Valerie Andre, the bold pilot of the French Army, dies in 102

Valerie André was ten years old in 1932 when she was armed with a congratulatory bouquet, she received the hero pilot Maris Hills At Strasbourg Airport in France.

She was already committed to becoming a doctor, an ambitious professional goal for a young woman at the time. But she received warmly when she gave the flowers to Mrs. Hillsz, who just completed a round and forth trip in a record race between Paris and Sigon, to the point that she adhered to herself to another huge goal: she decided to become a pilot of the plane.

Valerie André only followed both professions; I flourished in it. She became a brain surgeon, umbrella science and a helicopter who was said to be the first woman to fly rescue missions in the combat areas of any military force. She was also the first French woman to win the title of general and was a five -time winner in Croix de Guerre, for courage in India and Algeria.

Dr. André died on January 21 in Issi-Bus Molinho, a suburb of Paris. It was 102.

“Everything began with a 10 -year -old girl, who is flying like a star,” said Olivia Bencho, a spokeswoman for the French Ministry of Defense, in announcing the death on social media. “I worked with the design to ensure that the armed forces have opened the specialties of women like those of the fighting pilot.”

This announcement did not say whether any family members were directly survived.

In 120 combat missions in the early fifties of the twentieth century in the dense forests and the integrated rice field in India, the French were trying without success to start the Communist gangs. That is the soldiers of the times, when there was space on waste on a single -seat helicopter.

Later, it converted 365 missions into combat areas in North Africa, where the Algerians were looking for independence from France. In 1976, she was promoted to a year, the first woman to rise to that rank in the French army.

But while her tournament was celebrated at home and wrote notes in French, her exploits were not known abroad – at least until recently.

It was the subject of a 2021 documentary, Madame Le Jenal, and a book in English, “Heroic hero: Valerie André-wounds, the pioneer of the pilot rescue, and her courage under fire”, written by Charles Morgan Evans, flight, dated flight, published in 2023.

Valerie Collin André was born on April 21, 1922, in Strasbourg, in the Alzas region in northeastern France near the German border. Her father taught music at the Sons Secondary School. Her mother encouraged her four daughters to follow the same opportunities for higher education that was available to her five children.

Dr. Andrei will promote this agenda throughout her career.

“She considered that every woman has the ability to choose her life, even if this choice requires more perseverance than the man,” Mr. Evans quoted as saying.

When she decided to immerse her passion for both medicine and aviation, I studied students in French and mathematics to pay the price of airline. She got her pilot license when she was sixteen years old.

Two years later, in 1940, the Germans invaded. She fled from Al-Alzas-first to southwestern France, where the University of Strasbourg had cut off, then to Nazi Paris, where she continued her studies in the Sorbonne.

While most women who study medicine in France at the time have been transferred to pediatrics, gynecology, or public health, they specialized in neuroscience. She obtained a medical certificate in 1948, when she was twenty -six years old.

“At the end of my medical studies, the dean of the College of Medicine told us that the army in Indochy did not have enough doctors.” vertical In 2017, suggested that you join the army.

While working as a surgeon, she saw a helicopter in Sigon in early 1950 and persuaded her superiors that they were the wounded from combat areas to hospitals by Chopper would be better than umbrellas, which she did, to treat them on the ground. She later told Smithsonian News that the soldiers were stunned when they saw “a girl, from all things, fall from the sky.”

She returned to France for preliminary training, and underwent more training in Vietnam starting in October, then began to drive the first helicopter flights in early 1952.

According to the Air Museum and National Space at the Smithsonian Institute, she was one of the 12 first women in the world to have a helicopter classification and the first woman to fly a helicopter to combat areas.

In 1953, after surviving a crash, she returned to France, where she established medical units in military helicopters. In 1957, she was published in Algeria, where she recorded hundreds of rescue missions before returning home in 1962.

As an army physician and a member of a presidential committee, she pressed an unspecified way to give women a more active role in the army. In 1981 she retired as a general medical inspector.

Before moving to a retirement house in Issa-Lils-Molinho, who was near Hilibort Paris, Dr. André lived on the upper floor of a six-storey building nearby.

“I wanted a lot of heaven,” she said.

Because she was a little woman – her weight was less than 100 pounds – a helicopter can accommodate her with a Red Cross emblem with a slide. Before flying alone, she was trained by Air Force Colonel, Alexis Santini. In 1963, he married him.

Before his death in 1997, he surpassed him.