Helicopter Heroine: Valérie André-Surgeon, Pioneer Rescue Pilot, and Her Courage Under Fire

by Charles Morgan Evans

Overview

Valérie André is one of the great military aviators of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to fly a helicopter in combat and one of the first three helicopter medevac pilots. Flying more than 150 helicopter rescue missions during the French war in Indochina (including at Dien Bien Phu), and parachuting into the field twice, André was a trailblazer, a pioneer of flying helicopters in combat and an innovator of battlefield medicine, who risked her life to treat the wounded, whether they were French or Vietnamese, whether they were friend, civilian, or foe. Aviation historian Charles Morgan Evans tells her story with verve and pathos.

André was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1922. From an early age, she wanted to fly, but as a woman, she faced challenges. While boys could receive government-funded flight lessons, André had to pay for hers by tutoring. During World War II, she left Strasbourg against German prohibitions in order to study medicine in Paris, where she completed her studies under threat of arrest by the Gestapo. Assigned to an army hospital in Saigon in French Indochina in the late 1940s, André trained as a neurosurgeon, performing one hundred procedures per month. When the French medical corps developed mobile surgical units to be air-dropped into military outposts, she quickly volunteered, and then when the service acquired a few primitive helicopters, she volunteered for that, which meant learning to fly helicopters in combat. Flying through bullets and bombs, fatigue, parasitic illness, and mechanical issues with the helicopters— not to mention the French army’s prejudice against a female pilot and surgeon—André nonetheless became a legend in Indochina. The Vietnamese called her “the woman who comes down from the sky” and “Mrs. Ventilator.” On one day in December 1951, she flew her chopper into the teeth of antiaircraft fire to a besieged base, where she performed emergency brain surgeries, then flew the wounded to hospitals in Hanoi, two at a time.

After Indochina, she continued to be an innovator in military aviation and medicine as well as an advocate for women’s integration into the French military. In the early 1960s, she flew another 236 missions in Algeria. In 1975, she became the first female general in the French army, and at her retirement, she had flown nearly 500 combat missions, logged 4,000 hours in helicopters, and won the Croix de Guerre five times, the Cross of Military Valor twice, and the Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit.

André, who just turned ninety-nine, is still alive and lives near Paris, and this book is based on a series of author interviews with her and comprehensive research in other sources.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811771924
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/2023
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	485,282
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Charles M. Evans is the founding curator of the Hiller Air Museum in Redwood City, California. He has written about aviation history for such publications as American History, Aviation, and Civil War Times Illustrated and is author of War of the Aeronauts: A History of Ballooning in the Civil War (Stackpole, 2002).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 No Place for a Woman 1

2 Dreams and Destiny 7

3 War Comes to France 13

4 Occupation 19

5 Escaping the Gestapo 27

6 The City of Light in Shadows 33

7 Paris Broken, Paris Outraged, Paris Liberated 43

8 In the Company of Modern Knights 49

9 Into the Cauldron 57

10 Sang Froid 67

11 Trial under Fire 75

12 The Helicopter and How It Came to Vietnam 83

13 The Corsican Pilot 93

14 Évasan 99

15 The Woman and the Dragonfly 107

16 The Prestige of Men 117

17 Roi Jean 127

18 First Flight 133

19 The Exhilaration of War 141

20 True Believer 151

21 The Woman Who Came from the Sky 163

22 A Test of Will 181

23 The Perils of Tenacity 189

24 Operating in the Wilderness 205

25 Ventilateur Calling 215

26 Mademoiselle Ventilateur 227

27 Allons-y 235

28 On the Right Side of Luck 249

29 No Place for the Dying 265

30 Taking Command 275

31 Breakdown 285

32 Recognition 295

33 Pyrrhic Victory 303

34 To Breathe Again 323

35 Dénouement Dien Bien Phu 329

36 Challenges and Disillusion 341

37 To Fight and to Save 355

Epilogue: Triumph of an Indomitable Spirit 369

Notes 381

Bibliography 409

Index 415