Valérie André, first woman to fly helicopter rescue missions in combat, dies at 102

Boston Globe

31-01-2025

Helicopters were still relatively new contraptions for widespread military use when France sent some in 1950 as air ambulances to support its troops in Indochina, the French colonial protectorate in Southeast Asia that included Vietnam. The French military was in a pitched battle against Vietnamese anti-colonial communists, including Ho Chi Minh.
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General André (then a captain) arrived in the French colonial protectorate of Indochina in 1949 and was assigned to a women's infirmary and then to a military hospital, both in Saigon. She had taken flying lessons as a young woman in Strasbourg, had a civilian copter license, and tried to make the case that she could save more lives by going to field hospitals near the front lines.
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She said she initially met resistance to her plan from the Ministry of Defense. 'I besieged my superior,' she recounted, then showed her mettle by making dozens of parachute jumps from French aircraft to treat the critically wounded. In an interview decades later with the Smithsonian News Service, she described the sight of herself to the men on the ground as 'a girl, of all things, falling out of the sky.'
She returned to France in 1950 to get a military pilot license to fly two-and three-seater helicopters and was back in Southeast Asia later that year. She flew a Hiller 360 that bore Red Cross markings and, because of the weight limit, she flew alone so she could strap a stretcher onto each skid. (It was to her advantage that she was petite and weighed less than 100 pounds.)
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She flew more than 120 chopper missions in Indochina, often landing on jungle airstrips or near rice paddies amid enemy fire.
Local Vietnamese civilians, who had never seen a helicopter, gave her the nicknames 'The woman who comes down from the sky' or 'Quekat' — Vietnamese for 'Madame Ventilator' — or cooler fan, because that's what the chopper looked like to them.
Military records show she flew 168 wounded men from the battlefields to hospitals in Hanoi. Most were French soldiers, but there were also many enemy communist fighters, the Viet Minh, whom she insisted on taking if she had space. Ultimately, the French withdrew in 1954 after losing a 55-day battle at the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu.
'She was a one-woman MASH unit,' Jean Ross Howard Phelan, one of the earliest American women to receive helicopter accreditation, in 1954, told the Smithsonian News Service in 1987. Like Phelan, General André was a member of the Whirly-Girls, an international organization of women helicopter pilots that Phelan co-founded in 1955.
After Indochina, where she earned the French Croix de Guerre, the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, and the US Legion of Merit, General André served as a Sikorsky helicopter pilot in Algeria in the late 1950s.
She ferried French commando platoons 'armed to the teeth,' as she said, to put down Algerian anti-colonial fighters who would later, in 1962, win their independence from France. By the end of the war, she had completed 365 combat missions in Algeria.
The sixth of nine children, Valérie Marie André was born on April 21, 1922, in Strasbourg, in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France that borders Germany. Her father was a high school music teacher, and her mother, an art-loving homemaker, encouraged all of her children to pursue higher education.
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When the Germans invaded and occupied Alsace-Lorraine and most of France in 1940, she was a high school student at Strasbourg. The Germans ordered no one to leave the occupied area but, with the help of her well-connected father and the French Resistance, she slipped through German lines and managed to continue her studies in Clermont-Ferrand, in south-central France, where she narrowly escaped a raid by the Nazi Gestapo.
With the help of the resistance (contrary to many press reports, she was never an active member), she was able to get to the University of Paris, commonly known as the Sorbonne, to graduate with a medical degree in 1948.
'At the end of my medical studies, the dean of the faculty of medicine told us the military in Indochina did not have enough doctors,' she told the helicopter publication Vertical. 'He suggested us to join the army under a fixed-term contract to see whether we liked it.'
In 1963, she married retired French air force Colonel Alexis Santini, whom she first met in Indochina. He died in 1997. They had no children. Details of her surviving family were not immediately known.
In 1976, she became the first female general in the French armed forces. Five years later, after her military retirement, she was appointed by the defense minister to lead a commission on the future of women in the French military.
On that panel, she told Vertical, she fought to open up roles for women that went beyond administrative tasks. 'I wanted women to be real combatants, not just airclub pilots,' she said, adding that her work began a long process that eventually helped equalize roles.
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She was the subject of a biography, 'Helicopter Heroine: Valérie André ― Surgeon, Pioneer Rescue Pilot, and Her Courage Under Fire' (2022), by aviation historian Charles Morgan Evans.
She wrote two volumes of memoirs, 'Ici, Ventilateur!' ('Down Here, Ventilator!'), published in 1954, and 'Madame le Général' (1988), and she spent her retirement in suburban Paris, living on the top floor of a six-story building. Of her choice of apartments, she told Vertical, 'I wanted a lot of sky.'