Fly Girls Page 10
The women took off with Tibbets and an inspector from the Civil Aeronautics Administration on board. They did exactly as they’d been taught, but while they were demonstrating their ability to fly the plane with two engines shut down, the cockpit suddenly filled with smoke. One engine had caught fire!
Without hesitation Dora Dougherty gave clear instructions to everyone on board, radioed the tower for emergency equipment, and, with Didi as copilot, brought the plane down smoothly. When she climbed out of the cockpit onto the tarmac, the CAA inspector could hardly wait to sign her logbook, certifying her to fly the B-29. He’d never seen anyone do it better. 126
• • •
Tibbets had had a B-29 set aside for the Wasps to use for demonstrations. The Fifinella mascot was painted in bright colors on the nose of the bomber, with the name Ladybird above it. Tibbets wanted to be sure the men watching the flights got the message: “So easy a girl can fly it.” Dougherty and Johnson then went on a goodwill mission in their Ladybird. They flew generals, pilots, gunners, bombardiers, and all the other members of a bomber crew around New Mexico. “At stake was the ability of that aircraft to deliver the bomb it was built to fly,” Dougherty said later. “It made me want to do a perfect job.”127 And she did.
As Dora Dougherty remembered,
We completed our checkout by the end of the third day (despite an engine fire during the first flight) and thereafter demonstrated our ship, Ladybird, decorated with a painting of Fifinella on the nose, at the very heavy bomber training base at Alamogordo, New Mexico. After a short time, the purpose of the flights had been achieved. The male flight crews, their egos challenged, approached the B-29 with new enthusiasm and found it to be not a beast, but a smooth, delicately rigged, and responsive ship.128
Before long, though, the women were ordered to stop their tour. The head of the Air Staff in Washington, DC, was concerned that they were “putting the big football players to shame.”129 That was the end of Dora and Didi’s flying career in the B-29. Only about a hundred pilots anywhere on Earth knew how to handle the Superfortress safely. Now the two who’d been assigned to convince other pilots to train on the plane were grounded as soon as the job was done. They were grounded because they were women and their ability as pilots might embarrass someone.130
The B-29 soon proved its worth. In March 1945 over three hundred B-29s took off from Saipan and flew about three thousand miles to Japan and back in the biggest air attack in history. The B-29 would bring the war closer to an end.
The Atomic Bomb
The United States was the first country to develop an atomic bomb. It was tested in New Mexico in July 1945, two months after Germany’s surrender. Japan had continued to fight the war, and military leaders advised President Harry Truman (FDR had died in April 1945) that an invasion to defeat Japan would take another year of war and cost at least another one hundred thousand American lives. Truman decided to use the atomic bomb to force Japan’s immediate surrender. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets was chosen to fly the B-29 bomber that would carry and drop the bomb on the city of Hiroshima. He called the plane the Enola Gay after his mother. On August 6, 1945, Tibbets and his crew dropped a single bomb more powerful than the combined force of all the bombs already dropped in the war. It destroyed 90 percent of Hiroshima and instantly killed over eighty thousand people. Tens of thousands more later died of radiation exposure. On August 9 the United States dropped a second bomb, on the city of Nagasaki. Six days later Japan surrendered. The nuclear age had begun.
• • •
At about the same time that women started flying the big bombers, Ann Baumgartner at Camp Davis learned she was being transferred. She certainly wasn’t sorry to leave Davis. The harassment and dangerous discrimination there was nearly unbearable. Ann had done target towing, flown searchlight flights, and piloted drone mother ships. Now she and another Wasp got orders to report to Wright Field in Ohio to become experimental test pilots.
Wright Field was the biggest air force airplane testing center in the world. Engineers there experimented with every one of the million-plus parts of an aircraft to find the best materials and the best, most efficient designs. They experimented with pilots, too. How much force was safe when a plane took off? How high could a pilot fly before the lack of oxygen in the air had serious negative effects? How cold could a pilot be and still do the job? And did men and women react the same way to pressure, oxygen levels, and temperatures? That’s where Ann Baumgartner and Betty Greene came in.
The two Wasps rode in a B-17 bomber above forty thousand feet with sensors taped to their bodies to measure temperature. They went into a pressure chamber and practiced writing their names in lower and lower oxygen levels to see the effect on their brains and coordination. They tried various kinds of equipment under different weather conditions. And finally, in the least glamorous assignment anywhere, they worked with a doctor to develop a way for women to urinate while strapped into a pilot’s seat.
As Wasp Frances Green had learned when she almost died from lack of oxygen in a B-17 during training, the simple act of peeing had proved to be one of the most complicated problems Wasps faced. One woman said it was the worst thing she had to deal with as a pilot. The problem was especially serious in fighter planes, trainer planes, and other aircraft that had no toilets. Many had space for just one pilot and no other crew. Men used a tube they could slip into their unzipped flight suit without getting up. It collected their urine into a bag, which they disposed of later. A tube didn’t work for women, no matter how many designs engineers tried.131
Unfortunately, Ann, Betty, and the female doctor they worked with couldn’t develop a good solution either. Ann found that even the best design they came up with was inconvenient and difficult to use. Most Wasps chose to avoid taking in liquids before long flights. But aside from the discomfort that caused, dehydration is dangerous and can make a person’s thinking fuzzy, something a pilot can’t afford. Needing fluids without having a good way to urinate made for a constant balancing act—one Ann wished she could solve.132
When a Pilot Has to Go
Until the twenty-first century, fighter pilots faced problems with urination during long flights. Various kinds of tubes, bags, and funnels failed to solve the problem because pilots had to wear multiple layers of thermal underwear, flight suits, G suits, and harness straps. Most female fighter pilots usually chose to wear adult diapers. In recent years engineers have developed male and female underwear fitted with a hose and pump that collects urine into a bag for disposal. Both men and women who fly fighter jets say the systems work well. The pilots are quite “relieved.”
In every other way Ann’s work at Wright Field was a great success. Betty Greene returned to Camp Davis when her assignment at Wright Field ended, but Ann Baumgartner accepted an offer to stay. She became the only woman to perform experimental military test flights at Wright, which made her the only woman pilot lucky enough to spend time with the elderly gentleman who frequently came to the test flight hangar to talk with the young flyers.133 That elderly gentleman was none other than Orville Wright.
Still active and interested in new technologies and advances in flight, Orville Wright was particularly keen on the jet propulsion engines being tested at Wright Field, named for Orville and his brother Wilbur, who had died more than thirty years earlier. Engineers in Europe and the United States had been experimenting with jet, or turbine, engines for some time. They knew that a jet-powered plane would be able to fly faster than a plane powered by propellers. They believed jets would open a new chapter in flight. But any practical use of jet engines was so new, they hadn’t been showcased at the New York World’s Fair, which had closed less than four years earlier. The jet engine was now nearly ready for pilots to try, because World War II, like most wars, had pushed governments, scientists, and engineers to put all their efforts into developing war-related technologies as quickly as possible.
Jets—A New Kind of Thrust
The engines i
n a propeller plane create energy that turns the propellers. The propellers then produce thrust. In a jet the engines pull in air, compress it, and then use fuel to combust it (combustion occurs when certain kinds of fuel react with oxygen to release heat—this is why many fires can be extinguished by cutting off their oxygen supply, or smothering them). The exhaust produced by the combustion shoots out the back of the engine much faster than the colder air coming into the engines. This creates the thrust that pushes the plane forward. Think about running. As the runner sets her foot down, the muscles in her leg push, or thrust, her body forward.
Orville Wright wanted to see what this next generation of aircraft would be like. “Aviation will soar ahead,” he told Ann, “though its progress between our 1903 flight and today still takes my breath away. Women even fly military planes now!”134 Wright had no hesitation about women flying military planes. He asked Ann, “What kind of girl would want to fly an experimental jet? A pioneer like me, maybe?”135
Ann would never put herself in the same category as Orville Wright. He’d invented the airplane, for goodness’ sake. He’d almost started aviation. But she wondered if she might be a kind of pioneer too. She got an answer in the fall of 1944 when she became a pioneer among pioneers as the only woman in a group of pilots scheduled to test-fly the Army Air Forces’ first jet.
Ann wasn’t near the head of the line waiting to fly the strange-looking craft on that bright October morning. That privilege was reserved for the colonels and majors who ran the testing program at Wright Field. Waiting was okay with her. No one knew exactly what to expect of a jet, including Ann. Watching someone else take off first seemed like a good idea.
It was the deafening noise of the jet engines everyone noticed right away. Their painfully high pitch was different from prop engines and sounded powerful in a way none of them had heard anywhere else. Ann and the others watched as the jet started taxiing on its first takeoff. It used more and more of the runway as it built speed. Would it ever leave the ground? And what about landing? They were told, “You’ll have to land first time around. The slower acceleration of power in the jet will not get you off and around again.”136 No second chances. Ann hoped she was ready.
Finally it was her turn. She guided the jet down the runway in its long takeoff and felt the plane start to climb. But before it reached altitude, the roar of the engines stopped suddenly, as if they had stalled—as if they had shut down without warning. Ann felt a second of panic before realizing the plane was still climbing into the sky. Right. The noise of a jet engine is behind the pilot, where the turbines push the plane forward. She relaxed.
Ann’s first experience of flying in near silence was astonishing. Something she would never forget. For thirty minutes or so she flew the only jet in American skies. And she knew she was the first woman to do it. However, she didn’t know she would fly such a plane only once. Or that it would be nearly ten years before another woman flew a jet.137 She didn’t know her days as a WASP were coming to an end.
• • •
Baumgartner wasn’t alone. Betty Gillies, Nancy Love, and the other Wasps flying huge bombers, pursuit planes, and trainer planes didn’t know they’d be going home soon either. With factories continuing to send planes off assembly lines all over the country, men still being drafted into the military by the thousands, and a new group of women just beginning their classes at Avenger Field, every WASP and WASP trainee received two letters—one from Jacqueline Cochran and one from General Arnold. Both used gentle, kind words, but their message was harsh: The WASP program was over. By the end of the year, just two months away, there would be no more Wasps. Hap Arnold wrote, “I have directed that the WASP program be inactivated and all WASP be released on 20 December 1944.”138
Shirley Slade, a WASP trainee, was featured on the cover of Life magazine in 1943.
CHAPTER 9
Attacked
After all they’d put up with and all their expectations of being militarized, the Wasps were being disbanded. Thrown out. Sent home. As if they’d done something wrong. “We were all done in to have it end so abruptly,” one Wasp said. “We thought it would go until the end of the war.”139 The women were shocked. Most had had no idea their work was in jeopardy. So what had happened?
The simple answer is that the Wasps lost the battle for militarization. When Nancy Love and Jackie Cochran agreed to keep their programs civilian in 1942, they had expected militarization from Congress before too long. But a bill to militarize the women wasn’t introduced in Congress until June 1944. It was defeated 188 to 169, and in August plans were made to end the program.
Simple answers, however, are not often complete. Congress had militarized all the other women’s programs during the war. By 1944 there were nearly three hundred thousand women in the WAC, WAVES, and other groups with military status. They served in separate units from men, but they were military. And the bill to militarize the WASP had support from the Army Air Forces and the Department of War (today’s Department of Defense). Congress had voted in favor of every single bill the AAF had asked for between 1941 and the WASP bill in 1944.140 Why say no to the bill militarizing the Wasps? That answer is complicated.
For one thing, the Wasps’ jobs were different from the jobs the other women’s auxiliaries did. Most female members of the army, navy, coast guard, and marine auxiliaries did what was classified as “women’s work.” The work might be hard, even dangerous sometimes, and military men might have had those jobs before the war. But they were the kinds of jobs members of Congress and the public could imagine a woman doing: typists, bakers, secretaries, switchboard operators, nurses, and the like. All of those sounded like “women’s work” even if they meant going into combat zones. Women in traditionally male jobs (doctors and engineers, for example) became part of the military too, though only in small numbers. And since women had taken over factory jobs and become mechanics in the civilian world, most people could swallow having women as mechanics for the military. Their country needed them.
The Wasps, on the other hand, weren’t doing women’s work. They were pilots. And most people thought of pilots, especially military pilots, as the manliest of manly men. Americans pictured their flyboys as dashing, handsome, and fearless. Sure, women could get pilot’s licenses. They could be good small-plane pilots, and famous like Amelia Earhart and Jackie Cochran. But women flying military aircraft? That was something else and it put the Wasps in a more difficult position than other women’s auxiliaries.
Rosie the Riveter: Image for an Era
The fictional Rosie the Riveter might be the most famous woman of World War II. But her past is complicated. The image most people have of Rosie comes from a poster showing a strong but feminine worker wearing a red polka-dot bandana. Her thought bubble says, “We Can Do It!” Yet this iconic war worker is not a riveter and has no name tag saying ROSIE. In fact, the poster was designed for the Westinghouse Electric Company to promote hard work. Using a woman on the poster was a big step, but the poster was never shown outside the Westinghouse plant. No one thought a thing about that image until it reappeared in the 1980s and became famous.
So where is World War II’s real Rosie the Riveter? In 1943, American artist Norman Rockwell did a painting for a magazine cover that portrayed a strong, proud woman working as riveter. Her lunch box was labeled ROSIE, and Rosie the Riveter became a nickname for women in all kinds of war-related jobs. She even inspired a popular song. Today, Rosie the Riveter—usually seen in the Westinghouse poster version—is a symbol of feminism and women’s determination and abilities.
The timing of the request for militarization was another problem. In early 1942 the United States had been in real danger of defeat, and Americans supported every effort to win the war. A popular magazine editor echoed Franklin Roosevelt when he wrote, “There is terrible fighting to be done. All of us will be in the fight—men, women, and children.”141 Women, in particular, were encouraged to do their part and were admired for it. M
ost people saw women who went to work in factories and other war-related businesses as heroes (though they were paid less than men). Newspapers and magazines wrote articles on them. Posters and newsreels encouraged more women to join the workforce.
Those women, however, even those working in military auxiliaries early in the war, weren’t in the military. Bills to give the Wacs, Waves, and SPARs (members of the Coast Guard Women’s Reserve) military status in 1942 and 1943 passed, but they faced some opposition. A number of people still believed women just didn’t belong in the military at all, no matter how womanlike their jobs were.
By the time the request to militarize the WASP was made in 1944, support for women’s war efforts in both military and civilian work had shifted. The war was still raging on, but the Allies were closing in on Germany and Japan. An end was in sight, perhaps not even a year away, and Americans started asking what was going to happen when the war was over. Twelve million men in uniform would be coming home, which was wonderful news, of course. But what were those men going to do as civilians? Where would so many young men find jobs all at once? People around the country assumed that those patriotic women who had stepped into men’s jobs in 1941 and 1942 would step back out at the end of the war. They would go home to their families, or get married and start families. Whatever they did, they had to give all those jobs back to the men who had to support themselves and their wives and children. That belief left little enthusiasm for adding any more women to the military.
Additionally, with the Allies gaining the upper hand, strategies for winning the war changed and so did the military’s need for soldiers. Early on, the only way to attack the enemy was from the air, and the AAF’s terrible losses created an enormous need for pilots. By 1944, though, the war was being fought on the ground, so fewer planes and flight crews were needed, and fewer were being lost. The AAF began sending some pilots and crews home and were training fewer new men for those jobs.