During the Second World War, millions of women flooded into the workforce to produce materials the Allies needed for the war effort. Hundreds of thousands more served in the armed forces of Allied nations. But one woman, born 120 years ago today, not only worked in a factory that built fighter planes – she ran it.
Elizabeth (also called Elsie) MacGill was born on March 27, 1905 into quite an unusual family for the time. Her father was an immigration lawyer in Vancouver, which was normal enough — but her mother was a journalist and suffrage advocate, which was much less typical (Helen MacGill would later become the first woman appointed as a judge in British Columbia). So it was no surprise to the MacGills when their youngest daughter Elizabeth became an engineer (although her classmates and professors in the University of Toronto’ were in for a bit of a shock at first, having never seen a woman set foot in their engineering classrooms before. Reportedly, they got over it).
But even the MacGills probably couldn’t have predicted that a comic book would one day dub their daughter a queen of fighter aircraft at the fiery height of a world war.
Queen of the Hurricanes
In late 1940 and early 1941, the planes of the German air force, or Luftwaffe, rained bombs on London and other cities in the UK. Technically, the Nazi bombers targeted shipping ports, airfields, and factories, but in reality they killed more than 23,000 civilians and wounded 32,000 more just in the second half of 1940, during the Battle of Britain.
The UK sent squadrons of fighter planes into the air to fight off the German bombers, and most of the country’s defense relied on two aircraft: the Hawker Hurricane and the Supermarine Spitfire. With a quartet of 19 mm machine guns and a 1,185 horsepower Rolls-Royce Merlin XX V-12 engine, the Hurricane was a fighter to be reckoned with. In level flight, it could reach a top speed of 320 miles an hour, and it could fly as high as 36,000 feet (about the altitude most modern commerical jets fly). And in an aerial dogfight, the Hurricane could maneuver toe-to-toe with the German’s Messerschimidt Bf 109.
“If you saw a 109 on your tail, and it hadn’t shot you down at that point, you put on full throttle, fine pitch, full left rudder, full left stick and full forward stick. This resulted in a horrible manoeuvre which was, in fact, a negative g spiral dive,” recalled Hurricane pilot decades later in Alec Bailey’s 1987 book Merlin in Perspective: the Combat Years. “But you would come out of the bottom with no 109 on your tail and your aeroplane intact.”
And across the Atlantic, at a Canadian Car and Foundry factory in Fort William, Ontario, the engineer in charge of building Hawker Hurricanes for the war effort was Elsie MacGill.
CanCar, with MacGill as its chief aeronautical engineer, started working on Hurricanes in 1938 under a private contract from Hawker Aircraft. The company’s leadership realized that war in Europe was looming, and they wanted to prepare. In this case, preparing for war meant shipping designs, sample parts, and airplane prototypes to CanCar’s factory at Fort William late in 1938. The first Hawker Hurricane rolled off CanCar’s assembly line in 1940, just in time for the Battle of Britain.
During the early years of the war, it was MacGill’s job to take a peacetime airplane factory of 500 employees and scale it up to an operation of 4,500 employees, all working at a frenetic pace. She had to redesign and adapt the factory’s machine tools to manufacture a whole new aircraft (one with more than 25,000 individual parts) to very precise standards. By 1943, MacGill has personally overseen the manufacture of 1,451 Hawker Hurricane fighters for the Royal Air Force and Royal Canadian Air Force: more than a tenth of all the Hurricanes built during the war.
Her fighters flew in every major theater of the war, from tropical Pacific islands to the chilly skies of northern Europe (where pilots’ lives depended on the cold-weather modifications MacGill herself had designed, like systems for de-icing the plane’s wings and control surfaces and even a way to fit the aircraft with skis for landing in the snow).
And that’s when they made her their queen: a 1942 issue of the educational comic book True Comics dubbed engineer Elsie MacGill “Queen of the Hurricanes.”
After the war, MacGill opened her own aeronautical engineering consulting firm, where she focused on international safety regulations for commerical aircraft. She also threw herself headlong into advocating for equal rights for women in Canada.