woman, who self-assuredly made a precision landing at their compound. Time was of the essence when loading the wounded onto the Stokes litters on each side of the helicopter. Te pilot urged the men to quickly help her secure the wounded soldier. She knew the enemy Viet Minh could be lurking nearby and wouldn’t hesitate to fire on them, even with red crosses painted on the Hiller’s fuselage.
Te pilot then made her way back into the cockpit and
signaled that she was ready to lift off. Te men stood back in awe, wondering who this angel of the battlefield was. To them, the helicopter and its female pilot seemed to come from a futuristic fantasy. But the pilot, Valérie André, and the aircraft weren’t figments of anyone’s imagination. André, a captain and a surgeon in the French Military
Medical Corps, was one of the founding members of France’s then recently inaugurated military helicopter rescue squad- ron. By the time she picked up the wounded soldier at Nam Dinh, André had already served five years in Vietnam. Flying rescue helicopters would make her a legend.
Hooked on Aviation André was born in Strasbourg, France, on Apr. 21, 1922. Her destiny as a pilot was set at the age of 10, when she met acclaimed pilot Maryse Hilsz. Hilsz had just completed a nearly 13,000-mile journey from Paris, France, to Saigon, Vietnam, and back. Tat meeting hooked the young André on aviation. She regularly visited the Strasbourg aerodrome after that, eventually taking her first fixed-wing flight lessons at 17 years of age in the summer of 1939. “Boys were trained to fly free as part of national defense,”
she says. “I had to pay for my lessons.” André’s love affair with aviation was put on hold, however,
with the onset of war. Germany declared war on Poland in September of that year, and France, in turn, declared war on Germany. André’s world was completely upended. She would begin attending university the following year to fulfill her other life ambition to become a doctor. When Germany defeated France in 1940, her medical education nearly ended. To continue her studies, André defied the Germans and left Strasbourg, despite protests from her family. Her life was immediately in danger. Te Germans had
forbidden Strasbourg residents to leave without authori- zation. In Clermont-Ferrand, the Gestapo raided André’s university, searching for Resistance operatives, saboteurs, and Jewish students and faculty. André narrowly evaded arrest. Afterward, she fled to Paris, where she lived in hiding and under threat of arrest until the summer of 1944. When the Free French liberated Paris in August 1944, André compared the exile army to an incarnation of modern knights.
Surgeon on the Front Lines After graduating medical school in 1947, André enlisted in the French MilitaryMedical Corps and volunteered to serve in French Indochina as a doctor. Te region, which comprised Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, had been under French rule since the late 19th century. In the 1940s, a group of Vietnamese nationalists led by
Ho Chi Minh sought independence for Vietnam, and war broke out between France and the insurgents in 1946, lasting until 1954 and the withdrawal of French troops. Te French Army suffered massive casualties, and doctors were in short
GLIMPSE how
helicopter
rescues were performed in the early ’50s
Far left: Valérie André poses in front of a Hiller helicopter at Lanessan Hospital, Hanoi, Vietnam, 1952. André also served as a surgeon at Lanessan. Left: André commands a Sikorsky H-34 helicopter in Algeria, 1959. (Photos: Valérie André. Used with permission.)
supply. Trained in neurosurgery, André performed more than 100 procedures per month after her arrival. Still, her intense interest in aviation endured. When
given the opportunity to be part of a medical team para- chuting into remote French military outposts throughout Indochina to treat the wounded, she jumped at the chance. On one mission to Laos, where she was airdropped into a French fort, André treated both military personnel and civilians who lived near the outpost. Her skill and compas- sion became legendary among the villagers, and she became known as “the woman who came from the sky.”
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