Valérie André was 10 years old in 1932 when, armed with a bouquet of congratulations, he greeted the hero aviator Maryse Hilsz in the Strasbourg Aerodrome in France.
She was already committed to becoming a doctor, an ambitious career goal for a young woman at the time. But she was welcomed so warmly when she presented the flowers to Mrs. Hilsz, who had just completed a round -trip flight between Paris and Saigon, who has committed himself to another formidable goal: he decided to become an air rider.
Valérie André not only pursued both professions; He thrown into them. It has become a brain surgeon, a paratrooper and a pilot of helicopters who was said to be the first woman to fly the rescue missions in the combat areas for any military force. It was also the first French to be nominated general and was five times winner of the Croix de Guerre, for the courage in Indochina and Algeria.
Dr. André died on January 21 in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, a suburb of Paris. He was 102 years old.
“It all started with the dream of a 10 -year -old girl, flying like a star,” said Olivia Penichou, spokesman for the French Ministry of Defense, announcing death on social media. “He worked with determination to ensure that the armed forces opened to specialty closed women such as those of the hunting pilot.”
The announcement did not say if the immediate family members survived.
In the 120 combat missions in the early 1950s in the dense jungle and rice fields soaked in Indochina, where the French were trying without success to reject the communist guerrillas, Dr. André made 168 soldiers wounded by the battlefields when there was Space on the two litters mounted on its single seating Chopper Hiller.
He later made 365 missions fly in combat areas in North Africa, where the Algerians sought independence from France. In 1976 the first woman was promoted to be elevated to that rank in the French army.
But while his heroism was celebrated at home and wrote two memories in French, his exploits were not so well known abroad – at least until recently.
He was the subject of a 2021 documentary, “Madame Le Général” and a book in English, “Helicopter Heroine: Valérie André-Surgeon, Pioneer Rescue Pilot and his courage under fire”, by Charles Morgan Evans, an Aviation historical , published in 2023.
Valérie Collin André was born on April 21, 1922 in Strasbourg, in the region of Alsace in North France -eastern near the German border. His father taught music at high school high school. Her mother encouraged her four daughters to pursue the same opportunities for higher education that were available for her five children.
Dr. André would have promoted that agenda throughout his career.
“I believed that every woman has the opportunity to choose her life, even if that choice required more tenacity than that of a man,” said Mr. Evans.
When he decided to indulge his passions for both medicine and aviation, he troubled the students in French and mathematics to pay flight lessons. He received a pilot license when he was 16 years old.
Two years later, in 1940, the Germans invaded. He fled from Alsace-Prima in south-western France, where the University of Strasbourg had taken off, and then in Paris occupied by the Nazis, where he continued his studies at the Sorbona.
While most women who studied medicines in France at the time were diverted to pediatrics, gynecology or public health, graduated in neurology. He graduated in Medicine in 1948 when he was 26 years old.
“At the end of my medical studies, the dean of the Faculty of Medicine told us that the military in Indochina did not have enough doctors,” said dr. André at the Aviation Vertical magazine in 2017. He suggested joining the army.
As he worked as a surgeon, he witnessed a demonstration of Saigon helicopters at the beginning of 1950 and persuaded his superiors who evacuate the wounded from the fighting areas to the hospitals by Chopper would have been better than the parachuting, which he had done, to treat them On the ground. He later told the Smithsonian News Service that the soldiers were affected by the reverential fear when they saw “a girl, of all things, fall from the sky”.
He returned to France for preliminary training, underwent further training in Vietnam starting from October, and then he began to command his first flights of helicopters Medevac in early 1952.
According to the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution, it was one of the first 12 women in the world to receive a pilot evaluation of helicopters and the first woman to fly a helicopter in combat areas.
In 1953, after surviving an accident, he doubled in France, where he set up medical units with military Eliport. In 1957 he was deployed in Algeria, where he recorded hundreds of rescue missions before returning home in 1962.
As a general doctor of the army and member of a presidential commission, he has been pressing incorrectly to grant women a more active role in the army. He retired in 1981 as a general inspector of medicine.
Before moving to a retirement house in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, which is located near the Eleport of Paris, Dr. André lived on the top floor of a six-storey building nearby.
“I wanted heaven a lot,” he said.
Because she was a small woman – she weighed less than 100 kilos – her helicopter with insignia of the Red Cross could accommodate a stretcher on each Skid. Before flying alone, she was trained by a colonel of the Air Force, Alexis Santini. In 1963, he married him.
Well before he died in 1997, he passed it.