flying low overhead in tribute to the service that these men and their colleagues, male and female, British, Poles, Czech and others, had given during the conflict. 

For my daughters, the Second World War is part of the history curriculum. I felt the same at their age, but almost as much time has passed since I was at school, as between the war and my classes. My children are probably the last generation who may have the chance to talk with people who served in the conflict, men and women like Mary Ellis, Geoff Hulett, Fred Hooker and Eric Carter, whose lives were shaped not only by their service, but by the absence of those dear to them who lost their lives. Once female pilots made headlines by dint of their gender; these days the names of both male and female Second World War pilots are all too often in the papers as they leave us. Project Propeller provides a unique opportunity for many of those still with us to meet again, share their news, and retell their stories. Each passing year it feels ever more important to listen to their voices, remember the debt that we owe, and learn from their memories and insights, their humour and their humanity. 

Clare with Cirrus pilot Mark Williams, Flight Engineer Harold Kirby, and Pilot Geoff Hullet.

Project Propeller depends on donations of both time and money to keep going. If you would like to contribute, or are a private light aircraft pilot who would be interested in offering to fly veterans to next year’s reunion, please get in touch through the website: http://www.projectpropeller.org/PP/index.asp

Pilots and Spies, Enablers and Resisters

Article written for the Chalke Valley History Festival

Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were the only two women to serve as test pilots for the Nazi regime. Truly remarkable women, both were made Honorary Flight Captains and both were awarded the Iron Cross… yet they ended their lives on opposite sides of history. I am delighted to be talking about their beliefs, decisions and actions as told in my new book, The Women Who Flew for Hitler, when I return to the Chalke Valley History Festival this June.

I was last at the festival in 2013, speaking about The Spy Who Loved, my biography of Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, the first woman to serve Britain as a special agent during the Second World War. You can hear a recording of that talk here. These days the questions that I am most often asked are; why the focus on women in conflict; and why the shift in perspective from the story of an Allied heroine, to that of two women serving the Nazi regime…

For a historian, the seismic upheaval of war brings fascinating stories not only of honour, courage and duty, betrayal, sacrifice and horror, but also of shifting priorities and perspectives. For women in Britain, the Second World War brought an end to many hopes and dreams but also new opportunities, notably in the workplace. For some, the conflict also brought the chance to serve both at home, and behind enemy lines. It was of course preconceptions about gender that made female special agents so unexpected and inconspicuous in the field, and therefore so effective when they were trained, armed, and sent to work in Nazi-occupied Europe alongside their male counterparts.

The well-connected daughter of a Polish count and Jewish banking heiress, before the war Krystyna Skarbek got her thrills from smuggling cigarettes by skiing across her country’s mountainous borders. Arriving in London towards the close of 1939, she was desperate to put her skills and experience to good use in the fight against Nazism. Being British and male were then the fundamental requirements of the Secret Intelligence Services, but Krystyna offered a unique opportunity to see how the enemy was organizing in an occupied territory. Deployed before the year was out, she became Britain’s first – and longest serving – female special agent, and was ultimately awarded the OBE, George Medal and French Croix de Guerre for her service in three different theatres of the conflict.

Krystyna’s principle motivation was her deep sense of patriotism. The conflict had enabled her to live a life of freedom, action and significance, but it had also left six million of her compatriots dead, and her ravaged country under the control of a Soviet-backed Communist regime. For her, surviving the ‘terrible peace’ that followed the war was harder than responding to the call to action.

Pioneering German aviators Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg not only made their names in the male-dominated field of flight in the 1930s but, with the onset of the war, also became test-pilots for the Nazi regime. They, too, were motivated by both their sense of honour, duty and patriotism, and their love for personal freedom. Their understandings of what these words meant, however, were very different not only from Krystyna Skarbek’s conception, but also from each other’s.

With her blond curls and blue-eyes, Hanna looked the perfect ‘Aryan’ woman, which suited both her inclinations and her ambitions. Firmly aligning herself with what she considered to be the dynamic Nazi regime, when war came she proudly put her life on the line to test prototypes including the vast Gigant troop-carrying glider, the Me163 rocket-powered Komet, and even a manned-version of the V1 flying bomb or doodlebug. As a brilliant aeronautical engineer, Melitta, helped develop the Stuka dive-bombers, even insisting on testing her own innovations. She knew that it was only by making herself uniquely valuable to the regime that she might protect herself and her family – her father had been born Jewish. On 20 July 1944 Melitta supported the most famous attempt on Hitler’s life. Conversely in the last days of the war, Hanna flew into Berlin under siege and begged Hitler to let her fly him to safety.

The Nazi regime and its enormously powerful armed forces led to the suffering and death of millions of people, Jews of all nations, Poles of all religions, Russians, British, French, American, the list goes on. The Women Who Flew for Hitler searches for the truth about two female pilots, asking why they were so successful and how they felt about serving the Nazi regime. I hope that what it reveals – the good and the bad – will contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which Hitler was able to harness the resources of his country for his terrible purposes. It is no less important that we seek to understand these questions, as that we remember the courage, achievements and sacrifices of the brave men and women whose service in so many fields helped to defeat that threat.

Clare is due to give a talk at the Chalke Valley History Festival this summer,  if you are interested in tickets please go to this link.

First published for the Chalke Valley History Festival here

Pioneers of flight: Hitler's forgotten Valkyries

First published by Pan Macmillan on 28th June 2017

Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were talented and record-breaking women who fought convention to make their names in the male-dominated field of flight in 1930s Germany. In her new book, The Women Who Flew For Hitler, acclaimed biographer and author Clare Mulley tells the real story of Hanna and Melitta. Here, Clare explains why she was drawn to write about these two fascinating women. 

Among the women who were awarded the Iron Cross during the Second World War, for me, two stand out. Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg were both brilliant pilots whose skill and conviction placed them firmly at the heart of the Third Reich. Hanna with her dazzling smile, blonde curls and blue eyes, was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler’s new regime, happily lending her image to a series of publicity articles and collectable cigarette cards. She also test-flew the most pioneering designs from the Nazi aircraft development programme. The darker, more serious and seemingly shy Melitta had a more conflicted relationship with the regime. Although one of their most senior aeronautical engineers and the lead Stuka dive-bomber test-pilot, she would never accept many of the policies and practices of National Socialism.

As young women, Hanna and Melitta had learnt to fly fragile wood and canvas gliders over the same green slopes. With engine-powered flight prohibited under the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, gliding became the focus for German national pride after the First World War. Although girls were only expected to watch, the women who dared to take to the skies quickly became icons in this golden age of flight.

In 1936 both Hanna and Melitta would wow the crowds flying at events during the Olympic Games. Two years later Hanna became the first women to fly a helicopter, and the first person ever to fly one inside a building, blowing all the gentlemen’s hats off as she circuited the Deutschlandhalle. When war came she tested the design of wing blades developed to cut through British barrage balloon cables, practised deck landings, and eventually crash-landed in a prototype of the famous Me163 rocket plane, destroying much of her face. Hitler awarded her the Iron Cross for her courage and commitment to duty, making her the first woman to receive the Iron Cross during the war.

In contrast, Melitta Schiller had quietly built her career further away from the limelight. A brilliant aeronautical engineer as well as a test pilot, Melitta’s work was fundamental in developing the accuracy of Stuka dive-bombers. Sometimes she would pass out during tests, regaining consciousness just in time to pull out before impact. She knew she had to work at the limits of the possible; it was through becoming uniquely valuable that she hoped to help protect herself and her siblings – all of whom had been defined as Jewish ‘Mischling’ in 1937. By 1944 Melitta had been reclassified as ‘Equal to Aryan’, her family were safe, she too had received the Iron Cross, and she was heading up her own military flight institute; an unheard of position for a woman, let alone one with Jewish ancestry.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, although they knew each other well and often met before and during the war, Hanna and Melitta had a difficult relationship.

As the tide of the war turned against Nazi Germany, Hanna and Melitta both looked for radical ways to bring an earlier but very different end to the conflict. Their beliefs, decisions, determination, courage and dramatic actions would put them powerfully on opposite sides of history. Yet later, when Hanna was infamous, revered and abhorred in almost equal measure, Melitta simply faded from the record. Uncovering her story has shed extraordinary new light not just on both these women’s lives, but on life more generally inside Germany under the Nazi regime, the limited options open to some, and the courage it took to face realities and act on truths under the perverting conditions of dictatorship and war.

Do Bunny Down: when shared war stories can help to heal

Do Bunny Down: when shared war stories can help to heal

When researching biographies I am privileged to meet and exchange letters with many people whose observations, perspectives and actions present new insights into the past, and sometimes into the present. My current work, on two remarkable female pilots from the Second World War, has led to interviews with veterans and other witnesses from several sides of that terrible conflict. As always, many tales have emerged that have no bearing on the story I am telling – but which I cannot bear to let go unrecorded. This is the story of some USAF servicemen who crashed into an enemy field, and the young German boy who was desperate to find them...

The Do Bunny
(Courtesy of Gerhard Bracke)

On 25 March 1945, twenty unescorted US B24 bombers were releasing their lethal load over their target when they were attacked by a set of seven of Messerschmitt Me262 jet fighters whose approach had been deliberately concealed by the glare of the sun. These pioneering machines were far faster than any Allied planes, and they were about to show how devastating they could be to heavy bombers. Their first target blew up in mid-air. Only the navigator survived after he was blown free from the nose of his B24. Crew in the other planes saw his boots suddenly jerked from his feet as his chute opened above him. He was taken POW. The lead bomber in the formation was then attacked, and tragically spiralled down into a shoe factory in the town below – loss of life unknown. The three of its crew who managed to bail out were all also captured. A third, badly damaged, bomber made it to the Swedish coastline, only to swing round and ditch into the Baltic Sea to avoid crashing into local housing. Its surviving crew were interned in neutral Sweden. 

The crew of the Do Bunny,
Charles 'Chuck' Blaney is standing, back right.
(Courtesy of Chuck Blaney)

Another plane, the Do Bunny, also took extensive damage. Having been caught in a storm of cannon shells, one engine burst into flames and had to be shut down. The attack had left no time to close the bomb-bay doors, and damage now made this impossible. Despite returning fire, the Do Bunny took several more hits, eventually leading to the loss of a second engine - with one of the propeller blades left dangling below. ‘Time seemed to stand still’, the radio operator and top gunner, S/Sgt Charles ‘Chuck’ Blaney, later wrote. ‘The flight engineer was knocked out of his top turret and he dropped to the flight deck. The plexiglass in the rear tunnel shattered in the tail gunner’s face. Fuel and hydraulic liquid from pierced pipelines were pouring and swirling out of the still open bomb bay, which we were never able to close. Do Bunny was in real trouble.’ 

Charles 'Chuck' Blaney
(Courtesy of Chuck Blaney)

Suddenly the attack ended. Perhaps the Messerschmitts were out of fuel or ammunition. Either way, forced out of formation, the Do Bunny began a slow descent while its crew threw out ‘everything that was not nailed down’ to lighten their load. When a third engine packed up it was clear that they were not going to make it the last 220 miles to friendly territory. Opting to stay together instead of bailing out, they prepared to make an emergency landing.

Down below, a class of schoolchildren in the German town of Soltau were watching the crippled plane bleeding smoke across the sky. One girl shouted out, and twelve-year-old Gerhard Bracke rushed to the window to look but, by the time he got there, the Do Bunny was already out of sight. Disappointed, Gerhard decided to search for the remains of the plane on his own, as soon as he got the chance. Lt Joachim Grauenhorst, the Wehrmacht officer in charge of the Soltau Riding Academy, had also witnessed the B24’s final descent. Surprised not to hear an explosion soon after it had passed directly over the Academy building, he quickly assembled some soldiers to find the downed plane.

Gerhard Bracke in 1944
(Courtesy of Gerhard Bracke)

Inside the coasting Do Bunny, ‘all went well until a wing dipped into the ground as we lost speed,’ Blaney wrote, ‘and then all hell let loose’. The torn, burnt and battered B24, riddled with hundreds of bullet holes, broke apart on impact. Miraculously five of the nine crew managed to jump to safety. It was not long before they were joined some scared and angry locals, some carrying pitchforks, followed by Grauenhorst and his soldiers who kept the crowd back while they began working to free the last four of the crew still trapped inside the wreckage. Incredibly, despite injuries including a broken leg, none of them had been killed.

The Do Bunny
(Courtesy of Gerhard Bracke)

The Do Bunny
(Courtesy of Chuck Blaney)

The prisoners were escorted to the town square. Here two SS officers started building up the growing crowd’s resentment against the Americans as an enemy bomber crew. It was probably only because Grauenhorst had command of several soldiers that, after some tense moments, he was able to take the men back to the Riding Academy under his command. Here they were locked in the stables, partly for their own safety. ‘He probably saved all our lives’ Blaney believes.

Lt Joachim Grauenhorst
(Courtesy of Chuck Blaney) 

A passionate member of the Hitler Youth, Gerhard was keen to learn everything about the downed B24 and the enemy soldiers being held at the Academy. After school that afternoon he went exploring until he found the crash site. There he stood in awed fascination, looking at the wreck with its crushed nose, splintered fuselage and open bomb-bay doors which were now cut into the ground. It was a seminal moment for the impressionable boy, and he stayed for a long time.

The next morning the Do Bunny’s crew were driven to an interrogation centre, and started the long journey to a prison camp. They were liberated by the Russians in late May 1945.

Gerhard was still a schoolboy when the Second World War ended. He grew up to become a respected biographer and historian of the war. During our conversations, he not only told me about the downing of the Do Bunny, but of a rather wonderful postscript to the story.

Many years after the war, Gerhard spent some time researching what had happened to the Americans who had so miraculously survived the Luftwaffe attack and their own crash landing. Having tracked down Chuck Blaney and the other surviving crew members, he arranged a 50th anniversary reunion. In 1995 he travelled to Ohio, USA, to join them. With him, Gerhard brought a biography of the Luftwaffe pilot who had shot them down. Fighter pilot Ace Lt Rudolf Rademacher had survived the war only to die in a glider crash in 1953. Gerhard had also found the archived ‘missing crew’ reports from the other B24 bombers in the formation, and old photographs of the destroyed Do Bunny from the Soltau local newspaper. But what touched Chuck Blaney most was the warm personal letter Gerhard brought from Joachim Grauenhorst of the Soltau Riding Academy, along with an invitation from the Mayor of Soltau to a reunion in their town the following year.

Soltau newspaper coverage, 1995
(Courtesy of Chuck Blaney)

Former enemies, Gerhard and Chuck are in touch to this day. 'He is still a best friend forever', Chuck told me touchingly of Gerhard. Both men were pleased that there is continued interest in their story, and that it might now reach a new audience. Sometimes, when certain people find themselves acting for, or representing, one side of history or another, it appears that time, rather than ideologies or national boundaries, is the greatest barrier. How awful it is, among the many terrible tragedies of the war, that a German shoe factory was hit by a downed American bomber, and that so many airmen lost their lives altogether. But how uplifting that one young witness to history was compelled to restore the common bonds of humanity between people once torn apart.

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Hiroshima: City of Peace

Hiroshima: City of Peace

Seventy years ago this month, on Monday 6 August 1945, the nuclear bomb known as ‘Little Boy’ was dropped on Hiroshima by an American B-29 bomber, immediately killing an estimated 80,000 people. Three days later a second bomb, the equally appallingly nick-named ‘Fat Man’, was dropped on Nagasaki, killing between 60-70,000 people. On 15 August Japan surrendered, marking the end of the Second World War.

It has been argued that President Truman’s decision to drop the A-bombs on these two Japanese cities saved more lives than were lost by ending the war so much earlier than any alternative course of action. As usual the truth is more complex. Truman’s primary objectives were certainly American lives and the earliest possible end to the war, but other pertinent considerations included impressing the Soviets as the Cold War approached, the lasting need to respond to Pearl Harbour, and the pressure to justify the development costs of the atomic project. In this war, sides of very different motivations and experiences all committed atrocities and suffered from traumatising war crimes. I don't seek to suggest equivalence. Nevertheless, it is still difficult understand the detonation of two separate Atomic bombs on the same country within a few days.

Cherry blossom in Hiroshima, April 2015

I visited Japan for the first time this Easter. It was cherry blossom season and the flowers were spectacular, frothing white and pink against bright blue skies. I was traveling around by bullet train and bicycle, visiting shrines and temples, stroking deer, feeding carp, and watching robots hop and skip in Tokyo. I also spent a day in Hiroshima, a vibrant city rebuilt after its almost total destruction in 1945. Modern Hiroshima has its fair share of cherry trees, but the official flower of the city is the Oleander, as this was the first plant to bloom again after 1945.

I was shown around the city by a local guide called Keiko. We started at the Peace Park that had opened in 1955. Here Keiko pointed out the new ground level, resulting from the vast amount of imported earth brought in to cover contaminated land. We visited the Genbaku Dome, the skeletal remains of the most central building left standing by the bomb which has been preserved as a memorial, as well as the eternal flame, and the peace pagoda erected in 1966.

Hiroshima Peace Pond in front of the Peace Flame
and Cenotaph in the Memorial Park

Keiko had married into a family from Hiroshima. Her husband’s mother was a young woman living less than two kilometers from the epicentre of the detonation in 1945. Of their large family only she, and a few others who were also away from home that August morning, survived. Keiko's husband was not born until a few years later but Keiko told me that, although rarely talking about it, he still carries the weight of these devastating events on his shoulders. 'As do all the city’s post-war generations', she added.

While other cities like Tokyo and Osaka had been severely bombed during the war, Hiroshima, where several Japanese armies were based, had not been targeted. Anticipating an eventual attack, that August the city authorities had mobilised school-children aged between eleven and fourteen to demolish certain houses to create fire-breaks, with the aim of limiting potential damage from firestorms. Many were helping with this work on the morning that the A-bomb fell, putting them close to the centre of the impact. Amongst other relics, such as melted road girders and roof tiles, the absolutely heart-wrenching Hiroshima Peace Museum displays possessions from some of these children including unopened lunch-boxes, scorched school books and several school blouses that had been beautifully hand-stitched by girls in classes just weeks earlier. In case these seem romantic, there are also some appalling human relics, kept by traumatised relatives who had nothing else. Thousands of other people left no evidence of their lives, abilities or personalities at all.

The museum also holds a display of many of the origami cranes made by Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who was just two years old when she was exposed to radiation from the A-bomb further out in the suburbs of Hiroshima. Having developed leukaemia some years later, Sasaki began folding paper cranes in the hope that when she had made a thousand she might be granted a wish, as in Japanese legend. Too weak to continue, Sasaki died in 1955.

Origami cranes made by Sadako Sasaki in Hiroshima Peace Museum

Sadako Sasaki statue, holding a crane aloft

Such devastatingly personal effects and relics are deeply telling, but nothing can convey the enormity of the loss. Six thousand Hiroshima school-children were killed when the atomic bomb was dropped. Many more died later from their injuries. By the end of the year the death toll is estimated to have been between 90,000-166,000, possibly more than half of the city’s entire population. Cancer and other resulting conditions claimed many more lives, such as that of twelve year old Sasaki. Around 70% of Hiroshima’s buildings were also destroyed. Nagasaki suffered a similar level of destruction.

Hiroshima was proclaimed a City of Peace by the Japanese parliament in 1949. It has since hosted a series of conferences on peace, developed a dedicated Peace Institute within its university, and established the international ‘Mayors for Peace’ organization, calling for the abolition and elimination of all nuclear weapons by 2020. This may be an unrealistic goal but it serves as a guide to steer disarmament. When one thinks of mothers, their skin hanging off, running towards the suburbs of Hiroshima clutching their dead children to their chests, it seems impossible to conceive of ever using such a weapon again.

The American decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki resonates in other ways today as well. From a historian's perspective, earlier this year the USA took the decision to digitise the records generated by their Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, to make them readily available to researchers internationally. The ABCC was the US body established in 1947 to carry out a medical assessment of the effect of radiation on survivors from the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The documents show that many of the US commission’s doctors were deeply affected by what they witnessed, although, as The Japan Times noted while I was visiting Hiroshima, many of the A-bomb survivors later criticised the commission for treating them like research guinea-pigs. Pity, without empathy or respect, is of little value. Preserved images in this collection include many taken to show the ‘atomic bomb radiation effects on the human body’, with some of the survivors photographed holding nameplates. Clearly issues around confidentiality and sensitivity must be paramount, and the full history behind the commission, as well as its findings, needs to be addressed.

Keiko nevertheless believes that the stories that stem from Hiroshima need to reach the widest possible audience. She told me that she feels deeply moved when showing visitors around her city and she hopes that, in this way, she can play a small part in helping to spread Hiroshima’s messages both of peace, and of the ‘evil of Atomic weapons’, around the world. I thought of Keiko as Hiroshima and Nagasaki fell silent for the seventieth anniversary this August, each city remembering the moment when tens of thousands of their citizens were killed. After doves were released and Buddhist bells tolled, vows were taken to redouble civic efforts to halt nuclear proliferation in a world where incidents, accidents, and the threat of nuclear terrorism is ever growing. Since then, countries including Japan and the USA, Britain, India, Australia, China and Russia have negotiated a controversial new deal to limit Iran's nuclear programme, while providing relief from previous sanctions and permitting the country to continue its atomic programme 'for peaceful purposes'.

As I left Hiroshima, Keiko gave me a white origami orizuru, or paper crane, which she had folded as we walked around the peace park. There are many important war anniversaries this year, but among them we must remember the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the message of peace with which Hiroshima has heroically chosen to reply to the world. Pity alone is not enough.

Lest We Forget

There has been much in the press this month about Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, the impressive art installation of 888,246 ceramic poppies, each representing one British military casualty during the First world War, that flooded the Tower of London moat earlier this month. For many this was a beautiful and powerful statement of the size of Britain's sacrifice, for others, a mawkish display of nationalism. The wonderful Ring of Remembrance Notre Dame de Lorette, an elliptical structure engraved with the names of the dead of all nationalities in northern France, is another powerful but controversial war memorial. The who, what, how and why may be contentious, but what is generally agreed upon is the importance of remembering.

A while ago I was due to give a talk on the female special agents of the Second World War at Maddingley Hall, near Cambridge. En route I stopped to admire the beautiful stonework outside and bumped into a man doing the same thing. It transpired that he was Harry Gray, the stonemason, now artist, who had carved some of the pieces during restoration works several years ago. We soon discovered a shared interest in the two world wars, and fascination with the very different ways that the dead are remembered and, on occasion, honoured. A few weeks later Harry invited me, and my husband Ian, who is a sculptor, over to his studio for lunch.

Harry explaining that the foliage on Corinthian columns are acanthus leaves, with leaf from his garden.

Harry explaining that the foliage on Corinthian columns
are acanthus leaves, with leaf from his garden.

It turned out that Harry has worked on a number of war monuments and memorials, among other public art commissions. His first was the much admired frieze for the Animals at War memorial in Park Lane, but my favourite is the stunning Battle of Britain monument at the White Cliffs of Dover.

Approached from the ground, the Battle of Britain monument shows a young pilot, sitting, looking to the skies, calmly waiting for his call to action. Seen from above, however, from a pilot’s perspective, the figure is sitting at the centre of a propeller hewn from the white chalk of the ground. It is a beautiful and thought-provoking design that literally works on several levels, calling into question not just who these men were and what they were fighting for, but how their courage, skill and sacrifice has left a permanent mark on our country.

Pilot from the Battle of Britain monument

Battle of Britain monument from the air

Harry had only heard about the proposal for a Battle of Britain monument when he was commissioned to produce the stone base for the winning piece. Having rather cheekily asked if he could submit his own design, he was delighted to get through to the short list. Lord Tebbit, himself a former RAF pilot, was on the judging panel, and when he saw that Harry’s pilot figure was to be hewn from Forest of Dean sandstone his only comment was that it would weather badly. Harry protested that London pavements are made from sandstone, and ultimately it was Tebbit who backed his design. The Queen Mother unveiled the monument in July 1993. Earlier that day Harry had been checking everything was as it should be when he was surprised to see a woman let through the security cordons to join him at the monument statue. “At last,” she told him, “You’ve made my brother’s grave”. Her brother had fought in one of the Polish squadrons in the Battle of Britain, and had been lost over the channel. 

Harry has since won many public commissions, and you can visit his website here. The current piece that speaks most loudly to me is his project for a public artwork to celebrate William ‘Bill’ Tutte’s code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Coded signals intercepted by Bletchey Park were printed as perforated tape, or ‘Baudot’ code. Reflecting this, Harry is producing a sculpture comprising of five steel sheets each of which are perforated like Baudot code.

Baudot code

Harry's 'coded' metal sheets

When seen from a key viewpoint marked in the paving, the perforations reveal an image of Bill Tutte through the metal sheets. In this way the portrait image itself is encoded, with Baudot in place of DNA, showing people the essence of the man in face and form. 

Bill Tutte, reduced to dots as a guide

Three of the six sample sheets for the memorial

I live in Saffron Walden, within walking distance of beautiful Audley End House which was used during the Second World War as a training base by the Cichociemni, the ‘Silent and Unseen’ Polish special forces. It has always amused me that my last biography was of one of the very few Polish-born special agents, Krystyna Skarbek, aka Christine Granville, who never set foot in Audley End because she was trained and employed directly by the British. Nevertheless I am honoured that over the last few years I have been invited to lay a wreath for both Krystyna and the Cichociemni at our local war memorial on Remembrance Sunday. 

The Cichociemni are commemorated with a stone urn in the grounds of Audley End house, but I have often thought that it would be wonderful to have a more permanent memorial to Krystyna somewhere in Britain. I wonder now if it should be made from Polish soil, or how else to best capture the spirit of this passionate patriot and fighter for freedom. But then, perhaps writing biographies has its similarities with Harry's kind of art, in seeking to capture and present a picture of their subject that is more than skin deep?

I was appalled to hear this month that cuts to the Imperial War Museum budget mean that access to the library and archives, which were hugely important during my research for Krystyna's biography, is now going to be severely restricted if not closed, and the school education packages may be stopped. I find it incredible that, at this time of remembrance in particular, we can even consider risking losing one of the most important repositories of these stories. If you feel the same, please take a moment to sign the petition against these cuts, so that we can continue to remember, honour and consider, in an informed way.

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