Hitler’s Flying Frauleins
Within the cockpit of the Stuka dive bomber, the pilot reached the top of the climb, rolled the plane sideways and tore down almost vertically towards the earth at 350 mph.
The engines howled, the wings whistled and the fuselage shook so violently that the instruments on the control panel were almost unreadable.
Astonishingly, given that this was macho Nazi Germany in 1941, the pilot was a woman. With her gloved hands, Melitta von Stauffenberg clung to the juddering joystick as the plane plummeted 10,000 ft.
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Melitta von Stauffenberg was a pilot and aeronautical engineer in Nazi Germany. During the war, her job was to perfect the Fuhrer’s Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers
With the ground just 500 ft below, she pulled up as hard as she could, her oxygen-starved brain perilously close to blacking out. The nose lifted and, just in time, the bomber flattened out, skimmed across the runway and landed. Another death-defying test flight, one of thousands Melitta made, was over for that rarest of breeds — a woman aviator in Hitler’s Third Reich.
Within minutes, Melitta would be back in the air repeating the exercise as many times as necessary before returning to her drawing board to analyse the results. She was not just a test pilot but a brilliant aeronautical engineer.
Defying the Nazi mentality that confined a woman’s role to the three Ks; ‘kinder, kuche, kirche’ [children, kitchen, church], her job at this time was to perfect the Fuhrer’s Junkers Ju 87 dive bombers, a potent weapon in his armoury as he plundered Europe.
Meanwhile, the only woman comparable to her in Germany, Hanna Reitsch, was flirting with death by deliberately flying a Dornier Do 17 bomber into a heavy steel cable that tethered a barrage balloon to the ground.
The British used hundreds of these balloons to bring down planes, so a German scientist had designed razor-sharp steel blades, fixed to the leading edge of a bomber’s wings, to slice through the anchor cables.
Hanna aimed the plane directly at a taut cable, knowing full well she could be decapitated or disfigured in seconds. There was a jerk as she hit; the cable parted… but the cut end whipped back through the air, gouging chunks out of her propellers. Metal splinters flashed through the cockpit and past her head. The starboard engine went berserk.
Watchers on the ground waited for the crash and explosion. But somehow Hanna landed the crippled plane.
These were the golden air girls of the Third Reich in action. Fearless Hanna, blue eyes, blonde curls peeking out from under her leather flying cap, so tiny she had to have wooden blocks on the rudder pedals to reach them. And brainy, handsome Melitta, tall with a Roman profile beneath bobbed chestnut hair.
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