"AMY JOHNSON" The biography by Constance Babington Smith 1967.
Back in th 1930's Amy Johnson was Britain's answer to Amelia Earhart. In 1930, at the age of 27, She was the first female pilot to fly solo the 11,000 miles from London to Australia. For the following eight years she set many long-distance records: London to Capetown, London to America, London to Moscow and Tokyo, and a second record time to South Africa in 1936 ... her last record flight. Her marriage to fellow air ace, Jim Mollison in 1932, had mixed results, and after a mostly unhappy marriage, due to Jim's womanizing and alcoholism they divorced in 1938. Amelia met Amy in England after her 1932 solo flight across the Atlantic, and they remained friends for years. When Amy and Jim flew the first east-to-west flight to America, they ran out of fuel, and crash-landed in Bridgeport, Connecticut, injuring them both. When Amelia heard about it, she drove up to the Bridgeport Hospital, and brought them back to her home she shared with her husband, J.P.Putnam, in Rye, N.Y. to convalesce. She took them to Hyde Park, N.Y. to meet her friends, the Roosevelts. They remained close friends thereafter.
After her 1938 divorce, Amy had a rocky emotional time, trying to balance her fame, which she came to hate, with her happiness. In 1940, during the Second World War, Amy joined the newly-formed Air Transport Auxiliary, whose job was to transport Royal Air Force aircraft around the country --- and rose to First Officer, which pleased her. On January 5, 1941, while flying an Airspeed Oxford from Blackpool to Kidlington, an RAF pilot named Tom Mitchell claimed to have shot her down, when she twice failed to give the correct identification code during the flight. He said she gave the wrong color of the day (a signal to identify aircraft known by all British forces) over the radio. Assuming it was a German plane, he fired sixteen rounds of shells, and the plane dived into the stormy Thames Estuary. She was seen coming down in a parachute, and seen in the water. A rescue attempt from a nearby ship, HMS Haslemere, failed, and the bodies of Amy and the rescuer were never seen again. She died like her friend. Amelia Earhart.
One cannot imagine a more complete and fascinating biography which Constance Babington Smith has delivered here. She had total access to all of Amy's, her family's, friends', and lovers' letters from Day one, and has woven a wonderful and warm story of a fascinating lady, who the reader really gets to know. I hated for the book to end, and started to slow my reading toward the finish, to delay the inevitable. Talk about a page-turner! 'Best book I've read in years! I'm an
Amelia fanatic, and none of her biographies can hold a candle to this!
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