If a history book is to grab you in the same way as a good thriller, to fit within the impossible-to-put-down category, what it almost certainly needs is characters – interesting characters, sympathetic characters, characters about whom you quickly come to care.

Spitfire Women of World War II is packed with such characters – indeed you can only give a little credit to the writer, Giles Whittell. For who could not be grabbed by a character such as Mary de Bunsen, who had only limited use of her right leg as a result of childhood polio, had been born with a then-unfixable hole in the heart that frequently left her breathless after minimal exertion, who wore bottle-thickness glasses, who in the early stages of the war had worked for a Tiger Moth dealer in Devon as a test pilot before ending up flying a military Spitfire. Or Margot Duhalde, the 19-year-old from Chile, the first woman to get a commercial pilot’s licence there, who left her home in April 1941 speaking no English, with no English relatives, to get to England to fight the Germans.

The “Spitfire Women”, although not all of them got to fly the fighter pilots’ favourite plane, were the 164 female pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). Once planes had been built a British factories, or shipped from overseas, or repaired after major damage, or indeed had to be scrapped, they had to be transported to where they were needed. So:

“In all, the ATA delivered 308,567 aircraft, including 57,286 Spitfires, 29,401 Hurricanes, 9,805 Lancasters and 7,039 Barracudas of the type that took Betty Keith-Jopp to the dark floor of the Firth of Forth. In mid-1942, when British aircraft production reached its peak, the ATA was moving more planes each day than British Airways did on a typical day in 2006.”

Those were the main sort of aircraft, but there were many more, and many variations on each type. The pilots were expected to fly pretty well what they were given – sometimes a couple of different types in one day. Of course the pilots couldn’t know the details of every aircraft, so they relied on notes, surely a disquieting experience for passengers to watch their pilot read the “Ferry Pilot Notes” before takeoff and landing.

What was worse, and what killed many pilots, men and women, was that they had no instrument training. This was a deliberate decision by officials – a calculation that the cost in time and resources would not pay off – which meant of course, that some pilots died. Whittell begins the book with the tale of Betty Keith-Jopp, named above, who was flying that “lumpy, underpowered torpedo bomber … with a history of unexplained crashes”, who was trapped in unexpected clouds over Scotland on one flight in 1945, and eventually crashed on to the Firth of Forth.