A memoir by Russian pilot Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova, Red Sky, Black Death (translated by Ponomaryova and Green), made me wonder why the U.S.S.R. had allowed women to fly in combat when the United States didn’t. The answer, I guessed, was necessity. The United States restricted women pilots to delivering planes. They were not allowed in combat, were denied military benefits, and weren’t considered armed forces personnel until decades later.
Germany had women combat pilots in World War II and, again I guessed it was more desperation than liberation on Germany’s part. Women’s liberation is not new. The difference is that modern women were liberated because it was necessary to use them, whereas in former centuries wealth and power liberated a female to be leaders of armies.
Germany’s answer to Anna was a pilot named (1912-1979). In 1955, Hanna’s autobiography, The Sky My Kingdom, was published. Hanna started her career with glider training. She became a glider pilot instructor and was the first person to cross the Alps in a glider. By 1937 Hanna tested the Junkers JU-87, a two-seater dive bomber.
The next test put her in a Dornier DO-17, a bomber with a narrow fuselage and a four-person crew. That same year Hanna tested Germany’s first helicopter, the Focke-Achgelis FA-61. Although it maneuvered like a helicopter, its fuselage looked like an old barn-storming plane. Struts, attached to the fuselage in front of the cockpit and behind the single engine, held two horizontal rotors. A short prop that was non-functional for flying cooled the engine. The FA-61 was a true helicopter that hovered and turned 360 degrees in place. On October 25, 1937 Hanna flew the helicopter 108.974 km in a straight line to establish the distance record. She also was the first to set the helicopter records in altitude, speed, and endurance. At the 1938 Berlin Motor Show, she demonstrated the FA-61 inside a huge auditorium. Hanna flew around the auditorium, hovered, did a 360-degree turn, and finished the show with a Nazi salute from the cockpit. The Luftwaffe awarded Hanna the Military Flying Medal – the first woman to receive this award.
Whether or not Hanna was brave or crazy, she kept busy with one prototype after another. Three pilots were killed testing the secret German rocket plane. Hanna tested the plane first as a glider (Me 163A), and then with an engine (Me 163 B). The Komet, as it was dubbed, could not be controlled with an engine. Hanna, with her grit and superior flying skills, survived the crash, but spent five months in the hospital undergoing plastic surgery. In 1944 Hanna tested prototypes of the V-1 buzz bombs.
Her career ended with Hitler’s suicide. Hanna was on the wrong side of World War II, but that should not detract from her accomplishments. She died in 1979, a year after setting a new women’s distance record in a glider. In times past women could be anything they wanted to be whether it was to lead men into battle against the Persians, Romans, or to fly planes against the Allied Forces. When women were needed, they stepped forward. Some made history.
Other aviatrixes on Great History:
The WWII patriotic Russian combat pilot Anna Timofeyeva-Yegorova.
Cornelia Fort, the WWII American ferry pilot who saw the bombing of Pearl Harbor from the sky.
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Mike Halvorsen said:
You said that Hanna Reitsch “was on the wrong side of WWII”. That is really such an understatement, it’s comparable to saying Mussolini “had a conservative slant”. Reitsch was an out-and-out NAZI. She was known to be one of Adolf Hitler’s female devotees, even after the war, when most prudent Nazis were either in South America in hiding or were being “de-Nazified”(Oh God….)
Granted, she was a brilliant aviatrix, and a great test pilot, but let’s not forget that she had a VERY Dark Side to her. To put her up in the pantheon of pioneering women without first pointing this out just seems to be wrong.
July 20th, 2009 at 11:42 am
tom goodrich said:
Great piece on Hanna. Truly she was an aviation heroine and pace setter, no matter what side of the war she was on, no matter who she admired, no matter where her post-war loyalties lay. A pity some small-minded, self-appointed history commissars see it as their duty to diminish achievement because they disagree with this or that person and their beliefs. A few days before war’s end, Hanna–risking life and limb–flew into the teeth of Soviet flak during the Battle of Berlin and landed on a bomb-cratered city street. The hope was to rescue Hitler, the man she admired most on earth. I sense that our self-appointed history filter would deny such bravery since he disagrees with Hanna’s politics. Now, to me, that is an item which not only “just seems to be wrong,” but also seems “very dark,” as well.
History minus objectivity equals propaganda.
October 9th, 2009 at 6:58 pm