Le médecin général inspecteur Valérie André nous a quitté le 21 janvier 2024 à l’âge de 102 ans.

Médecin militaire, résistante, parachutiste et pilote d’hélicoptère, sa carrière fut notamment marquée par son engagement dans les guerres d’Indochine et d’Algérie. Pionnière dans l’évacuation sanitaire par hélicoptère des soldats blessés, première femme à avoir été nommée officier général de l’armée française le 21 avril 1976, c’est avec une certaine idée de l’honneur qu’elle a toujours, sans relâche, traduit en actes sa volonté d’espérer pour la France et porté ses idéaux : le devoir, l’humanisme, le dévouement.

Elle a été élevée à la dignité de Grand’croix de la Légion d’Honneur et de l’Ordre National du Mérite. Elle était également titulaire de la Croix de guerre des théâtres d’opérations extérieures, de la croix de la valeur militaire, de la médaille de l’aéronautique, de la médaille d’honneur du service de santé des armées agrafe Vermeil, de la médaille commémorative de la campagne d’Indochine, de la médaille d’Outre-Mer et de la médaille commémorative des opérations de sécurité et de maintien de l’ordre, agrafe Algérie.

Attestant du niveau d’exception de cette femme, sa disparition a donné lieu à une cérémonie dans la cour d’Honneur des Invalides le 27 janvier en présence du Général d’Armée Thierry Burkhard, Chef d’Etat major des Armées, et à un retentissement médiatique au niveau national. Fait remarquable et exceptionnel, elle a fait l’objet d’un long article dans le New York Times rédigé par Sam Roberts, journaliste qui se consacre particulièrement aux biographies de personnes célèbres.

Pour la circonstance et en hommage à cette grande dame, le comité éditorial d’asnom.org a choisi de reproduire intégralement cet article.

She was the first woman to fly rescue missions in a combat zone, in Indochina and Algeria. She was also the first Frenchwoman to become an army general.

Valérie André was 10 years old in 1932 when, armed with a congratulatory bouquet, she greeted the hero aviator Maryse Hilsz at the Strasbourg airfield in France. She was already committed to becoming a doctor, an ambitious career goal for a young lady at the time. But she was so warmly received when she presented the flowers to Ms. Hilsz, who had just completed a record-breaking round-trip flight between Paris and Saigon, that she committed herself to another formidable objective : She decided to become an airplane pilot. Valérie André not only pursued both professions ; she thrived in them. She became a brain surgeon, a parachutist and a helicopter pilot who was said to be the first woman to fly rescue missions in combat zones for any military force. She was also the first Frenchwoman to be named a general and was a five-time winner of the Croix de Guerre, for bravery in Indochina and Algeria.

Dr. André died on Jan. 21 in Issy-les-Moulineaux, a suburb of Paris. She was 102. “It all began with the dream of a 10-year-old girl, flying like a star,” Olivia Penichou, a spokeswoman for the French Ministry of Defense, said in announcing the death on social media. “She worked with determination to ensure that the armed forces opened up not as well known abroad — at least until recently.
The announcement did not say if any immediate family members survived. In 120 combat missions in the early 1950s in the dense jungles and soggy rice paddies of Indochina, where the French were trying without success to repulse Communist guerrillas, Dr. André flew 168 wounded soldiers from the battlefields to hospitals in Hanoi — including enemy soldiers, when there was room on the two litters mounted on her single-seat Hiller chopper. She later flew 365 missions into combat zones in North Africa, where Algerians were seeking independence from France. In 1976 she was promoted to general, the first woman to be elevated to that.

She was the subject of a 2021 documentary, “Madame le Général,” and of an English-language book, “Helicopter Heroine : Valérie André — Surgeon, Pioneer Rescue Pilot, and Her Courage Under Fire,” by Charles Morgan Evans, an aviation historian, published in 2023.

Valérie Collin André was born on April 21, 1922, in Strasbourg, in the Alsace region of northeastern France near the German border. Her father taught music at a boys’ high school. Her mother encouraged her four daughters to pursue the same opportunities for higher education that were available to her five sons. Dr. André would promote that agenda throughout her career.“I considered that each woman possesses the possibility of choosing her own life, even if that choice required more tenacity than that of a man,” Mr. Evans quoted her as saying.When she decided to indulge her passions for both medicine and aviation, she tutored students in French and math to pay for flying lessons. She received her pilot’s license when she was 16. Two years later, in 1940, the Germans invaded. She fled Alsace — first to southwestern France, where the University of Strasbourg had decamped, and then to Nazi-occupied Paris, where she continued her studies at the Sorbonne.While most women studying medicine in France at the time were shunted into pediatrics, gynecology or public health, she majored in neurology. She received a medical degree in 1948, when she was 26.

At the end of my medical studies, the dean of the faculty of medicine told us the military in Indochina did not have enough doctors,” Dr. André told the aviation magazine Vertical in 2017. He suggested that she join the army.While working as a surgeon, she witnessed a helicopter demonstration in Saigon early in 1950 and persuaded her superiors that evacuating the wounded from combat zones to hospitals by chopper would be better than parachuting, which she had done, to treat them on the ground. She later told the Smithsonian News Service that soldiers were awe-struck when they saw “a girl, of all things, falling out of the sky.”She returned to France for preliminary training, underwent further training in Vietnam beginning that October, and then began commanding her first medevac helicopter flights early in 1952.

According to the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, she was one of the first 12 women in the world to receive a helicopter pilot rating and the first woman to fly a helicopter into combat zones.In 1953, after surviving a crash, she doubled back to France, where she established medical units at military heliports. In 1957 she was deployed to Algeria, where she logged hundreds of rescue missions before coming home in 1962.As the army’s physician general and a member of a presidential commission, she lobbied indefatigably to grant women a more active role in the military. She retired in 1981 as inspector general of medicine. Before she moved into a retirement home in Issy-les-Moulineaux, which happens to be near the Paris heliport, Dr. André lived on the top floor of a six-story building nearby.“I wanted a lot of sky,” she said.Because she was a petite woman — she weighed less than 100 pounds — her helicopter with Red Cross insignias could accommodate a stretcher on each skid. Before she flew solo, she was trained by an Air Force colonel, Alexis Santini. In 1963, she married him.Well before he died in 1997, she outranked him.

Lien pour video sur la cérémonie militaire des Invalides :

Vidéo.- Valérie André, un destin exceptionnel - 6 mars 2015 - Vidéo (11mn 36).

Archive vidéo INA : Madame Le Générale : Valérie André - 21 avril 1976 – Vidéo (3mn 54)

Article de L’œil de l’ASAF par GCA Robert Meille (février 2025).