Celebrating Women in Aviation on the First Day of Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture)

It’s the first day of EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the world’s largest fly-in and general celebration of aviation. In particular, there tends to be a lot of official celebration of women in aviation. Thus, today’s blog post is about the greatest female pilots in history, chronicled in the book The Women Who Flew for Hitler. Hanna Reitsch, who taught herself to fly a helicopter, is already well-known, but the book also covers Melitta von Stauffenberg whose career was actually far more impressive. While Hannah was a great stick-and-rudder pilot, Melitta was one of Germany’s most important aeronautical engineers and a far more disciplined test pilot (the author refers to both women by their first names). As Melitta isn’t as well-known, a few excerpts

In October [shortly after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering Melitta] was interviewed by the head of the aerodynamics department at the prestigious German Research Institute for Aeronautics, better known as DVL,* at Berlin-Adlershof airbase. Having temporarily closed its doors during the war, the institute was now aiming to restore Germany’s international reputation in technology, and was keen to employ the brightest graduates. Invited to watch a test flight, Melitta was deep in conversation when the plane she was there to observe plummeted from the sky to crash only a hundred metres away from her. The entire crew was killed on impact. Although she was shaken, Melitta’s resolve did not falter. The following year, aged twenty-five, she received her diploma and started work at DVL as a flight mechanic and mathematician in experimental aerodynamics research. Her initial brief was the operation of propellers, then known as ‘airscrews’, with particular focus on the sound and drag caused by high altitudes.

Adolf Hitler was an early adopter of aviation and a big proponent of the industry as well as women within it.

‘Hitler wanted the Germans to become a nation of aviators,’ the wife of Hanna’s friend Karl Baur, a Messerschmitt test pilot, later wrote. ‘If there was some kind of celebration in a city, an air show was a must.’

‘Women have always been among my staunchest supporters,’ Hitler told the New York Times in July 1933. ‘They feel my victory is their victory.’ While working to return women to their rightful and respected role, as he saw it, of hausfrau, Hitler had been keen to exploit any support for his National Socialist Party. At times this required rising above a tide of female fan mail and enduring more than one public display of adoration. ‘He was often embarrassed’ by such women, his friend and official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann later remembered, but he ‘had no option but to accept their veneration’.

Hitler ended up supporting and decorating both of the women whose careers are chronicled in the book and, famously, admitted Hanna Reitsch to his inner circle.

[It is interesting to compare the book’s description of Hitler’s platform to what today’s politicians promise: “[Hitler] promised a higher standard of living with a car for everyone, beautiful homes, affordable holidays, marriage loans, respect for mothers and a defence against Bolshevism.” Is it fair to say that Democrats promise to take cars away, move people into apartments in 15-minute cities, give women money if they don’t get married, and, instead of defending against Bolshevism, to deliver the best aspects of Bolshevism adapted for domestic use.]

Some recent books describe aviators, including German fighter pilots, as anti-Nazi. A Higher Call is one prominent example. Pilots find themselves accidentally wearing swastikas and doing whatever Hitler tells them to do. The Women Who Flew for Hitler points out that German aviators were early enthusiasts for Hitler:

Organized by the meteorologist Walter Georgii, the first Rhön gliding competitions had been held on the Wasserkuppe mountain in 1920. Every summer since, thousands of sightseers had journeyed by train and foot up to the annual rallies held on the bare summit of the Wasserkuppe, the Rhön valley’s highest point. According to contemporary German flight magazines, by the late 1920s the highest slopes of the mountain hosted a glider camp with its own water and electricity supply, hotels, bars and restaurants, a post office with special-edition stamps, and indeed everything, ‘like in the big cities. Even dancing. Even bobbed hair!’

By the 1930s, over 20,000 people regularly travelled to the Rhön valley at weekends. On the day of the 1932 Reichstag elections, a temporary voting station had even been set up on the mountain, and Walter Georgii called on the people of Germany to ‘do as the gliders have’. His message was clear – it was time to recognize the forces of nature and embrace a brave new future characterized by technical prowess, a love of freedom and a deep sense of national pride. With the Nazis securing over 50 per cent of the mountaintop vote, the Wasserkuppe fraternity’s support for Hitler was considerably above the national average.

If you think that motion sickness will prevent you from achieving greatness in the air:

Hanna quickly proved her capabilities and was accepted by her peers. Most of the flying suits were too large, and she needed cushions to boost her height in the cockpit, but she learned to fly loops, turns and rolls in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44, a two-seat open biplane known as the Stieglitz, or Goldfinch, and carefully concealed her initial sickness by throwing up neatly into one of her gloves.

Americans loved Hanna Reitsch before and after World War II and she loved Americans. Here’s an interesting quote from 1938:

Nevertheless, although she favourably compared the USA to a Europe ‘intellectually overburdened with centuries-old cultural legacy’, she still had some reservations. ‘The American’s uncomplicated acceptance of life-as-it-comes,’ she decided, ‘exposes him to the dangers of absorbing uncritically the opinions served up to him by press and radio.’

While Hanna was celebrated for winning gliding competitions, Melitta was doing a combination of aeronautical engineering and test piloting her own creations:

Melitta’s new assignment was to perfect the aircraft technically, to eliminate as much risk as possible. The main task was to evaluate and improve the targeting devices, and in particular the dive-sights for the two-man Junkers Ju 87 Stuka, with its distinctive gull-wing shape, and the popular four-man Ju 88 dive-bomber developed for larger-scale strategic air war. This involved registering the continuously changing angle of the dive, speed and dropping altitude, all without modern instruments. She also worked on developing dive-visors, ensuring that the autopilot levelled off the aircraft automatically when a bomb had left its cradle so as not to put too much strain on the machine’s airframe, and that the automatic pullout sequence functioned at 6G – the point at which most pilots suffered G-force-induced loss of consciousness.

Every morning Melitta cycled across the airfield from her dorm on her heavy-framed pushbike, before swapping her beret for her leather flying cap, donning her overalls and clambering into a Junkers’ cockpit. She would take her machine up to 4,000 metres before rolling sideways and tearing down again at speeds of up to 350 mph, the engines howling and the surfaces of the plane whistling as the dive angle steepened until it was at least seventy-five to eighty degrees – not far from vertical. As Melitta plunged towards earth, her gloved hands tightly gripping the steering column, the whole frame of her plane would be shaking with the mounting pressure. The vibrations made it difficult to read her instruments accurately, so many of her dives were filmed to provide the detailed information required to enable incremental improvements to the targeting devices. Sometimes she would also release between four and ten cylindrical cement bombs to test her work. At between 150 and 200 metres, just as correction seemed impossible, Melitta would lift her plane’s nose and skim low across the fields before circling back to land. After several such tests over the course of a morning, her colleagues would heave her from her cockpit, unclip her parachute harness and help her out of her flying suit, so that she could return to her engineering role. Over desk and drawing board she would now conduct a precise evaluation of the dives, often working late into the night ‘without making any fuss about it’, her colleagues noted, to calculate the alterations required before testing could begin again.6 Undertaking a few such dives without any of the engineering work had been enough to exhaust Udet some years earlier. Even with automatic dive-brakes, trainee Stuka pilots were often sick, and sometimes plunged into the sea. Yet Melitta might complete fifteen such test dives in one day: a performance unmatched by any pilot in history.

… As an engineer–pilot, Melitta already had all the qualifications needed for a technical general staff officer so she now started work on a PhD. Her new work was focused on the development of a special night-landing device for single-engined night fighters. She was ‘testing landings with fighter planes for unlit, improvised emergency airfields’, and ‘blind-flying’ without any electrical landing systems, Jutta explained.

Melitta ended up doing more than 2,000 test-dives and had a full staff of men working for her. By contrast…

Messerschmitt’s chief test pilot was Heini Dittmar, the gliding champion who had travelled to South America with Hanna before the war to study thermal winds. Unfortunately he and Hanna had since fallen out. Hanna now had a reputation for demanding access to whichever aircraft she chose, sometimes delaying desperately needed trials. Furthermore, when she undertook test flights her reports were not always conclusive. ‘She flies with her heart and not with her brains,’ one pilot complained, or ‘at least without critical understanding of her work’.39 More than once, deficiencies were found in aircraft that Hanna had signed off.

The other huge contrast was that Melitta was actually part-Jewish and, though immensely useful to the Nazi war effort, was at best ambivalent about National Socialism. Hanna Reitsch, of course, was an ardent admirer of Hitler before, during, and decades after World War II.

More about this book and these women in a follow-up post…

Melitta:

Hanna: