War Angel Valérie André with Charles Morgan Evans

Have you made your parents proud lately with your accomplishments? Then don’t let them listen to this episode, because we’re talking about Valérie André, a neurosurgeon and helicopter pilot who served with overwhelming distinction in war, saving countless soldiers and civilians. On her fifty-fourth birthday Valérie André became France’s first female general while not long after she was inducted into the Grand Legion of Honor.

Her story is told in the book Helicopter Heroine: Valérie André—Surgeon, Pioneer Rescue Pilot, and Her Courage Under Fire by Charles Morgan Evans. Evans is a writer based in Coos Bay, Oregon, and Reno, Nevada. He has known Valerie Andre for over 20 years and worked from numerous primary sources while researching his book. He is also the author of The War of the Aeronauts—A History of Ballooning in the Civil War. Evans is also a graduate with a Master of Arts degree in history from San Francisco State University and the founding curator of the Hiller Aviation Museum in northern California. Today we’ll be talking about his longtime friend and hero to many.

Thank you so much for being on the show. Charles Morgan Evans, your book Helicopter Heroine:Valerie Andre, Surgeon, Pioneer, Rescue Pilot and Her Courage Under Fire is not just a great scholarly work, but it is very, very entertaining. I think that a lot of people are going to be drawn to this work, because it's not just that the story itself is incredible, but you really found someone who was a fascinating figure, who was involved in so many incredible events and who herself was such a stirring person to learn about. How did you get into this topic, and what made you want to write a book about Valerie Andre?

Charles: Well, that's an excellent question. Many years ago, in the 1990s, when I was working on my master's degree at San Francisco State University, I was able to get a job working for a man named Stanley Hiller, who had a museum in Redwood City, California, just slightly south of San Francisco. And Stanley Hiller was one of the founders of the American helicopter industry. He built his first helicopter when he was 19 years old, back in 1944, when he was going to the University of California at Berkeley. So at the time, he needed a curator for his museum, and I applied for the position. And when I was first set loose in the museum, my first day there, and it was an incredible museum. It was in a warehouse in Redwood City, kind of nondescript, and we had about 45 aircraft in the museum of all different sizes, some really small, some big, mostly as helicopters. One of the things I saw that first day I was there with this woman standing in front of a helicopter, rather petite woman wearing a floppy field hat and khaki overalls, and I wondered who she was. And that sparked my curiosity. And I asked Stanley Hiller about her, and he told me that she was a rescue pilot. Her name was Valerie Andre, and she had served in Vietnam during the French Indochina War. She saved many lives.  He knew a lot about her story. Obviously, it was a big publicity coup to have her use his helicopter back in the early 1950s. He had a factory that was located in Palo Alto back in late 1940s up into the mid 1960s, and many of his, most of his customers were military, either the US military or international military, and along with civilians too, he also sold civilian aircraft as well. But it was sort of split between military and civilian back then. So to have someone use his helicopter for something positive, like medical rescue was something that he was quite proud of.

Gary: The 1990s must have been a very different time. Historians being able to get jobs just like that. Nowadays we do podcasts. You deal a lot with her upbringing. What was life like for a young woman in interwar Alsace? What led her to go down the life path that she chose?

Charles: Well, that's another great question because when she was a very young girl, she was born in 1922, April 21st, 1922, and she's still with us today. She's 101 and a half now, and she lives just outside of Paris. But we'll get to that later. But in her early life, she had the remarkable opportunity to see Maurice Hiltz, who was one of the premier French women aviators of her time come to the airdrome in Strasbourg, where she lived in 1932. I believe. Valerie was only ten years old at the time, but she became fascinated with the idea of aviation. She became a fanatic, a fanatic, as they say, and she just gravitated to the idea of wanting to become a pilot. She collected all sorts of aviation magazines from the period. She followed all the aviators, the famous ones. Even people like Amelia Earhart were quite influential in her early upbringing in her early life. In fact, at one time she wanted to take lessons, and she said that this was just before the outbreak of World War II. And she said that young men were allowed to take lessons for civil defense for free. But young women would have to find a way to pay for lessons if they wanted to learn how to fly. And she did. She actually did tutoring in different subjects like science and math, and was able to raise enough money to pay for an instructor to teach her how to fly. But this was sometime around August of 1939, when she was actually taking her first flight lessons. And of course, the war broke out the following month, and it pretty much dashed her hopes for the time being, at least from 1939 on until after the war.

Gary: When World War II breaks out, Valerie proves to be incredibly resourceful despite all the turmoil of the invasion and occupation. How did she get through the war?

Charles: Oh, that's an incredible story in its own. A lot of my book is devoted to that story because she showed incredible courage and resourcefulness. When the Germans in occupied France beginning of 1940,  Alsace-Lorraine, Strasbourg, Alsace-Lorraine, the entire region reverted back to German control. It was considered a forbidden zone and forbidden to leave that area altogether. Her family, particularly her father, was against her leaving that area, but what she wanted to do by this time, she was determined also to become a doctor. She was, like I said, fascinated also at sciences in general. And she wanted to attend the University of Strasbourg. But that was impossible because the Germans had taken control of the university, had reverted back to a German based university under the Reich, and the faculty that had taught there had fled. They actually had gone to Clermont-Ferrand just before the end of the German invasion of France. And again, as I mentioned, this was it was forbidden to leave that part of France without authorization to any other part of France or any other part of Europe for that matter, at that time. So very clandestinely she left. She went with a friend of hers. They were able to get by through German, escape through German border control, and obviously eventually got to Claremont- Ferron, but where she started her medical studies. But it was under quite a situation of duress. She experienced a raid in 1942 where many of her classmates and her professors were arrested, some actually deported to Germany to the concentration camps. So I'm actually shot on the spot that day. Her landlord was even arrested later that week. She had to eventually flee to Paris to live underground until the liberation in 1944, and eventually she was able to get her records from the university at Claremont-Ferron, transferred to the University of Paris to continue her medical studies, but during that entire period of time she had to live underground under threat of deportation to labor camps in Germany, because she was definitely considered a criminal under the German occupation regulations.

Gary: Now we get to the heart of your book, which was the First Indochina War. How did Valerie end up in another war zone on the other side of the world?

Charles: Well, when the liberation came in 1944, she was in Paris. And as you know being familiar with French history, it was the French, the Free French, who actually were the first to march into Paris and liberate the city. And she was enamored with the soldiers. She thought they were an incarnation of modern day knights, and she called him as such. And she eventually was sent to actually treat some of the wounded. Under supervision of her professors at the University of Paris. And she became kind of an admirer, I think, of military life, and was at the urging of her professors at the university, that when she graduated in late 1947, that she might want to volunteer for the medical corps that was going to Indochina at the time. Now, Indochina is three countries that were under French colonial rule after, before and after World War II. And they're made up of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Vietnam was the country that was seeking independence from French colonial rule. They were the main protagonist or the French regard them as antagonist. It's the history of that war is very controversial, as we know today and back then as well. But Ho Chi Minh was the leader of the the nationalist movement that wanted to have separation from France and have independent rule. And they were at war with the French at that time in order to reestablish rule there, you know, self-determination for Vietnam at that time. So medical personnel in Vietnam were in short supply and casualties were incredibly, incredibly high. And so when she arrived in Vietnam in late 1947, her specialty actually was not surgery, but she was pressed into a military hospital in Saigon. She was pressed into service at a military hospital in Saigon, and there was a master surgeon there in neurosurgery who saw her aptitude and said that we have this tremendous number of head wounds, trauma, a head trauma, wounds. And she was pressed into service to become a neurosurgeon. He would he trained her and eventually allowed her to be, you know, a solo surgeon, if you will, sometimes working on as many as 100 cases a month. That was that many casualties that the French were suffering at that time.

Gary: Being a doctor was not enough for our protagonist. Tell us a little bit about how she became a helicopter pilot.

Charles: Well, there was a step in between being a neurosurgeon in military hospitals and becoming a helicopter pilot. The French also had a service where they took medical personnel and airdropped them into remote French outposts all throughout the country. Also on the other parts of the colony to Cambodia and Laos. And she  signed up for training. She volunteered for the service was a totally volunteer service. And she trained to be airdropped into these remote areas and, and set up a medical field station, if you will, and to treat not only soldiers, but she also treated civilians as well. One remarkable period of time for her was when she was airdropped into Laos, and she was dropped into this remote village near (?). And the people there who saw her, the civilians I should say, they were an ethnic minority called the Mayo, and they saw her being dropped by a parachute. They referred to as a woman who came from the sky. They were in such awe of her. And when she was there, she not only just treated the French soldiers, she treated anybody who needed help of any kind. She said she actually had to even perform dental extractions when she was there, because that was what people needed. And so she gained quite a bit of a reputation just from that by being that adventurous, being that brave. She had to take, when she finally returned to Vietnam, to Hanoi, I guess, I think she went back to Hanoi from that particular adventure. She did most of it on horseback for several days, sometimes being chased by soldiers who were intent on killing the party, getting her out of there.

Gary: The woman who came from the sky. That sounds like a good phrase for the title of a book, but in any case, yes. So you go into great detail about how she becomes a pilot for a helicopter, including introducing other characters who are pioneers in these early helicopters. How did she come to get in the pilot seat for what was a truly novel technology at the time?

Charles: The first helicopter came to Vietnam in 1950. It was brought there by an Englishman named Alan Bristow, who worked for the French distributor of Hiller Helicopters in Paris, France. He was there almost as an exile from England. And that's another story that I cover in my book. But what he was trying to do is trying to make a sale for these helicopters. And as I said, he worked for the distributor in France for Hiller. And what he was trying to do is, he was actually trying to sell the helicopter to anyone when he got to Vietnam. But really what he was trying to do, what he eventually did was make a demonstration for the French Air Force that this helicopter could be used for medical rescue purposes. The Hiller is kind of an interesting helicopter. It's rather primitive. It has absolutely zero protection. And at the time it was not really known for its payload capacity, meaning it didn't carry a lot of weight. But it was maneuverable, it was nimble. It was could get in and out of situations. And this was the thing. Prior to the helicopter coming to Vietnam, the French were reliant on fixed wing aircraft, and oftentimes they would have to land at airstrips. They needed a runway and and a landing strip. And oftentimes these landing strips would be far away from where the French were actually doing their fighting, these remote outposts I mentioned quite a bit about my book. And so they would have to take a wounded soldier and drive on a truck or a jeep or an ambulance many kilometers before they got to these airstrips. And oftentimes these men were so badly wounded that they might not even survive the over ground transport just to get to a runway. So the helicopter was a big deal. And the French saw it that way. And, and they and the medical Corps thought it was going to be a big deal to save more men. And that was the entire intention. So the helicopter was demonstrated in Saigon, I believe, in April of 1950, and Valerie Andre was there to see it happen. She was, as I said, always a fanatic about anything relating to aviation. And so when she heard about this new fangled aircraft that very few people had actually seen anywhere in the world at this time, going back to the 1940s and early 50s, it was a big deal, and she was determined to sign up for that service. And there was a lot of prejudice with that being, you know, I also cover in my book the intense chauvinism, the intense prejudice for a woman, even in the medical profession, where they were in dire need of medical personnel to be in a field that was considered a man's milieu. In her case, she was an officer. She was commissioned as a captain. But even among fellow officers, sometimes she would not be seen as an equal in rank to other captains or lieutenants. And it was a frustrating thing for her. But she had tenacity. That was one thing I think you could really sum up Valerie Andre's life, is that she was incredibly tenacious. And so as a result, she just said that here I am, I weigh less than 50kg, roughly 95 to 100 pounds. And these helicopters have terrible, terrible payload capacity in the first place. So instead of maybe taking two wounded soldiers, maybe we can take three wounded soldiers if need be.  She made the argument and she said, also, I'm a doctor. So if any of these these patients need stabilization, need to be treated at the pickup site, I can probably stabilize them and ensure that they have better chances of survival when they get to a regular military hospital. So she made these arguments and there is a lot of things going on at the time that worked in her favor. I mean, she did have a lot of respect from her superior officers because she had actually demonstrated her ability. She had worked in these military hospitals. She had already did the the drop into Laos, the airdrop into Laos I mentioned. And she had taken on quite a bit of respect and for her ability and again, her tenacity. So she was able to convince people that she could do this.  One of the people she really had to convince was the founding pilot for the French Air Force and for helicopters. Captain Alexis Santini and Captain Alexis Santini was France's first military helicopter rescue pilot. He had flown flown many fixed wing missions prior to that and had been in Vietnam roughly since 1946, so he was a very seasoned veteran. He'd been in the French Air Force since 1939, when the French Air Force fell into limbo after the German occupation in the 1940s, he joined the French Resistance and was very instrumental in the liberation of Grenoble, France in 1944 with his resistance cell, so he was very instrumental in allowing Valerie to join his rescue helicopter rescue squadron when he was forming the basis of support in 1950 and 1951.

Gary: A truly remarkable story how Valerie entered a place which you could even say was no place for a woman, and yet was able to take over the skies. During her tenure in Indochina, she had a number of truly incredible episodes. Can you detail for our listeners any particularly fascinating chapters or episodes in her life?

Charles: Oh, there's many I mean, it's truly as many. I start my book off with a very interesting episode that she experienced during her career, where she came in for what she thought was a routine pickup of a wounded Vietnamese soldier who was fighting with the French at the time. And that's another interesting story, too, that I bring into this whole story about the Vietnam War in France is that it was not just the French fighting, but the French were fighting also with the Vietnamese against the well, that's another story we'll get into later. Possibly. But let me get back to Valerie Andre. The story was about how she was picking up a wounded Vietnamese soldier who was fighting along with the French. He had a head wound, and she wanted to make sure that he was completely sedated before they loaded him onto helicopter. And it turned out that he wasn't. He woke up in mid-flight on their way back to Hanoi, and he started to wrestle for controls. Control of the helicopter, now you have to imagine what these helicopters were like. They had side litters that carried the wounded. If you've ever seen the television show Mash, you might have an idea of what these helicopters look like. And the Mash show, they were Bell 47s, but the Hiller UH 12 is very similar. They have these outboard stretchers, they call them litters and they carry they carry the wounded. Well, in this case, this young man woke up on the flight back to Hanoi and started to wrestle for the foot controls on the helicopter. And Valerie Andre had to just work her best to just keep the helicopter in flight. There were times that was just really almost totally out of her control. He was panicking. He didn't understand where he was. He didn't understand why he was in a in a helicopter flying anywhere. And he just panicked. And it was lucky for her that as she said that many times the head wound cases sometimes wake up and oftentimes they just pass out once again. In this case, she was very fortunate that they passed out But there were other cases where she was sometimes stuck behind enemy lines. One time a mechanical failure happened with the helicopter, and she was dropped in the middle of a zone where she wasn't sure if she would be picked up by the enemy Viet Minh, that the French were fighting. And she was lucky that eventually some French soldiers founder and was able to tow the helicopter back into a friendly village, where they were able to repair it and fly out the next day. Other times, she was sometimes flew into areas that were inundated by rain, which is very, very common in Vietnam where you have these torrential rain storms that just flood everything. And the helicopter landed in mud almost up to its belly pan and she had to extricate herself from that. There was one time on the tarmac at the airbase near Hanoi that she was suffering herself from extreme fatigue and hovering a helicopter just above the tarmac, and the engine cut out on it, and it came down probably about 10-15m, about 40, 50ft from the from where she was hovering. It came down with such force that it actually bent the tail boom of this helicopter in half and into a V, and she survived it, but with no injuries, except that she was suffering at that time from amoebic dysentery. But she was never allowed to forget that she damaged this poor helicopter, and she felt very sorry for it as well. It's kind of an interesting story. These helicopters took on a little bit of a character of their own, because she babied them and nursed them along, too, because they were such primitive, sometimes temperamental and oftentimes fragile aircraft, she fell in love with them. But they were not always the easiest companion for her to live with or to work with.

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Gary: Of course, if people want to get all of the fascinating stories, they will have to pick up the book. Now, can you tell us what was life like for Valerie after Indochina?

Charles: Valerie left Indochina in April, I think of 1953. I believe it's April 1953. She had already served three tours of duty by that time. And. She was sort of forced to go back home now. It was interesting. Prior to that, she was actually for a time being in charge of an air base at in Hanoi. She's not in charge of an air base. I should back that up. She was in charge of her rescue air unit in Hanoi at (?) and believe she would probably could be considered one of the first females to have actually commanded an air squadron of rescue, in this case, a rescue squadron. But she was sort of told to take a break from Vietnam after 1953. I mean, there was a lot of controversy with her attaining so much in such a little time. She called it sometimes a threat to the prestige of men. And that's a quote that I have in my book. So she left Vietnam in April 53rd and went back to France and almost immediately wanted to come back to Vietnam, but she wasn't allowed to join up again and at this point, so she felt bad that some of her comrades were continuing to fight in Vietnam. I think it was sort of a remorse that she felt because she wanted to be part of that action. She had been a part of that action all the way going back to late 1947. But she eventually found her way to becoming a medical officer at a test facility for Advanced Aircraft in Brittany in 1954, I believe. And there she actually met interesting test pilots. She found the whole idea of testing advanced aircraft to be equally fascinating. She became very good friends with a woman who is really well known also in French aviation circles, Jacqueline Auriol, who was the first French woman to break the sound barrier in 1955 with a French Dassault. So she was semi content, I would say being a medical officer at this test facility, but she really wanted to get back into the action of the military. The war in Vietnam ended in 1954 for the French. They had lost their last major battle again, Dien Bien, and according to the Geneva peace agreement, the French had to withdraw their control not just from Vietnam, but also their control over Laos and Cambodia as well. So the war for the French was over by 1954. But there was another war that the French were going to be involved with, and that was with Algeria, North Africa. And that had started to heat up just as the war in Vietnam for the French was winding down, and Valerie wanted very much to become a part of the force that was fighting in Algeria at the time. During one of her breaks from the test facility in Brittany. She went to Algeria and she was able to become an observer for one of the helicopter squadrons that were working out of Algeria at the time. Now, it's interesting to note that the French eventually fought Algeria was considered one of the first helicopter wars. The role of the helicopter had expanded by this time, not solely limited to medical rescue as it was in Vietnam. It was used as troop transport and also eventually as gunships that the French used in Algeria.

Gary: What legacy has this remarkable woman left behind?

Charles: Well, that's an incredibly good question to ask because she continued her legacy in Algeria. She became, let me just touch on what she did in Algeria at the time. She was a she worked as a rescue pilot and a troop transport pilot and flew over 200 missions I believe in Algeria at the time, but she was also a medical officer assigned to an air base that the French controlled just outside of Algiers. But she rose through the ranks after the war in Algeria wound down in the early 1960s, she continued her career in the military in the French medical service. And she rose thro the ranks. She was the first woman to be promoted to the rank of colonel in 1965. And that was an incredible achievement at that point. But what she found in the French military medical services was that there was  quite a bit of an inequity that was prevalent. There were very few women who are serving in the French military medical services at that time. They were quite distinctly in the minority. And she saw that this was not just an inequity, but also unfair. They at the time, they were allowing men into the French military medical services who had lower entrance exam scores than women who are applying for similar positions. And she saw that as incredibly unfair. And so she started to lobby the French assembly to look into this and to into promulgate a more equitable solution and allow more women to serve in the French military medical services. And she did this throughout the 1960s and into the 70s. It started with a quota system that she wasn't entirely satisfied with, because they were still allowing men into the service with who had lower entrance exams. But eventually I think her legacy with that was, that by where we stand today and the 21st century in France, the military, it's called service de santé and today's service de santé, the medical service branch of the French military services, has roughly 50% women, 50% men. And that is directly related to Valerie Andre's fight in the 1960s and 1970s to establish equality in that service.

Gary: A truly remarkable story and a truly remarkable life for someone who is still with us at over 100 years old. The book is Helicopter Heroine: Valerie Andre, Surgeon, Pioneer, Rescue Pilot, and her Courage Under Fire. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Charles: Oh thank you Gary. It was great.

Gary: As always, donations keep the podcast going. So if you would like to make a one time donation or become a patron, please consider doing so. Thank you very much for your continued support.