JF Ptak Science Books    Post 2411

“I am the first woman to make a flight across London, in one of His Majesty’s war machines; I am the first woman who has been presented by the War Office with a view of Hyde Park from an altitude of almost eight thousand feet.”–Jane Anderson (1916)

I was somewhat surprised to see that this pamphlet was co-written by a woman—my 
experience with WWI pamphlets is that it is vastly dominated by male writers, and I 
would have expected it to stay so especially for this subject matter.  Jane Anderson was an 
interesting writer with a free style, and I can tell that she had a good time with her 
experiences.  She starts with this, and tells an unusual story in an easy way:
 

“Seven thousand feet above Hyde Park, an American Girl looked  straight ahead and saw "the roof of the Sky" from 
England's finest Warplane.”
 
An example of her writing on the sub:
"When I looked at her lying with her exposed  tubes shining in the sunlight and her bulkheads in strips of rusty 
iron, it seemed incredible that she had been under the coast guns of the enemy, that she could have made
in her damaged condition a journey of three hundred miles, returning to a safe harbour with the information 
she had been sent to obtain. And, added to this, was the fact that she had made the voyage in a high sea, 
that for twenty hours, defenceless, she evaded the enemy patrols....”

The pamphlet really is worth a read, and it is available here for free via the Internet Archive.

The second part of this story is not so great--checking Ms. Anderson's biography 

reveals an ugly twist and deep turn to the far and distant fascist/Nazi right. She was 
certainly an adventurer, and at some point she winds up marrying nobility in Spain 
and covers the Spanish Civil War--but she goes from journalism to propaganda 
and begins to write and broadcast for the Fascist government.  Her good works there 
come to the attention of the Nazis, who pursue their interest in her. Anderson responds, 
and goes to work in service of Adolf Hitler.  She writes propaganda, and then is given her 
own radio show. She seems to have been useful for a time, and then perhaps wasn't, but
she stayed in Germany until the end of the war, arrested after flight finally in 1947 in 
Austria.  She was charged with treason, but released for lack of evidence. 
She survived herself, went to Spain, and lived to be 84, dying in 1972. 

From Wiki, we have her wartime story: