Fly Girls Page 12

  You, and more than nine hundred of your sisters, have shown that you can fly wingtip to wingtip with your brothers. If ever there was a doubt in anyone’s mind that women can become skillful pilots, the WASP have dispelled that doubt . . . .

  Frankly, I didn’t know in 1941 whether a slip of a young girl could fight the controls of a B-17 . . . .

  Well, now in 1944, more than two years since WASP first started flying with the Air Forces, we can come to only one conclusion—the entire operation has been a success. It is on the record that women can fly as well as men . . . .

  The Wasps have completed their mission. Their job has been successful . . . .

  . . . We of the AAF are proud of you; we will never forget our debt to you.

  Those were heartfelt words, but they didn’t change anything.

  WASP trainees formed close bonds with each other and with Jacqueline Cochran, center.

  CHAPTER 10

  At Last

  Teresa James was “heartbroken.”155 Betty Gillies was angry. Ann Baumgartner felt “incomplete” at not being able to continue to the war’s end.156 They’d been told success would lead to militarization. Instead the women who had proved they could fly anything men could fly were being sent home simply because they weren’t men. “It was almost like a funeral,” one Wasp said, “it was a shock. What do we do now?”157

  “Their careers will be marriage,” the WASP public relations officer told Time, a weekly news magazine. The women should go back to their husbands and live their lives on the ground like “ordinary” women. It was a tidy answer. But again things weren’t that simple.

  For many Wasps there was no going back. A lot of the women were single. Some married Wasps were now widowed, having lost husbands in the Pacific or in Europe. Teresa James’s husband, who was called Dink, was a B-17 pilot shot down over France in June 1944 and listed as missing, presumed dead. James’s and other widowed pilots’ careers in marriage had ended almost before they’d begun. As Wasps, they could share their sorrow, their fear, and their loneliness together. Now they were losing more than just their jobs; they were also losing one another. Teresa, one of the best of the best pilots anywhere, said later, “I’ll never forget walking out the gate that morning.”158

  The Deadliest War in History

  World War II was the deadliest, most destructive war in history. Nations around the world were involved. There is no way to determine the exact number of deaths the war caused worldwide, but estimates range from 60 to 80 million. Of those, the Soviet Union (today’s Russia was the largest part of the Soviet Union) lost about 11 million soldiers and at least 7 million civilians out of a total population of 130 million. That’s 14 percent. The United States, with about the same size population, suffered just over 400,000 military deaths and very few civilian deaths, since the war was not fought on American soil. The American loss was approximately 0.3 percent . In addition to war deaths, over 6 million Jews and other “inferior” people died in the Nazi Holocaust.

  Most of the women got on with their lives, as they put it. Those with husbands and children were happy to be home, of course. They had missed their families terribly. Still, it wasn’t easy to readjust to life on the ground, though one woman said, “History is history. It is good to remember our WASP experiences and to appreciate them, but what is present is more important and what is future is much more important.”159 Other Wasps felt the same way. They wished they’d been able to continue flying during the last year of the war. They had wanted to be part of the victory and the celebrations that followed. Some admitted they felt a little bitter about being denied those last months of service. Even so, when the men and women of the military, including the militarized women’s auxiliaries, were honored as heroes in 1945, the Wasps joined with the rest of the country in cheering for them. Those men and women deserved to be called heroes. Former Wasps supported the laws giving those veterans benefits to help them go to college, buy houses, and get the health care they needed. But they resented not being honored or receiving benefits themselves. Hadn’t they served their country by joining the WASP? And what about the thirty-eight Wasps who had died? Weren’t they heroes too? It didn’t seem right.

  Some former Wasps, especially those who had started with Nancy Love in Delaware, blamed Jackie Cochran for the program’s demise. They believed Cochran had waited too long to push for militarization. She’d also ordered the women to stay quiet when they should have been defending themselves. She’d been pushy, stubborn, selfish, and overconfident.

  The majority of those who had trained in Texas, however, strongly defended Cochran. She’d lent many of them money to get to Avenger Field, and she’d designed and paid for their silver wings at graduation. Without her, they argued, the program wouldn’t have existed beyond the handful of pilots in Nancy Love’s ferrying squadron. Yes, Jacqueline Cochran was pushy and stubborn, but as Betty Jane Williams said, “If there was an obstacle Jackie knew how to get around it. That kind of gutsiness and aggressiveness in a woman is not always admired; in a man, it’s applauded, not so in a woman.”160

  Whatever her faults, Cochran had given the Wasps an opportunity to soar, and many wanted to continue soaring. That public relations official might have told Time that marriage would be the women’s career. And the majority of Wasps did marry. But did that mean marriage was really their career? The Time article acknowledged that military pilots weren’t so sure the women would make marriage their career. As the men saw it, “Flying is a hard habit to break.”161 They were right.

  • • •

  Between 1942 and 1945 the war effort had forced industry to stop making appliances and the like, and switch to producing military equipment. It had encouraged women to take jobs outside the home. But now with the war over, all that changed again. In the late 1940s industry was back to producing and marketing household goods, and women were expected to give up their wartime jobs for the millions of men coming back from the military. After all, the men needed those jobs and women really belonged in the home. Besides, all the new conveniences being advertised would make homemaking better than ever before.

  The Women’s Movement

  In 1848 a small group of women in New York State organized a convention to demand the rights promised in the Declaration of Independence. They wanted the right to own and control property, to be educated, to hold jobs, to vote, and more. By the late 1800s their major goal was gaining suffrage—the right to vote. They achieved this in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment. But there was more to be done.

  A second wave of the women’s movement started in the 1960s. Women formed organizations to demand equal pay for equal work, an end to job discrimination, and access to universities, law schools, and medical schools. They campaigned for quality childcare and women’s health care, including family planning. They made a great deal of progress.

  In 1965 fewer than one in twenty-five girls played high school sports. Today that number is ten in twenty-five. Women in 1965 made up less than 10 percent of medical and law students. Nearly half of students in those fields today are women. But women continue to earn less than men on average, even in the same jobs. And complex issues remain. Many young women today consider themselves part of a third wave of the women’s movement. They are confronting difficult questions concerning women in combat, abortion rights and issues, single mothers in poverty, sexual harassment, equal pay, and more.

  Advertising, books and magazines, even radio and television shows, told women they should devote themselves to being full-time mothers and homemakers. Everywhere anyone looked were pictures and film of women happily cooking, cleaning, smiling at their children, and wanting nothing outside of that role. Companies like Westinghouse and General Electric had pushed the image of the glowing homemaker on women at the World’s Fair before the war, and now they were pushing it again.

  Dishwashers and clothes dryers were great, no doubt about it. So were frozen foods and all the rest. But while Betty Gillies, BJ Erickson, and man
y other former Wasps wouldn’t have given up their families for anything, their hearts simply weren’t in the kitchen or the laundry room. They were in the sky.

  • • •

  Teresa James tried to find work as an airline pilot after the Wasps were disbanded, but no civilian airline would hire her despite her stellar record. The same was true of most of the others who looked for jobs as pilots. Quite a few, including Ann Baumgartner and Gene Shaffer, found work as flight instructors, something many of them had done in the Civilian Pilot Training Program before the war. Some, like Lois Hollingsworth, opened flight schools. Betty Gillies went back to working as a pilot and test pilot for the aviation company where her husband worked, as she’d done before she joined the WASP. She also helped organize the All-Woman Transcontinental Air Race, known as the Powder Puff Derby. She and BJ Erickson and others competed in the race for years. Dora Dougherty, one of the best multiengine pilots Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets had ever seen, became an instructor at the University of Illinois and set records as a helicopter pilot.

  Most of the former Wasps, however, remained on the ground. Some stayed close to flight by working in the air industry. Betty Jane Williams moved to the new world of television, and wrote and filmed documentaries on aviation both for commercial television and as a nonflying officer in the Air Force Reserve. She won a dozen national awards for her documentaries.162

  Others turned to new careers. One became a police officer, another a physicist.163 There were authors and artists. But whatever they did, married or single, children or no children, the women stayed quiet about what they had done during World War II.

  Shortly after the WASP program ended, the government closed the WASP records for a period of thirty years, making research almost impossible (the same was done with other war records once the war ended). Many of the women didn’t even know exactly what had happened to force the end of the WASP. Those who did know the details weren’t allowed to talk about them. The few women who tried to tell people what they had done during the war found people had never heard of the WASP and didn’t believe their story. Gradually the public forgot the program had ever existed. Aside from an occasional conversation among old friends, no one talked about the WASP—not at all. Pilot Kaddy Steele, who had done target towing in Texas, said, “The WASP program was over; we got on with our lives, and nobody knew who we were and nobody cared.”164

  A small group of the women stayed active in the Order of the Fifinella, an organization founded as the Wasps were sent home. Finally, in 1964, one former Wasp decided to hold a reunion. The women who attended were glad to see one another again and talk about old times. It was like revisiting the most exciting part of their lives. They also realized how good it was to be able to talk about the shock and anger they’d felt at the way they’d been treated all those years ago. Some had never even told their children about their time in the air.

  A few years later the women held a second reunion, and more Wasps attended. At the third reunion, in 1972, a larger group gathered. Over the years some Wasps had started working to get a bill before Congress that gave the group veterans’ benefits. They’d had no success. As the women talked now, though, many of them agreed that it was time to do more. It had been thirty years since the program’s start. They decided to demand what they’d been promised in 1942: militarization.165

  This time the Wasps came together with know-how. They were in their fifties and sixties, had raised families, and had succeeded in their careers and more. Additionally, they had some powerful people on their side. Hap Arnold had died in 1950, but his son—retired air force colonel Bruce Arnold—was happy to help. As a young lieutenant during the war, he’d seen the Wasps fly target-towing patterns above the Mojave Desert at Camp Irwin in California. They’d been willing to do what many pilots assigned there refused to do—tow targets for gunner trainees firing live ammunition from vehicles moving rapidly over rough terrain. He had tremendous respect and admiration for the Wasps and knew how much his father had respected and admired these women too. They deserved recognition.

  Women in the United States Air Force

  The United States Air Force became a separate branch of the armed forces in 1947. The following year the Women in the Air Force (WAF) program was established. Women could now serve as a regular part of the air force but were limited to ground duties. Several former WASPs joined the USAF or USAF Reserve, though they could not be pilots despite their training and experience flying military planes. In 1976 the USAF began accepting women for pilot training. The United States Navy had trained its first female pilots two years earlier, at the same time that the US Army began training women as helicopter pilots.

  Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona—who had been a military pilot during World War II—was on board as well. He’d worked with the women pilots and believed they’d earned veteran status. The women themselves began gathering documents, telling their stories, writing articles, and talking to members of Congress. It was still going to be an uphill battle. Some wondered if it was really worth fighting for militarization at this point at all.

  • • •

  In 1975, Congress passed legislation admitting women to the US military academies, including the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colorado. The next year the air force proudly announced that the USAF would begin training American women to fly military aircraft for the first time. Women training to fly military aircraft for the first time? Were they joking? Hap Arnold had said in 1944 that the service the WASP had given would never be forgotten. Apparently, he’d been wrong.

  Former Wasp Kaddy Steele described the women’s reaction. “When . . . they made the announcement . . . it really set a bomb under all of us.”166

  “We stepped up and pushed the envelope, and then had to back up a little and wait for total acceptance. Society wasn’t ready,” one Wasp explained.167 But society had changed by the late 1970s, and the women were determined to achieve “total acceptance” now.

  The Wasps had fought for themselves as women pilots in a man’s world during the war. They could do it again. They’d fight for themselves and for their sister pilots killed in action. They’d fight for those who had died since 1944. And for the women who needed the financial and medical benefits veterans received. They’d fight for every one of the 1,102 forgotten Wasps. And for the truth.

  • • •

  Opposition from some veterans’ organizations and members of Congress hadn’t weakened over time. But the women formed a WASP Military Committee, chaired by Colonel Bruce Arnold, and got to work. Americans’ views of women were changing, and Wasps were able to collect signatures on petitions all over the country. Dora Dougherty created fact sheets and handed them out to hundreds of people standing in line to see a new movie called Star Wars. Moviegoers were polite to the soft-spoken, middle-aged woman. Then, astonished at the information she gave them, they eagerly signed her petition to Congress. Dougherty went back again and again and collected thousands of signatures.168 Many Wasps wrote to their representatives and to newspapers, the very thing they had not been allowed to do in 1944. Marie Muccie, who had laughed at herself in her gigantic military zoot suit, argued,

  Opponents of the bill say we Wasps were not under military discipline. They must be kidding. We received the same training as the male Air Force Cadets. The US Army Air Corps issued orders for all military missions. We flew all the same type military aircraft from small trainers to bombers . . . .

  . . . By offering official recognition of our part to help win the war would mean a great deal to us. It would be like the US government saying, “Thank you for a job well done.” We earned it, we deserve it and we did do a good job.169

  Dora Dougherty traveled to Washington and testified before Congress in September 1977. Now a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve, a record-setting test pilot, and department chief at Bell Helicopter, she told the Senate committee, “We have waited many years to tell our story.”170 As of 1975 the WASP records that
had been closed in 1944 were opened, and Dougherty and other former Wasps gained access to documents showing they had been treated like military personnel. They described their experiences flying with male officers and having base commanders assume they, too, were military. They reminded the committee of the women who had died in action.

  Former commanding officers did the same, one bringing over a hundred pages of evidence that the women had been treated the same way military personnel were.171 Colonel Arnold spoke passionately about the women’s service. He pointed out that they had taken greater risks than many military personnel who worked in offices and supply depots and other positions and who now had veteran status and veterans’ benefits.

  Who is more deserving, a young girl, flying on written official military orders, who is shot down and killed by our own anti-aircraft artillery while carrying out those orders, or a young finance clerk with an eight to five job in a Denver office?172

  Still, committee members hesitated. Was there documentation, written proof, that the AAF had considered the WASP de facto military—not just like the military, but an actual part of the military, even though they hadn’t been militarized by Congress?

  • • •

  In 1944 pilot Helen Porter had been the only Wasp assigned to Strother Field in Kansas.173 When she got the letters from General Arnold and Jacqueline Cochran and learned that the program would soon end, she decided to resign rather than wait until December. Arnold had ordered AAF commanding officers to give the Wasps some sort of discharge papers when they left the program. It was up to the commanders to decide exactly what the papers said. Helen’s commander used a regular army discharge form and filled it in, saying, “This is to certify that Helen Porter honorably served in active Federal Service in the Army of the United States.”174