By GLENYS ROBERTS

Last updated at 23:35 12 September 2007

Rich, beautiful and oh-so daring...the girls who flew dangerous wartime missions seemed to lead charmed lives. But a fascinating new book reveals a darker reality

She climbed out of the cockpit of her Fairey Barracuda and became instantly famous. Wearing a summer uniform of white shirt, dark tie and sleeves rolled above the elbows, she slung a parachute over her shoulder and shook out her long blonde hair.

Back-lit by the afternoon sun, pilot Maureen Dunlop looked unbelievably glamorous.

And when the picture appeared in 1944 on the cover of the magazine Picture Post, the world was convinced the Air Transport Auxiliary - or ATA - was an-all woman outfit.

The ATA, or the "legion of the air" as it was known, performed an essential role during World War Two, delivering British warplanes from the factories where they were made to RAF airfields all over Britain. It was dangerous work which gave rise to incredible feats of heroism.

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Flying in the ATA whether you were a man or a woman was one of the most high-risk activities in the whole war - its death rate was higher than in RAF Fighter Command.

Of 1,124 pilots who flew for the outfit, nearly one in six was killed. Constantly depleted, the elite troupe needed replenishing - yet even when their country clearly needed them, women had to fight hard to be allowed to take part at all.

The hoops they had to jump through to be accepted in a hitherto male preserve seem quite extraordinary, as does their amazing single-mindedness.

The famous female flyer Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo to Australia before the war, had a hysterectomy when she was only 26 because she blamed her womanhood for holding her back.

One fellow pilot, Jackie Surour, was so unhappy in 1939 when her male friends went off to join the RAF she recalled: "I despised my body, my breasts, all the things that pronounced me woman and left me behind as solitary and desolate, as a discarded mistress.

"I looked malignantly at my breasts, symbols of bleakness rooted to my chest and remembered the cut-throat razor in the bathroom."

Other women were so keen on flying that they forewent the chance of marriage so nothing would detract from their passion. Inevitably, there were whispers about lesbianism. Yet more tried to keep marriage, family and flying alive.

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Margaret Fairweather, who lost her pilot husband while she was pregnant, got back into the cockpit the moment her baby was born, only to crash land in a field.

This time she escaped with her life, though by 1944 she died in another crash, in common with one of ten of the women who flew with the ATA.

There were 146 brave women pilots just like her, their fates mostly unsung today, not least because of the extreme modesty of the handful of elderly survivors.

But a new book, The Spitfire Women Of World War II, has collected the extraordinary stories of these Atagirls for a new generation.

There was Diana Barnato Walker, granddaughter of a South African diamond merchant; Mary de Bunsen, daughter of the British ambassador to Vienna; and Lettice Curtis, ex-captain of the Oxford ladies' tennis team - the first woman to fly a four-engined bomber.

There was also Mona Friedlander, an ice-hockey international; Lois Butler, captain of the Canadian women's ski team; Audrey Sale-Barker, Olympic skier and the future Countess of Selkirk; and Rosemary Rees, a former ballet dancer. They were among the cream of their generation.

To join the ATA you had to have 200 hours in the air and flying was, therefore, a rich person's sport. Young, beautiful and wilful, they swopped a life of privilege for one where death was potentially just round the corner. For in order to make their mark they volunteered for the most dangerous jobs.

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In 1939 Amy Johnson was routinely flying across the Solent acting as target for searchlight batteries and anti-aircraft gunners to draw attention away from the combat pilots.

She was killed in January 1941, when her plane ran out of fuel in thick fog and she baled out over the Thames estuary. She landed safely, but got lost in the water and drowned.

But there were many other dangers. Scandalously, one woman's aircraft was even thought to have been sabotaged by male rivals, threatened by the sight of attractive, young and physically slight women emerging from the cockpits of huge heavy bombers.

"Women are not doing this job for the sake of doing something for their country," declared one outraged male authority figure.

"Women who want to serve their country should take on work more befitting their sex instead of encroaching on a man's occupation. Men have made aviation reach its present perfection."

Sometimes danger came from the sheer unfamiliarity with the planes they were flying - there were 143 different types and often the pilots had a mere half-hour with the handbook before taking off.

More usually it came in the guise of the weather. For the most part, these pioneer women were flying in open cockpits without instruments and without radar and when, like Johnson, they were engulfed with cloud, they had little hope of finding their way to land safely.

There were some terrible nearmisses. One January morning in 1943, Diana Barnato Walker was flying over the Cotswolds when the clear blue sky suddenly filled with cloud more than 6,000 ft thick.

As her plane started losing height, Barnato, then 25, desperately peered through the clouds trying to find a place to land.

She finally broke through at treetop height and banked sharply to avoid a patch of woodland. Improbably she recovered to make a perfect landing in heavy rain on a grass airstrip at RAF Windrush.

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Luck played its part in her survival, but it was also a great feat of concentration and endurance.

Flying in open cockpits, these brave women were often dangerously cold by the time they reached their destinations, but they went straight back to base on the train to ferry another plane the next day.

And if the natural challenges weren't enough, some pilots took their lives wilfully in their hands. Ann Wood-Kelly, 24, once followed two male pilots up the Avon gorge and under the Clifton suspension bridge in a Spitfire.

The fact was that life in the air was glamorous. It was daredevil, it was cutting edge and the women flaunted their fascination with it and their feminity, often playing up to the men's direst fears.

"My dear, I've got my first Hudson and I know I shall I crash and I've got a pain (cold, temperature, etc)," wrote one female pilot in her memoirs, parodying the attitude in the mess before they took off.

Her parody continued: "They would totter out, leaving a trail of handkerchiefs, lipsticks, handbags, etc, which would be picked out by willing male hands.

"They would then fly the aircraft superbly to its destination."

That of course was the point. These plucky women knew they could do the job and they were determined to prove it. For all of them the holy grail was the Spitfire, the brave little plane which men found so sexy they talked about it more as a mistress than a machine.

Yet the iconic British single-seater fighter was in fact the perfect plane for a woman to fly. The cockpit was so petite that their smaller frames fitted in perfectly. Women who flew it used to liken the feeling to wearing a well-fitting dress.

They loved its sensitive and powerful-performance, too. With its 1600 horsepower Rolls-Royce engines, it made the first post-war jets seem sluggish by comparison.

The first woman to fly one was Margaret Fairweather, daughter of Liberal peer Lord Runciman, who joined the ATA in 1941 with 1,000 flying hours to her credit.

Margaret was one of the unique bunch of women flyers called the First Eight, flying out of the tiny airport of White Waltham which still exists near Maidenhead, Berkshire.

The team was assembled by Pauline Gower, the first female even allowed to climb into an RAF plane, let alone fly one.

Gower, daughter of a Tory MP, had no use for anyone who thought women too frail to fly, saying every girl should take lessons - they were "the best antidote to the manifold neuroses which beset modern women", usually because they had too little to occupy their minds.

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She paid for her own lessons by teaching the violin, wisely keeping them secret from her parents because as soon as her father found out he tried to clip her wings by cutting off her allowance.

Ultimately just like Amy Johnson's father, Sir Robert Gower became his daughter's fiercest supporter and even gave her the down-payment for a first plane of her own, a little twoseater, for her 21st birthday.

Pauline used it to become a joyride pilot offering pleasure trips from a field next the road in Kent.

As war approached, she had a massive 2,000 hours flying time and had flown 33,000 passengers, yet as a woman she was not allowed to fly in combat.

Then, in 1940, she came up with the idea of persuading her father's powerful friends that women should be allowed to boost the dwindling numbers of pilots, by ferrying planes alongside the hitherto allmale Air Transport Auxiliary.

Pauline was paid a salary of £400 a year - 20 per cent lower than a man doing the same job - to recruit the original eight female flyers, who themselves joined up for an abysmal £26 per annum, plus a much coveted uniform consisting of a pleated skirt, slacks - not to be worn off base - a one-piece "Sidcot" flying suit and quilted liner, a sheepskin leather flying jacket, great coat and cap.

At first the women were restricted to flying light planes which were so inexpensive they were easy to replace "if broken by women", observed Pauline wryly.

Their horizons soon expanded. By the time she was 22, Joan Hughes, one of the first and the youngest to join - she had started flying at 15 - had clocked up 600 hours ferrying everything from light trainers to heavy four-engine bombers.

Hughes used her skills after the war teaching airline pilots and in 1965 starred in the film Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines flying a replica of a 1909 Demoiselle. She died in 1992, aged 74, with 11,800 hours in her logbook.

Only the war made such progress possible. Women knew it and they were soon arriving in Britain from all over the world to take part. The Americans were recruited by the dynamic Jackie Cochran, who wanted to show the British what American women were made of.

An orphan from the deep South, her background as a hairdresser was far removed from the upper-crust English beauties she came to join.

Each winter, Jackie styled the hair of rich women in Miami and there one year she met millionaire Floyd Odlum, who owned several aircraft factories.

The two were married and when Floyd advised her to learn to fly Jackie went solo on her third lesson. "To live without risk would be tantamount-to death," she declared.

The happy couple set up home in the California desert, where they often entertained fellow flyers, such as the doomed Amelia Earhart and the eccentric Howard Hughes.

Then in 1941 when Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the famous boss of Bomber command, was in Washington casting round for extra ferry pilots, Jackie was recommended.

She offered him American women pilots including Dorothy Furey, a southern belle so spirited she lured Lord Beatty - son of the famous First Sealord - away from his wife and married him in 1947, and then moved on to have an affair with soontobe Prime Minister Anthony Eden.

Women brought extreme passion to their vocation. As Jackie's first batch of Americans gathered in Montreal for the long voyage to Britain, through sea lanes patrolled by U boats, they partied hard to soothe their nerves.

There were tales of all-night benders with male flyers and of a particular party trick which consisted of filling their shower curtains with water and bombing them down the stairs at their hotel. The high jinks continued throughout the ten-day passage.

Centre for these hardliving Americans in London was Mayfair. Blacked out, dirty and haunted by barrage balloons, the capital was teeming with exiles from all over the world, many of them flying for the ATA. Often their extrovert natures clashed with the British, who were quietly getting on with the job.

Unlike the Brits, the American women already knew they could breach all-male preserves. One of them, Helen Richey, had become the first U.S. civil airline pilot as early as

1934. In fact, Helen was sent home before the end of the war for pranging one too many planes. Poor Helen, whose early life had been so full of great achievements, committed suicide in 1947, because she felt the world had become such a dull place.

Not for the British women. The ATA had enabled them to make their mark in the air. Before the war they had flown, like Audrey Sale-Barker, a doctor's daughter, for fun and to draw attention to themselves.

Audrey, nicknamed 'Wendy' after she got her wings, ditched in lion country in the middle of Africa with co-pilot Joan Page, daughter of the chief justice of Burma, memorably wrote an SOS in lipstick which they gave to an illiterate Masai tribesman in the hope that he would pass it on to someone who could save them.

"Please come and fetch us. We've had an aircrash AND ARE HURT," it read. Amazingly the lipstick SOS did get through to rescuers. It saved their lives and only encouraged Audrey's flamboyant personality.

When the time came for her to join the ATA, she refused to wear the regulation RAF uniform and had her own made in Savile Row with a bright red lining.

If women were going to be the butt of male criticism, she reckoned they might as well make the most of it.

By the end of the war, everything had changed. The 'Atagirls' had acquitted themselves so well that from now on the sky was the limit.

Though the Air Transport Authority itself was disbanded immediately after the war, many of them carried on flying into old age.

Most of all, they had proved without doubt that women were equal to men. And that was a legacy which would help coming generations make their mark in all sorts of professions.