Fifty years ago this month, the French army got its first female general: Valérie André, a surgeon, parachutist and helicopter pilot who blazed a trail for women in the highest ranks of the military.
Long before she was France’s highest-ranking female officer, Valérie André was a girl who wanted to fly.
“I decided when I was three years old that I would be a pilot,” she told RFI in 2010, then aged 88.
“I used to cut out articles from newspapers and aviation magazines. I collected it all. They were my idols, the aviators of days gone by.”
Pioneers including Elisa Laroche, the first woman to get a pilot’s licence in 1910, and Adrienne Bolland, the first woman to fly over the Andes, in 1921, had shown André that women had a place in the sky.
But they didn’t yet have a place in the armed forces. A handful of women would be recruited as auxiliary pilots during the Second World War, but France disbanded their unit once the conflict was over.
But in the wars that came afterwards, André would become one of the first pilots, man or woman, to fly a new type of aircraft on a new type of mission.
Witness to war
Born in Strasbourg on 21 April, 1922, André came from a family where girls and boys alike were encouraged to pursue their passions.
Alongside aviation, hers was science. As a teenager she saved up to pay for flying lessons, then enrolled to study medicine – but both were interrupted when the Nazis invaded France.
Her native region of Alsace was annexed and André fled, resuming her studies in Paris. In August 1944, she watched the city’s liberation.
By the time she qualified as a doctor in 1948, France was at war again. Communist independence fighters were battling France for control of what was then the colony of Indochina – today Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
The French army was relying on volunteers, and it badly needed medics. While women were barred from combat, they were accepted into the medical corps. André signed up.
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From Strasbourg to Saigon
Shipped out to a military hospital in Saigon, André was confronted by what she would later call “the daily horror” of war.
Injured soldiers streamed in. Given the number of severe head wounds, she developed a specialism in brain surgery, sometimes operating on as many as 100 people a month.
French forces were scattered across Indochina, many in remote outposts, and not all the wounded could make it to hospital. The army’s solution was to airdrop doctors.
André was the perfect candidate. Writing her university thesis on injuries suffered by parachutists, she had taken up parachuting as a hobby.
She got to work jumping over distant parts of Laos, setting up tents in which to treat patients – French soldiers, locals and sometimes even the Viet Minh that France was fighting.
Soon, technology replaced her parachute. “I saw the helicopters arrive,” André told RFI. “It was love at first sight.”
The flying doctor
The helicopters in question were lightweight and “very primitive”, according to aviation historian Charles Morgan Evans, author of a biography of André.
“This helicopter afforded absolutely no protection. It was entirely made out of aluminium and very underpowered,” he told RFI. “It was just a very difficult helicopter to work with.”
Developed by the American company Hiller, they were fitted with a stretcher on either side on which to carry wounded soldiers.
It was the first time the French army had used them, and André lobbied her superiors for the chance to fly one. Not only did she have the medical training, she pointed out, but she weighed less than most men.
“Since these helicopters had such terrible payload capacity performance in tropical environments, she said it would be possible not just to take two wounded soldiers back to a hospital, but possibly three,” said Evans. “One in the cockpit and two in the litters on the side of the helicopter.”
The head of the medical corps agreed and André returned to France to get her pilot’s licence. Redeployed to Vietnam, she began flying rescue missions.
These involved heading into the heart of areas where fighting was taking place, often escorted by fighter planes firing machine guns or dropping napalm to drive back the Viet Minh. They would have just minutes to land, load up the wounded and take off before the enemy regrouped, then fly long distances to a hospital.
Pilots were exposed to enemy fire, as well as mechanical failures. It was, Evans said, “incredibly, incredibly dangerous”.
“It was mainly afterwards it sank in,” André told RFI decades later. “In the moment, you had to get on with it.”
Under her call sign “Ventilateur”, between 1951 and 1953 she flew 128 missions and rescued 168 soldiers.
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‘A woman like any other’
After two tours, André returned to France. Soon the country was at war again, this time in Algeria. She flew another 350 missions there from 1959 to 1962, both evacuating soldiers and transporting troops.
After that she came back to France for good, serving as a medical officer on military bases. She was promoted to lieutenant-colonel, colonel and then, on 21 April, 1976 – her 54th birthday – brigadier general.
It was big news. A TV interviewer asked her husband – a fellow army rescue pilot – about her cooking, while André, her eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses, told the reporter she was “a woman like any other”.
In fact, the French armed forces were structured to allow only exceptional women in. Quotas limited the percentage of female recruits each year that could go into the various branches, which meant only those with the very highest qualifications were picked.
In some cases, according to Evans, André saw men admitted to the medical corps with lower entrance exam scores than female applicants.
She lobbied to revise those quotas, and headed a commission that recommended allowing women into certain officer positions that were previously barred to them.
Today, the medical corps is the only branch of France’s armed forces where women outnumber men. Overall, they make up around 17 percent.
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A quiet pioneer
Since André retired in 1981 as a three-star general, the French forces have dropped their quotas and opened all posts to women. It currently has 65 serving female generals, including its first with the highest possible five stars.
Defence officials say they expect that number to rise in the next five years, as women admitted to France’s top military academies in the 1990s – when they stopped capping the numbers of female students – climb the ranks.
André died in January 2025 at the age of 102, with a dozen medals to her name. She avoided calling out sexism in the military publicly, telling RFI: “As long as you do what’s expected of you, you set an example. It’s not a problem.”
Her autobiography contains a clue as to how she saw herself. “In my own way, I’ve always been a rebel, bucking against injustice and outdated traditions,” she wrote.
“But I’m a rebel who loves order… and taking risks.”
