With a few words in the House of Commons, Gordon Brown has undertaken to put right a 68 year-old wrong. The surviving women — and the men — who ferried Spitfires and dozens of other aircraft types round Britain and beyond throughout World War II are to be recognised at last with the civilian equivalent of a campaign badge.

Some of them are startled, to say the least, by so much attention after so long. I know this, being partly to blame. My book about them, Spitfire Women of World War II, seems to have been the catalyst for a short, sharp and successful campaign by Nigel Griffiths MP to ensure that their service and sacrifices aren’t forgotten.

I’m thrilled for them, and hope they will agree that late is better than never.

These were extraordinary pilots. Unlike those of the RAF they flew unarmed, in all weathers, in so many different kinds of plane that often 20 minutes’ study of their Ferry Pilots’ Notes was the only way to familiarise themselves with a new cockpit. About one in ten of them died, including 15 women.

Churchill and Beaverbrook knew well that the air war could not have been won without the Air Transport Auxiliary. And the women who flew for it embodied its spirit of resourcefulness and sheer pluck. But only two of them were honoured after the war. The rest had to content themselves with a certificate of service, then compete with demobbed RAF pilots for scarce civilian flying jobs after the war — or give up flying altogether as their accomplishments were quietly forgotten.

Yet they are memorable. Their most significant achievement, historically, is the delivery of tens of thousands of intact aircraft to frontline bases, freeing up combat pilots to fly them into battle.

But the Spitfire women also chalked up near-misses to rank with those of any fighter boy. Some involved a lot of luck. In May, 1945, Betty Keith-Jopp took off from Prestwick in a Fairey Barracuda in fine weather only to run into thick fog over the Firth of Forth. Following standing orders, she turned back. But she lost height, ditched and sank to the bottom “like a lift”.

Rather than resign herself to drowning, Betty took a deep breath, pulled back her canopy and unfastened her shoulder straps and parachute harness as the water flooded in. She then swam to the surface and started shouting. A passing trawlerman, running late because of earlier engine trouble, picked her up and took her to the nearest RAF station to be thawed out in a specially-built cradle.

Betty was told to tell no-one, and moved to South Africa after the war. When I met her there a year and a half ago her story tumbled out as if it had transpired the day before. She called it a miracle, and few would argue.

The more experienced women pilots were as skilled as any of the men. One, Ann Welch, delivered a Spitfire intended for the relief of Malta by flying at treetop height along the Savernake Forest branch railway line, in a blizzard. Another, Diana Barnato Walker, once landed a Typhoon at 230 mph — more than twice its recommended landing speed — because having lost its floor in mid-air it would have stalled had she brought it in any slower.

I knew about the ATA because one of its pilots, Margaret Frost, was once my grandparents’ neighbour. Margaret was so tiny that she gave rise to the legend of the pilotless Spitfire.

At the same time, by pure chance, my wife-to-be was growing up in Massachussetts next door to one of 25 women who joined the ATA from America. This was Ann Wood-Kelly. I met her at my wedding, where she told terrifying stories of upside-down engine failures and of buzzing the Severn Railway Bridge at high tide.

The women pilots of the ATA tirelessly remind you that their male fellow pilots and their ops officers and flight engineers, both male and female, deserve equal recognition. They do. And at last they are getting it.

Spitfire Women of World War II by Giles Whittell is published by HarperCollins

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