The Second World War, with the massive number of personnel required to serve at home and abroad, opened the door for the first real glimpse of equality for women and minorities.
Women served overseas in uniform or worked in factories building munitions, vehicles and aircraft; racial minorities could become soldiers, on an equal footing with their comrades.
It presented a world that could be, and yet, it was still a world of what was: great divides still existed and, while some were open to the change, many were not.
Calgary author Garry Ryan explores this changing world in book two of his Second World War trilogy with Two Blackbirds published by NeWest Press.
Blackbirds, book one, introduced readers to Sharon Lacey, a young Canadian and a natural pilot, whose love of flying is in her blood, passed to her by her father. She gets the chance to fly when she joined the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA).
The role of the ATA is to ferry planes from Point A to Point B, usually from a factory to an air base, freeing male counterparts for combat duty.
But Lacey’s life changes the day she’s assigned to ferry an armed Spitfire fighter and encounters a lone German plane. She blasts the enemy aircraft from the sky with the Spitfire’s cannons, turning her from a ferry pilot into a combat pilot.
The skies remain a dangerous place for pilots as the war progresses and Lacey shoots down other enemy planes and in the process develops a reputation as an ace.
And as her reputation grows, she is both revered and reviled.
Ryan, who also writes The Detective Lane Mysteries series, explores this dichotomy. In Two Blackbirds, Ryan takes his story towards the end of the war with the introduction of jet fighters, notably the Gloster Meteor, the Messerschmitt Me-262 (the world’s first jet fighter) and the dreaded V-1 and V-2 flying bombs.
In a story about pilots, the planes are a character unto themselves and Ryan weaves these aircraft throughout the the Spitfire, the Lancaster, the Mosquito, the Hawker Tempest, and, of course, all of the German counterparts, including the lowly Storch, a German-made liaison aircraft.
But Ryan ensures the planes are part of the backdrop, the stage. He doesn’t lose sight of the fact that a good war story – at least one worth telling – is really about people.
“In the first book it was more about women who did all of these things and they didn’t get recognized,” said Ryan. “I just keep doing research and I looked at how, from the Second World War, the whole human rights, civil rights movement grew out of that.”
At the same time, as he explored the role of women in the war, Ryan said he was influenced by a story that a Calgary veteran told him about witnessing an American MP shoot and kill an African-American soldier.
“It happened in Darlington (U.K.) and he told me what happened and how disgusted he was. I asked him if there was an investigation and he looked at me like I was an idiot and said, ‘there was no investigation. It was a war.’ That whole thing, it really made me think about that.
“It made me think of all of these things; the human rights movement, the equality of gender, the equality of race, equality for sexual preference. I think a lot of it came out of the Second World War and they weren’t willing to accept the same old, same old.
“After these people have risked their lives, what are you going to threaten them with; they weren’t going to stand for that and they were immune to it because they had seen much worse.”
Lacey, meanwhile, just wants to be left alone to do her job. She doesn’t want the recognition that comes with being an ace and she doesn’t want to be forced into what society expects from a mother.
“She’s supposed to go and take care of the house and she’s not that kind of person. She doesn’t let other people define who she is. And she wasn’t the only one like that.
“I keep finding women who were like that. They didn’t let others define them,” said Ryan.
“One of the critics of Two Blackbirds said she is too much a 21st century woman and I thought, I think she’s who she is, she doesn’t listen to other people, and I’ve met people like that. They are who they are and they are comfortable with that and they don’t let other people restrict them in the kind of lives they want to lead.”
Ryan said individuals who inspired his characters were 21st century thinkers as their motivations and goals opened the door for the human-rights movements that would eventually follow.
How could a woman who made bombs or built tanks or flew planes simply return home, hang up her overalls or her flight jacket and simply go back to the way it was before the war?
While they may not have necessarily been overt about it, they didn’t simply roll over and do what society expected.
“People had a vision of how they wanted things to be and we have benefitted from it today. It doesn’t mean the ideas are new,” Ryan said. “It had to start somewhere, it didn’t come out of a vacuum.”
Ryan is well into book three of the series and in it he carries his story forward beyond the end of the war to Lacey’s return to Calgary, exploring just how a female fighter ace adapts to life as a mother and yet maintain her fierce independence.
