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  She had a pair of wood blocks made to fit over the foot-controlled rudder pedals.51 It was like she’d grown three inches taller. Other petite pilots used their parachutes as seat cushions or brought pillows into the cockpit so they could see over the instrument panel (similar to a car’s dashboard). However, wood blocks and pillows didn’t help when a woman was too short to swing herself onto an airplane’s wing and into the cockpit. Instead a woman like Gillies asked a ground crewman to give her a lift—an actual lift—so she could climb into the aircraft.

  As long as they could do what they’d signed up for, they’d find a way to make it work.

  Not long before they finished training, the women at New Castle learned they were going to have to march in review with actual military units. They couldn’t believe that they lacked the benefits of being part of the military but still had to march like soldiers. And they didn’t see what marching had to do with flying.

  At first they ran into problems—and one another. Literally. Though one or two of them had done a little drilling in high school, most had no experience, and they hadn’t been assigned a military drill instructor to help them. Nancy Love was supposed to lead her troop, but she had never marched, didn’t know the commands, and had a very soft voice.

  One day the women drilled on an old, unused runway, unaware that the pavement ended in a steep drop-off ahead of them. When the first row of the formation reached the edge, they stopped short, though Nancy hadn’t ordered them to. The second row bumped into the first, and the third into the second, and then the whole group was piling up like a flock of sheep at the top of a cliff. When Nancy, who’d been thinking about other things, finally noticed, she forgot any proper commands and yelled, “Stop!” not sounding at all military. The women didn’t look or sound very military either as they collapsed on the ground laughing.52

  Despite their difficulties, the WAFS pilots didn’t stop practicing. Determined not to embarrass themselves or the program, they kept at it, with Betty Gillies using her limited experience to help.

  The Army Air Forces had issued the women standard, though oversize, flight coveralls and goggles as soon as they arrived at New Castle. But now the formal, or dress, uniforms Nancy had had designed arrived. Military pilots got a $250 uniform allowance; the civilian women didn’t, so they paid for the uniforms themselves. By then their marching looked quite military, and the uniforms made them feel official, even important. The women of the WAFS were ready to take off and do what they’d dreamed of doing.

  Cornelia Fort wrote,

  I think the most concrete moment of happiness came at our first review. . . . Suddenly and for the first time we felt a part of something larger. . . . We were marching with the men, marching with all the freedom-loving people in the world.

  . . . A bomber took off, followed by four pursuit planes. We knew the bomber was headed across the ocean. . . . I could hardly see them for the tears in my eyes.53

  Avenger Field near Sweetwater, Texas, where the WASP held its training program after moving from Houston, Texas.

  CHAPTER 5

  Becoming Wasps

  Jackie Cochran returned from England to work out the details of her plan for women pilots just a few days after Nancy Love started recruiting pilots for the WAFS. Cochran’s plan was more complex and ambitious than Love’s, but that was no surprise—Jackie’s plans were almost always bigger than anyone else’s.

  Cochran wanted to train women who had limited experience as pilots, as well as use highly experienced flyers. She also wanted her recruits to do various kinds of military flying in addition to ferrying planes from factories to bases. By opening the program to hundreds or even thousands of women with only some flying experience, the Army Air Forces could free hundreds or thousands of men for combat missions. In addition to ferrying, women could fly target-practice planes, test new or repaired planes, and more. Like Love, Cochran agreed to keep her program civilian and experimental so the training could get under way quickly.

  Hap Arnold approved the plan. Jacqueline Cochran would lead the WFTD—the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, headquartered in Houston, Texas.

  Soon thousands of applications poured in. Before the war was over, more than 25,000 women had applied. Only a fraction ultimately made the cut, with 1,074 successfully completing training. Trainees had to be smart, hardworking, skilled, and physically fit—like the men. But they were also expected to behave at all times in a proper and ladylike way. Love and Cochran knew their programs would draw attention. Everything the women pilots did would be examined and scrutinized. The women could very well appear on the cover of a weekly magazine like Life, read by millions of Americans. Sure enough, as soon as the press learned of the WAFS, magazine and film crews clamored for interviews with the women at New Castle. If the public or military leaders or Congress thought even one woman was creating a scandal, the whole experiment could be shut down. These pilots had to prove that women were serious, mature, and professional, on top of being skilled.

  • • •

  Cochran’s school in Texas was just down the road from Ellington Field, where thousands of men trained as combat pilots. The women trained with civilian instructors at a civilian airfield on the edge of Houston Municipal, a civilian airport. Houston was a much smaller city in 1942 than it is today. There were no barracks available as the program began, and finding a place for the women to live was difficult. Most of the WFTD trainees rented rooms with families who had extra space, or stayed at inexpensive motels. They weren’t allowed to use the airfield’s dining room, and training started so early each morning they couldn’t buy breakfast in town. They went without.

  At first the flight school’s classrooms weren’t available for the women’s program either, because a men’s CPTP program was still under way. The women’s training program would have to make do until the men were finished and gone. Even the bathrooms at the school were off-limits to Cochran’s trainees, and the women had to walk a half mile to the nearest toilet. Worse, some of their flight instructors didn’t want to train women and said so—loudly.

  The women of the WFTD came from diverse backgrounds and included a Hollywood stuntwoman and a nurse who reached her rural patients on horseback.54 The first class in Houston included several young women who’d never been away from home before. Some had argued with their parents about volunteering and had to convince them they wouldn’t become “loose women” out on their own. Others were college students who’d started flying with the Civilian Pilot Training Program. And some were married, with careers, and husbands fighting overseas. Like the women in Delaware, they’d all paid their own way, some even selling their belongings to do it. Others were well off and could afford to fly just for fun. But no one was quite like trainee Marion Florsheim.

  Red-haired Marion, a very wealthy woman who chose to stay in the nicest hotel she could find, had learned to fly so she could chauffeur her prizewinning Afghan hounds to kennel club competitions around the country. She arrived in Houston with trunks of designer clothing and two enormous red-haired dogs that wore bows on their heads to match her traveling outfit.55 Though Florsheim stood out against ranchers, teachers, and secretaries, she knew how to fly and wanted to serve her country, just like the other women. That’s all that mattered.

  The Tuskegee Airmen

  African American men were not allowed to serve as military pilots until 1941. In that year a flight training center was established at a school for blacks in Alabama—Tuskegee Institute. The African American men who trained there as fighter pilots, crewmen, maintenance workers, and other support staff became known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Their achievements during World War II proved that black air and ground crews were the equals of white crews. Their success helped pave the way for a fully integrated military in 1948.

  The trainees may have been a diverse group when it came to wealth, education, hometowns, and the kinds of lives they led. But with the exception of two Chinese American women and one Native American, all
were white.

  The US military was segregated in 1942 and remained segregated throughout the war. Black and white men served in different units and often in different jobs, with blacks usually limited to low-level support work. The Army Air Forces had started accepting African Americans for flight training only a few months before the women’s program started, and they were in black squadrons and groups.

  Some men in the top ranks of the military and government simply believed that African Americans had inferior abilities. Others knew blacks were perfectly capable of doing the same jobs whites did, but they worried about the turmoil that integration of the military would create. A majority of Americans, military and civilian, had grown up with segregation and lived largely segregated lives. Most whites resisted any change to the way things were. Many generals thought that integrating the military would cause resentment, hostility, and distrust among soldiers and sailors. Any lack of cohesion, or unity, could mean disaster on the battlefield and was a risk the generals and the president would not take.

  Jackie Cochran had the same concern as those generals. She turned down any black women who applied to the program regardless of their qualifications. She said of one impressive young woman, “I had no prejudice whatever with respect to the color or race of my candidates but . . . the complication she had brought up . . . might . . . be the straw that broke the camel’s back” of the program’s success.

  Rocking the Boat

  Cohesion—the ability of a group to stick together—is a major concern for the military. Soldiers, sailors, flight crews, and others must be able to rely on one another in difficult circumstances. They must trust one another with their lives. And they must share a deep commitment to achieving the group’s goals. Anything that threatens that cohesion is a serious problem. In the 1940s the issue was racial integration of the military. In more recent years the questions of LGBTQ in the military and women in combat have been hotly debated. In 1948 the military was integrated. In 2011 bans on gays serving in the military were lifted. In 2015 women were accepted into all military jobs, including combat positions. In each case people inside and outside the military predicted that the change would destroy cohesion and readiness. Discrimination, harassment, and resentment did present problems in some areas after 1948, 2011, and 2015—and in some areas still do. But studies have found that overall cohesion and readiness in the armed forces has remained strong, and the majority of military men and women support the changes that have been made.

  Accepting black women pilots certainly would have made the WFTD program different from the military.56 And Jackie Cochran and Nancy Love were already pushing their luck when it came to gender. Was Cochran correct in thinking integration would have threatened the success of the WFTD? There’s no way to know for certain. What is certain is that her program—just like the Army Air Forces—failed to recruit some very highly qualified pilots, men and women.

  • • •

  Most of Cochran’s trainees in Houston had less flying experience and training than the women in Delaware. So while their program was similar, their classroom courses were longer and more detailed. They memorized army flying procedures, practiced Morse code for radio communication, and learned enough mechanics to take an engine apart and put it back together. They studied navigation techniques to find their way across the country alone and without radar, and meteorology so they could assess the weather as they flew. The men down the road at Ellington Field covered all the same material in their classes. But one WFTD instructor insisted on giving the women an arithmetic test before they got started, something the men didn’t take. That instructor wasn’t sure the women could “do any of this stuff.”57 They could.

  They could also fly the worn-out, rickety, bucket-of-bolts planes they’d been assigned. The twenty-two planes were all different types of trainers, and the women’s instructors admitted they’d never flown some of the models themselves. The men training nearby had better planes to work with, and even CPTP classes on college campuses boasted better fleets.58

  Cochran considered the planes unacceptable, and her determination and stubbornness paid off. She soon found better trainers for the program—reliable primary trainers, or PT-19s. With one roofless cockpit in front and one in back, the trainees flew with their instructors behind them talking through a tube attached to their helmets. Unfortunately, some instructors yelled angrily at every move instead of talking—leaving their students ready to scream in frustration. The instructors had controls so they could override a student’s mistakes when talking through the tube wasn’t enough. They used the controls less and less as the student grew more proficient and finally soloed.

  African American Women in Aviation

  Women who wanted to become pilots in the 1920s and 1930s faced barriers men did not. Black women faced double barriers; even at schools that accepted women, they were barred from flying lessons because they were black. Bessie Coleman was the first African American and Native American woman to earn a pilot’s license. When she couldn’t train to be a pilot in the United States, she saved her money, learned to speak French, and went to flight school in France. She got her license in 1921 and returned to the United States, where she became famous as a stunt pilot. Coleman dreamed of opening a flight school for blacks but died in a plane crash at the age of thirty-four before she could fulfill her dream. Other black women followed in Coleman’s footsteps. In 1938, Willa Brown became the first black woman to earn a pilot’s license in the United States.

  Then there was physical training, or PT. Jumping jacks and running to build stamina. Neck exercises to avoid whiplash. Push-ups and pull-ups for upper body strength. The trainees were perpetually aching, sore, and sweaty, but in the end PT paid off.

  After WFTD graduation Betty Jane Williams worked testing newly repaired planes. It was a dangerous assignment, since a missed or poor repair could mean disaster. She took a ship up one day and put it into a spin—a standard part of testing. This plane, though, wouldn’t come out of its spin. Betty Jane spiraled downward, her concern turning to real fear as she tried everything she could think of with no luck. Finally she decided she had to bail out and let the plane crash, as terrifying as that was with almost no parachute training. Then she realized she couldn’t bail. The force of the spin—centrifugal force—was so strong she couldn’t move her hand far enough to reach the hatch.

  “As they say, my life passed in front of my eyes,” she recalled. Split seconds felt like hours before an instructor’s words popped into her head: If the plane won’t reset, put both hands on the stick and “pretend that you’re whipping a big bowl of mashed potatoes and go clear around. Sweep the cockpit.” Betty Jane grabbed the stick and forced it in a circle against the terrific force, using every ounce of strength she had. Those pull-ups may have been the thing to save her life as the plane straightened out just five hundred feet above the ground.59

  • • •

  PT included marching, too, and the women in Houston hated it as much as the women in Delaware did. At least building upper body strength had an obvious purpose. But marching? They were saved by a young lieutenant assigned to a nearby supply depot who saw the women going to and from the terminal in an unorganized mass. At first he didn’t know who they were or why they were there. They certainly didn’t look military.

  The women had been wearing their civilian clothes for training, since the army hadn’t issued them flying gear yet. They’d discovered that ordinary women’s clothing wore out quickly in flight training and they needed to replace things. However, women’s slacks were rare in 1943 and none were sold in Houston, so the women bought men’s pants and tried to make them fit. They’d become a ragtag-looking bunch.

  The lieutenant was curious, and once he found out about the WFTD program, he volunteered to help. Lieutenant Alfred Fleishman understood the point of marching. Competent drill would boost everyone’s morale and make them feel more military.60 He explained that to the trainees and gave them clear instructions and s
upport, spending hours teaching them to march and leading them in calisthenics. Soon their attitude toward drill improved and they gained confidence.

  Eventually the army sent flying gear for the trainees, and they could put away their street clothes. As civilians, however, the women would not be issued uniforms. They were happy to have the sturdy coveralls for flying, but they admitted the new gear didn’t boost their pride or sense of dignity. The coveralls were leftovers from men’s training classes—large men, at that.

  Marie Muccie of New Jersey was just five two, shorter than the required five feet four inches, but she had so impressed Jackie Cochran in her interview that an exception was made.61 Marie’s khaki coveralls would have fit a man a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than she was. She had to roll the sleeves and legs over and over, making them bulky and heavy. Then she found a belt to cinch at her waist, leaving gallons of fabric billowing over the top. Without the belt, the pants’ crotch was at her knees and she had to walk like a penguin. Nothing could fix the armholes, which drooped practically to her hips.

  She and the other petite women had to laugh at what they called their “zoot suits”—named for the baggy-legged, high-waisted, big-jacketed men’s suits popular with jazz musicians at the time. They joked that the suits came in “all sizes—large, Large, and LARGE.”62 At least all the extra material might help keep them warm in an open cockpit. But they didn’t have access to washing machines, so they’d been doing their laundry in their bathroom sinks, and the coveralls were too big to fit in a sink. The women ended up wearing the zoot suits into the shower and soaping and rinsing them there.