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  Taking off in a huge C-60 while towing two gliders was a real challenge. The C-60 was twice the size of most fighter or trainer planes and big enough to carry three tons of cargo.97 The plane’s size made it slow lifting off the ground even without gliders attached. The gliders made it slower. Once up, the C-60 tow pilots had to keep their planes low, the way pilots would overseas to stay under the enemy’s radar. They were told to stay below “the height of a windmill.”98 That left little room to maneuver or make adjustments. And the sudden loss of weight when the gliders were released could force the C-60 up and out of control if a pilot wasn’t prepared. It was difficult, dangerous work, but the Wasps found it a thrill to watch the gliders move silently and smoothly away across the sky.

  • • •

  In addition to target and glider towing, the Wasps worked as flight instructors, teaching ground courses and flying classes for military pilot trainees—classes many Wasps had taught with the CPTP before the war. They also provided air taxi service for military bigwigs and played the part of the enemy for military pilots learning to maneuver and fire in a dogfight. Some were assigned to “attack” men in training, spraying them with tear gas or flying low and fast over them as if they were firing on them. A handful of the most skilled Wasps even flew in a top secret experiment.

  Most people today would probably guess that drones (motorized planes guided remotely instead of by a pilot in the cockpit) are a fairly new invention. But drones first appeared during World War I, and when World War II began just over twenty years later, drones were still in the experimental stage and far less sophisticated than the drones of the early twenty-first century. Engineers hoped to use drones to deliver bombs without risking crews’ lives. They thought drones might also be a better way to train antiaircraft gunners than target towing. They kept their plans secret, and so did the men and women involved in the testing.

  Modern military drones can be directed by a pilot thousands of miles from the drone itself, but the drones of World War II had to be controlled by a pilot in close radio range. That pilot directed the drone with radio signals, a lot like directing a remote-control car or model airplane. Beeping sounds from the unmanned drone plane told the pilot what to do. The so-called beep pilot sat in a plane called the mother ship, which followed the drone. Wasps often piloted those mother ships, with the military beep pilots sitting next to them directing the drone.

  Drones were expensive to make, and the military couldn’t afford to lose one because an inexperienced beep pilot made a mistake. So during training a third pilot sat inside the drone at a set of controls. That safety pilot was supposed to touch the controls only if the drone was about to crash. Then he or she could take over and save the drone, similar to the way a flight instructor could override a trainee’s error.

  The little PQ-8 drones looked like Walt Disney planes—short, chubby, and red, with a turned-up nose. They were cute, but they weren’t designed to hold a human pilot and were very uncomfortable. Safety pilots had to be agile enough to squash themselves into the drones. They had to be very skilled, so they could recognize what every pitch or turn or bump of the little red plane meant. And they had to have enough self-discipline to keep their hands off the controls unless there was a true emergency. Just four pilots in the entire drone program were trained for the difficult work of the safety pilot. Two were Wasps, including Lois Hollingsworth, whose degree in engineering and aeronautics gave her a clear advantage over most flyers.

  Hollingsworth admitted that trying to concentrate in the cramped space wasn’t easy, and every sudden move of the drone made a safety pilot want to grab the controls. She forced herself not to. As she explained, “We were supposed to delay taking over until the very last minute, otherwise the beep pilots would never know how good they were.”99

  • • •

  As stressful as Lois’s job could be, there was another flying assignment that many veteran pilots—civilian or military—dreaded or even refused. Every time a plane went in for repairs, it had to be tested before going back into service. The AAF’s mechanics knew how serious the smallest flaw could be at 400 miles per hour, but there weren’t nearly enough mechanics or spare parts to take care of all the planes that needed work. Mechanics sometimes overlooked problems or postponed repairs. The test pilots, some of them civilian pilots and some military pilots who were back in the United States after months of combat missions overseas, were there to find out if a plane really needed repair and if a supposedly repaired plane had actually been fixed.

  WASP Gene Shaffer had grown up close to Oakland, California, where she loved watching small planes near her home. She was in high school there when Amelia Earhart landed at a nearby airfield after flying solo from Hawaii to the West Coast in 1935. Shaffer worked on her high school newspaper and managed to talk her way into the hangar where Earhart was giving a press conference. She could hardly believe she was standing right next to one of the most famous women in the world and was surrounded by reporters from nationally known newspapers. She asked Earhart what advice she had for high school students. “Aviation is the career of the future,” the tall, soft-spoken woman told her.100 Shaffer believed it. Six years later she had earned a pilot’s license and was looking for ways to use it in the war effort.

  Now a WASP at Gardner Field in California, Shaffer found herself testing planes she knew no pilot in his or her right mind would take up, since pilots could and did die because of mechanical failures. In fact, that may have been what killed Amelia Earhart. Even so, someone had to find out if seemingly minor damage was a reason to ground a plane or not. The Army Air Forces didn’t want to risk military pilots who could be used overseas, so Wasps were welcomed. “We were expendable,” Shaffer said. She knew the risks but became an experienced test pilot. On one occasion she was testing a training plane and needed to find out if the wing was secure: “I . . . remember the rivets popping off.”101 She landed safely and went on with her work.

  Shaffer knew what she did was dangerous, and she knew some men who worked as civilian pilots for the military tried to avoid maintenance test flights. But the stress of the job hit home when she flew with an experienced combat pilot. Shaffer recalled,

  There was this fellow who came back from England with fifty [combat] missions to his name and an “I’m a pilot . . . I’ve been to war” attitude. Well, they put him with me. . . . We went up there and did a spin [a standard part of testing]. We got into the spin and it wouldn’t come out. . . . He said, “You take it.” So I did all the normal things you do; I tried everything, but it wouldn’t come out. . . . I put the power in and wiggled the stick . . . and it finally caught . . . and I thought, Whooh!102

  Shaffer never saw that combat pilot again. He was ghostly pale when they landed, and he went straight to the maintenance officer to ask for a new assignment.103 Shaffer kept testing planes.

  • • •

  The maintenance problem was particularly severe at Camp Davis in North Carolina. Trainees at Camp Davis—over forty thousand men at any one time—were there to learn how to use antiaircraft guns of all kinds. The hundreds of pilots assigned to Camp Davis were there to be the “enemy” the trainees fired on. About fifty of those pilots were Wasps.

  Camp Davis wasn’t a popular assignment location to begin with. The base was surrounded by swampland, and the weather was often hot and always humid. Insects swarmed around everyone’s hair and buzzed at their ears. Barely visible flying pests flew into mouths and up noses. And the mosquitoes were famous for attacking like a squadron of fighters. With fewer than a hundred women and nearly fifty thousand men on the base, unwanted attention from human pests was also a constant hazard.

  Wasps at Camp Davis did target towing and searchlight flying, as they did at other bases. At Davis, however, they ran into two very serious problems. One officer described both issues at once when he said, “These planes are dispensable [easy to replace] and you’re dispensable.”104

  Many of the planes used to tow target s
leeves were redlined, meaning they had lots of broken pieces and shouldn’t be flown. But Camp Davis was so desperate for aircraft that if a plane could get off the ground it was used regularly, redlined or not. The women flew those unreliable planes day after day as if they were in fine condition. Instruments sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, so a pilot couldn’t rely on the readings. Tires were worn thin, since most new tires went to Europe for planes in combat. Those thin, worn tires frequently blew out as a plane landed. As many as five planes a day had blowouts at Camp Davis. Engines quit in midflight—two in one day in late August 1943. Radios didn’t work either. The list went on and on. Pilots were told to fill out a Form One sheet to describe any mechanical problems they experienced in flight. But the mechanics admitted there was no point in filling out those forms because there weren’t any parts to fix anything.105

  Maintenance at Camp Davis couldn’t have been much worse. And the attitude of the commander and many enlisted men there didn’t help. Before the women even arrived some mechanics and others mumbled threats of a strike if they had to “serve any powder puff pilots.”106 Others asked to be transferred rather than work with women. And the camp commander had restricted the Wasps to flying tiny Piper Cubs—single-engine, two-seat planes that weighed less than a thousand pounds—though the women had checked out on much bigger planes.

  Jacqueline Cochran was furious. Some commanders of ferrying groups had limited the women at their bases to flying small planes six months earlier. They had soon gotten orders from General Tunner (he had been promoted in June 1943) to use the same standards for the women as they did for men. Those orders didn’t apply to the commander at Camp Davis, since he wasn’t leading a ferrying group. But it made no sense to do things differently there.

  When Camp Davis’s medical officer insisted on monthly physical exams for the women, Jackie Cochran flew down and demanded an explanation.107 Men didn’t have monthly exams and neither did women at other bases, she pointed out. Some men, including some male doctors, believed women’s menstrual cycles had a negative effect on their physical and emotional state and that they couldn’t manage difficult tasks during menstruation. Such thinking may have been the reason for the medical officer’s decision, though the head of medicine for the AAF had ordered his officers to leave the issue of menstruation up to the women individually. By the time Jackie left Camp Davis, the monthly physicals had been canceled.

  • • •

  Marion Hanrahan had fallen in love with flying as a child. She even cut classes in high school to hang around an airfield and beg for rides and flight time. She later admitted having to go to different airports on different days to stay ahead of the truant officer—the official responsible for making sure students were attending school—who was trying to chase her down. At twenty-one she became a WASP and was assigned to Camp Davis.

  All her time at airfields turned out to be a very good thing for Marion. In addition to the mechanics course she had taken at Avenger Field, she knew quite a bit from working in hangars in exchange for lessons. After she had two tires blow and one engine fail in a very short time, Marion realized she was piloting “flying jalopies” and took matters into her own hands. She got to know the mechanics, saw how overworked they were, and helped them in her spare time. Then, when she was assigned a flight, she talked to them about the particular plane so she’d know what to expect. Other Wasps followed her example.108

  No matter what the pilots did to protect themselves, though, Camp Davis was a dangerous place for pilots. In the first weeks there “I think we lost three men and four women,” Marion recalled later.109 She never got over Mabel Rawlinson’s death.

  Mabel had grown up the middle of seven children on a small farm in the red clay of rural Virginia. Lean and freckled, she looked like a girl who spent a lot of time outdoors and knew how to put in a day of hard work. Mabel was a good student, and when she finished high school, she moved to Michigan, where she lived with an aunt and worked her way through college. After graduation she worked at the Kalamazoo Public Library, heard about the CPTP program, and learned to fly. She joined the WASP as soon as she found out about the program.

  One evening at Camp Davis, Mabel and several other pilots, including Marion Hanrahan, were assigned to do a check flight to test their night-flying skills. When Marion commented that she hadn’t had dinner yet, Mabel offered to switch times with her so she could eat. Mabel and an instructor climbed into an A-24, a small two-seat bomber, with Mabel at the controls and the instructor behind her in the gunner’s seat.

  Nearly all the A-24s at Camp Davis had problems, and this one was no different. But the items listed on the Form One sheet didn’t involve the engine, so up they went. Everything looked routine until Mabel prepared to land. Witnesses reported seeing the plane bump the treetops as it approached the runway. Someone else thought he saw flames. The instructor later reported,

  I felt the throttle moving back and forth and realized the engine was dead. . . . I took over and told the student to jump. I then shouted at the student to jump. . . . Somehow I knew she hadn’t.110

  The plane crashed, splitting in two between the cockpits, and the dreaded siren started screaming the news of an accident. Marion Hanrahan said,

  We were in the dining room when we heard the siren that indicated a crash. When we ran out on the field we saw the front of her plane engulfed in fire, and could hear Mabel screaming. It was a nightmare.111

  Rescue workers and others raced toward the flames and smoke. The swampy undergrowth and vine-covered trees slowed them down. When the terrible screams stopped, they knew it was too late. Mabel Rawlinson was dead.

  Marion knew it would have been her in that A-24 if Mabel hadn’t offered to switch places. Why hadn’t she bailed out, or climbed out on the ground? A quick investigation showed that one of the items listed on the Form One sheet was a broken latch on the front hatch. It wouldn’t open from the inside and had not been fixed. Mabel hadn’t gotten out of the plane before the flames reached her because she couldn’t.

  Shaken by the horror of what they had witnessed, Rawlinson’s fellow Wasps collected money to send her body home for burial. They knew her family couldn’t afford to do it, and regulations didn’t allow for burial money, since Wasps were still civilians. Altogether, thirty-eight women died flying for the AAF. All thirty-eight times a fellow Wasp went with her sister pilot’s body to tell the family what had happened. BJ Erickson said, “I had to go six times and tell their mothers that their daughters weren’t coming home, and I was only twenty-two.” She was especially bothered by having to tell those mothers that their daughters would have no military honors, not even a flag.112 Mabel’s friends and family ignored part of the rule. They bought a flag for her casket. Mabel had died for her country just as any military pilot might have, and they weren’t going to deny her a flag.113

  For days the Wasps at Camp Davis couldn’t focus on anything but what had happened to their smiling friend. A friend who’d loved books and singing and flying. They thought about why she had died. Maintenance. If the hatch had worked properly, Mabel might have survived as her instructor did.

  Just a month later Betty Taylor Wood—married only six weeks earlier—was killed at Camp Davis in another A-24. She was chauffeuring an army chaplain that day, and when she started her landing, something didn’t feel right. She pulled up and accelerated in order to go around and make a second approach, as she’d been trained. That wasn’t an unusual thing to do. It was like a driver backing up and readjusting to pull into a parking space. However, before Wood’s plane climbed into the air again, it suddenly rolled and crashed onto its back, crushing Betty and her passenger.

  Fellow pilot Kay Menges had recently reported a sticky throttle on that same plane. She felt sick. Nothing ever got fixed, and a sticky throttle could cause that kind of accident. Yet there were other possibilities too. No official report was ever made, but the women heard unofficially that Jackie Cochran, who had come to Camp Davis after Ra
wlinson’s death and again when Wood died, found sugar in the gas tank of Betty’s plane.114 Sugar was a surefire way to stall an engine, and it meant sabotage. If there really was sugar in the gas tank, someone had put it there on purpose.

  The Wasps at Camp Davis had endured constant harassment. Now, with two deaths in a month and not a trustworthy plane on base, morale fell to rock bottom. Marion Hanrahan and another pilot quit the program. For those who stayed, the laughter and singing the women usually shared were gone. Some of the pilots said they’d lost the nerve to fly. Others were losing weight because they were too jumpy to eat. Jackie Cochran talked with the women and concluded that there were more incidents of sexual discrimination, maintenance problems, and accidents among Wasps at Camp Davis than at any other base in the country.

  Women at other bases sometimes experienced discrimination and resentment among the men they worked with. At bases where commanders welcomed and respected them, they were generally treated as equals. At Long Beach Army Air Field in California, for example, the women were seen as pilots with the skills to get desperately needed planes to their destinations. Nancy Love checked out on more than fifteen different kinds of airplanes in just a month at Long Beach—no one restricted her to small trainer planes because she was a woman. Eventually eighty women were assigned to ferrying duties at Long Beach and had nothing negative to say about the military pilots and commanders there. A report from Buckingham Army Air Field in Florida said that the ground and air crewmen had “grown to respect the blue WASP uniform and . . . admire the women who wore it.”115 The same was true at other bases. Why couldn’t something be done about the situation at Camp Davis?