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Issue 23 - 2003 : The Two Jackies
Two remarkable women, separated by culture and birthright, blazed their way through aviation history, and left an indelible mark on our collective memory. Fifty years ago this summer, two women-Jacqueline Auriol of France and the American Jacqueline Cochran-became the first women in the world to break the sound barrier. Cochran did it first. Flying in a SabreJet, she created her first sonic boom in May of 1953 at the age of 43. Just a few months later, flying a Dassault Myste II, the 36-year old Auriol bested Cochran's record and became the first European female to fly faster than sound. For the next ten years these pilots would continue to trade world speed records back and forth across the Atlantic in what is perhaps aviation's most impressive rivalry between two solo pilots. The War of the Two Jacquelines Between 1951 and 1964, these women held the world speed record more than a dozen times between them. Each time one of them would set the record, her counterpart would quickly snatch it back, pushing the best engineering minds of their respective nations to create faster, stronger, more efficient aircraft in order to keep up with the high-profile battle. The press dubbed their competition "The War of the Two Jacquelines," and followed each development closely. But their relationship was, in fact, a friendly rivalry driven more by the shared desire to test their limits than by any vain or hostile interest in outperforming or defeating one another. In fact, after Auriol's record-setting flight in the Vampire in 1951 - a record she took from Cochran - it was Cochran who nominated her for America's highest aviation honor, the Harmon Trophy. When the award was bestowed upon Auriol by President Harry Truman, Cochran accompanied her to the White House for the ceremony. The two pilots had several visits together over the years, at Cochran's ranch in Indio, California and at various other formal and informal gatherings, and both women demonstrated great respect for one another, both publicly and privately throughout their lives. Surviving Childhood While they shared the same first name and the same intense passion for flight, their backgrounds couldn't have been more different. Auriol was born into a stable, loving French home, while Cochran is believed to have been orphaned at a young age and in fact, never knew her true birth date. Some records list her birth as 1905, while others list it as 1908 or 1910. She spent most of her youth in foster care in Florida. "Until I was eight years old," she writes in her autobiography, Jackie Cochran, "I had no shoes. My bed was usually a pallet on the floor and sometimes just the floor." Her childhood was spent in a series of ramshackle homes near the sawmills where her family found work, trying to stay clean, scavenging for food, and listening to her foster father suffer through typhoid fever. Auriol, on the other hand, described her youth as idyllic: "The setting for our early childhood was the garden of my paternal grandmother's house at Challans: a wonderful universe that to us seemed boundless." While Cochran's childhood was tragic and gritty - "Hunger was a permanent way of feeling when I was growing up," she wrote - Auriol's was not without hardship. She was sent to a convent at the age of eight, a traumatic event for a girl who had been so happy at home. "Feeling alone, isolated, deprived of affection when one is so young, soon arouses one's defensive and even aggressive feelings," she wrote in her memoir, I Live to Fly. "It is likely that these childhood sufferings of mine not only toughened me, but also made it easier for me to bear later the painful experiences and to overcome obstacles that seemed insurmountable." Auriol also lost her father at a very young age when he succumbed, after a three-year battle, to poliomyelitis and died at the age of forty-one. Her mother insisted that her children view their father moments after he died. "At that very moment as I looked on death for the first time, as I saw it on the face of my father, I was filled with an extraordinary peace and calm, a kind of release," wrote Auriol. "That day was the last day of my childhood. I have never since needed anyone to push me into conquering my fear." Pushing the Limits Each woman emerged from the trials of her youth strong and determined. As Auriol said of Cochran, "While we may differ completely in physical appearance, upbringing and background, we have the same passion and the same urge to take up a challenge, to go beyond known limits. Aviation has played the same role in both our lives; enabling us to escape, to get away from that altitude zero, moral or material, that we detest. And the 'other Jacqueline' has also had to struggle and show constant determination to reach her objective." When she was just twenty years old, Auriol (whose maiden name was Douet) married Paul Auriol, whose father, Vincent, became President of France after the war. She had two children who were still just babies when her country was invaded by Hitler's army. Because of her affiliation with the controversial Auriol family - Vincent was a declared enemy of the regime and imprisoned during the war - she was forced to continually evade the Gestapo. "I spent my time fleeing from the Gestapo, with two babies in my arms. False identity papers, false ration cards, mysterious warnings from the Resistance, sudden flights and changes of abode," she wrote. She joined the French Resistance and when the war had ended, she obtained her pilot's license at the age of 31. As a girl, Auriol spent many days racing bicycles with her brother and cousins down a steep hill, which ended at a stone wall they called The Wall of Death. The winner was the child who didn't hit their breaks. This daredevil adventure turned out to be unnervingly prophetic. Just two years after her very first flying lesson, Auriol was a passenger in a small plane which crashed violently into the Seine, destroying her face. She lost all of her teeth and every junction point of her face with her cranium was smashed. Her skull was fractured in three places. Her jawbones were crushed, her nose was gone. Several ribs and her collar bone were broken. Throughout her life, she would undergo two dozen surgeries, but even so, her face remained more than an inch flatter than it had been before the crash. Despite this horrific ordeal, she never stopped flying. She tackled helicopters next and received her license in a matter of weeks while in between surgeries in the U.S. She soon began flying jets and went on to become the first female military test pilot in the world and the first European to break the sound barrier. Meanwhile, Cochran launched a line of cosmetics and became a highly successful businesswoman in the United States. At the suggestion of her future husband Floyd Odlum, one of the wealthiest men in America, she learned to fly in 1932 as a promotional gimmick for her product line. But once she started, she was hooked. In her more than 30-year career, she held more speed records than any other woman in history, she received the Harmon Trophy six times, and in 1971 she became the only living woman in the American Aviation Hall of Fame. Cochran and the WASPs While Cochran's individual accomplishments as a pilot are virtually unmatched, her most significant contributions to aviation history were made on behalf of her country, the Allied forces, and her fellow American female pilots during WWII. During the war, American General "Hap" Arnold at first refused to allow women to serve as pilots in any capacity, so Cochran rounded up a group of American women pilots and went overseas to fly with the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), a group which flew ferry missions in order to free up more Allied pilots for combat. Ann Wood-Kelly, now 82 years old, was among the two dozen American women accepted to the ATA in 1942. She was impressed by Cochran's leadership, organization and determination, and eventually they became close friends. "She was terribly attractive," remembers Wood-Kelly, "energetic, a take-command sort of person." Wood-Kelly, who flew with the ATA from 1942-1945, logged hundreds of hours in 75 different aircraft and received the King's Medal from King George the VI. She was present when the troops gathered to prepare for the D-Day invasion. "Women pilots gathered strawberries and passed them out to the troops as they sat in their vehicles awaiting their turn to cross the channel," she remembers. "Some of the troops were reading comics, some were getting haircuts - simple things." Eventually, Cochran's lobbying efforts, the impressive performance records of her ATA pilots, and the severe death toll among male combat pilots in the war convinced General Arnold that Cochran's plan to start a female group of military pilots, the Women Auxiliary Service Pilots (WASP), was a sound one. "The daylight raids were so costly in manpower, in death, that they had to change their mind after about a year of Jackie being [in Europe with the ATA] and they recalled her to come home and help form the WASPs," recalls Wood-Kelly. When word got out about the creation of the WASP, thousands of women applied for service. More than 1,000 were accepted and trained on a variety of aircraft, including an elite group which flew the B-17. The WASPs took on a variety of missions ranging from ferrying aircraft to hauling targets for artillery practice. The women were not acknowledged at the time as military pilots, but several decades later Cochran successfully lobbied Congress for veteran status and benefits for the 1,074 women who served as WASPs, including the thirty-eight who died in the line of duty. After the war, the WASPs were disbanded, but they have continued on to hold regular reunions and are dedicated to memorializing women in flight. Dawn Seymour, a WASP who served as President of the WASP from 1982-1984, says, "In two short years, Jackie was able to accomplish more for women than anyone I know. She opened doors. We flew everything from the bombers to the pursuits. She wanted to see women get the chance she had. For her, it was always, 'duty, honor, country.' She was a patriot." A Race to the Edge of the Envelope After the war, both Jackies continued to fly, to push limits and remain on the cutting edge of aviation technology. And so it was that in the 1950s, their speed record rivalry began. American General Curtis LeMay is quoted in Cochran's autobiography as saying, "Jackie was obsessed with the idea of breaking records. Every year she was after something else. I remember her hot rivalry after the war with a French gal, Jacqueline Auriol. Jackie would be in my office in Washington, D.C., demanding a fighter to get a record for the United States. . .but she was a good pilot, so the Air Force never had to worry about her cracking up one of our planes." Although it was never their mission to prove that women were capable pilots, through the force of their will, their extraordinary skill and determination, and their incredible desire to fly, they did just that. "I never really wanted to copy men or to do what men can or should do better," wrote Cochran. "I only wanted to be myself. And for me that meant flying." "Aviation records are far too complex to be reduced to a struggle between two pilots," wrote Auriol. "Any search into the unknown is an incomparable exploration of oneself...But further, there is the proud feeling of serving them well - my profession, the aircraft I have tested, and my country. I think that record holders in all sports...have one characteristic in common: they cannot resist a challenge." Certainly, nothing could be more true of these two extraordinary pilots.
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