Fly Girls Page 9
Cochran worried that if she made an official report to the AAF about the harassment at Camp Davis, it could put the whole WASP program in danger. If top military brass thought discrimination or, worse, sabotage was widespread, they might cancel the experiment. If they thought the women themselves were somehow inviting the resentment at Camp Davis, it would “prove” that women couldn’t do the job. The program wouldn’t end because the women were incompetent. It would end because too many men couldn’t accept women as equals.
Cochran made no official report and kept any evidence she had secret. She wouldn’t risk the whole program because of problems at one base. The women there would have to persevere.
As most of the women pressed on with their work, several of the men who had asked for transfers earlier had a change of heart. They might not have wanted to work with women pilots, but that didn’t mean they wanted them dying. The men had actually gained respect for the skill they saw among the Wasps. As one enlisted man said, “We better stick around here and see these girls through.” Moreover, the camp commander couldn’t deny that officers overseeing artillery training had started asking for Wasps because they found them more reliable than the male pilots doing the same jobs.116
Like Betty Gillies and so many others, the Wasps of Camp Davis stuck out their chins and showed them they could take it. They were shaken, but they weren’t defeated, and most continued to accept every job that came their way. Dora Dougherty explained their persistence: “The country was at war, submarines were seen at our coasts. We were all motivated to do whatever we could to further the effort for peace, for our country to win the war.”117
A Wasp points to the sky on the wing of B-17 Miss Patricia J in Bryan, Texas.
CHAPTER 8
Greater Heights
Overall, 1943 brought more good news for the Allies than bad, and Americans grew optimistic about winning the war. But 1943 was a devastating year for B-17s and their crews. Ten percent of the planes that took off on bombing missions were lost, never to be seen again. Most of the ten crewmen aboard each of those planes were either killed or captured. Another 30 percent of the bombers were seriously damaged before returning to the Allies’ bases. And in one horrific mission sixty B-17 Flying Fortresses were lost, along with the six hundred men in them.118
Plants in the United States built B-17s as fast as they could to meet the Army Air Forces’ desperate need for the Flying Fortress bombers. Military commanders had to find more and more pilots, too. But men just coming out of flight training were a long way from being able to handle a Fortress.
In the meantime, the military still resisted having Wasps pilot bombers and other big planes, even as they continued to ferry smaller planes, tow targets and gliders, and teach men to fly. They couldn’t be strong enough for the big planes, the generals said. Or big enough. Cochran kept pushing. And so did a few AAF instructors and commanders who had seen how skilled the Wasps were.
General William Tunner—who ran the Ferrying Division of the Army Air Forces and supported the idea of women pilots from the very beginning—thought Nancy Love and Betty Gillies would be the perfect pilots to demonstrate that women could, in fact, fly heavy bombers over long distances. If they succeeded, some of the men now ferrying the bombers in the United States could be moved to combat flights and the new B-17s could be put into action more quickly. Were Love and Gillies willing to train on the bomber? Absolutely.
The B-17 was a well-engineered plane known for flying smoothly and easily in a clear sky, but bad weather could make it clumsy in the air. And weighing thirty-five thousand pounds empty, and over sixty-five thousand with full fuel tanks and a load of bombs, it lumbered on the runway. Pilots had to fight the controls to keep the plane level in high winds. Strong men climbed out of the bomber’s cockpit soaked with sweat and shaking with fatigue after those flights. Could even the most skilled women pilots handle the B-17?
For hours at a time Gillies and Love practiced controlling the powerful plane in the air, sometimes with one or two of its four engines intentionally shut down. They often landed with their arms and legs vibrating and their clothes dark with perspiration. But even the men who were certain no woman could fly a B-17 were impressed. Without wood blocks for the pedals and cushions under and behind her, five-feet-two-inch Betty Gillies couldn’t operate the rudders or see over the control panel. She didn’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds, yet she managed to keep the bomber straight and level using the engines on only one wing. The men had to admit that military command had been wrong about Wasps not being big enough or strong enough. Nancy Love and Betty Gillies had found ways to work around their size and strength and come out as good as the men flying missions in Europe or the Pacific.119
General Tunner kept Gillies’s and Love’s training on the B-17 a secret. They were the first women to train on a four-engine plane, and he didn’t want the distraction of publicity. He had a plan for them once they were qualified on the bomber. Over a hundred B-17s were scheduled for transport to England as soon as they came off the assembly line. Though good pilots, the young men in the Ferrying Division who were scheduled to fly the bombers across the Atlantic were far less experienced than Love and Gillies. Many of them lacked confidence when it came to making a transatlantic flight in a plane they had just learned to fly. If Gillies and Love ferried a B-17 to England, Tunner thought, the young men would follow.
Tunner had good reason to think the women pilots could influence the men. Just weeks earlier one of Nancy Love’s ferrying pilots had done just that at a base in New York. The men there were assigned to the P-39 Airacobra fighter, which they had taken to calling the “flying coffin” since several pilots were killed in P-39 crashes, usually on takeoff or landing. Some refused to fly the plane.
Then a woman assigned to the base asked for permission to take the fighter up. She studied the plane’s manual carefully and practiced several takeoffs and landings, following the instructions’ guidelines. She realized that the plane responded better when she landed it at a higher speed than she would with other types of planes. When she reported what she’d learned, it was discovered that many of the men piloting the fighter had not closely read the P-39 manual for takeoff and landing. Their failure to follow the instructions had caused many of the crashes. Once the pilots studied the manual and adjusted their takeoffs and landings, the accident rate for the plane dropped dramatically, saving both lives and needed aircraft.120
Tunner was sure that if a woman could convince the men to fly the P-39, Gillies and Love could do the same for the B-17.
• • •
Betty Gillies and Nancy Love were excited at the idea of taking a bomber to England. They knew they would enjoy the challenge and liked the idea of being the first women to fly such a plane. They may not have thought about it at the time, but that flight could help open doors for women in military aviation in a way that flying within the United States could not.
The flight was scheduled for early September. The route would take the B-17 from Delaware to Maine, and then to Labrador, Canada, making the trip across the Atlantic as short as possible. Gillies and Love flew the plane as far as Labrador, with stops along the way, but as they and their male crew prepared to take off from Goose Bay, Labrador, they got a message canceling the flight. Hap Arnold, though he fully supported the WASP program in the United States, refused to allow the women to fly into a war zone.
Arnold may have feared the bad publicity if they were shot down. Or he may have worried that having women fly bombers across the ocean would hurt male pilots’ morale. Whatever his reasoning, Gillies and Love were devastated. It seemed no amount of skill, no amount of training, and no amount of experience could get them past the barrier of being women—what’s called the glass ceiling today. But their disappointment didn’t slow them or their sister pilots down.
• • •
A month later at Lockbourne Army Air Base in Ohio, twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Logue Mitchell learned that a group
of Wasps was headed there for training on the B-17 so they could ferry the planes from factories to US bases. He would be the instructor for six of the seventeen women. Though Mitchell was young, he’d earned a reputation as an excellent flight instructor. He understood that different people learn in different ways, and he was fine with the idea of teaching Wasps to fly the four-engine Flying Fortress. Frances Green—who, before joining the WASP, had never been away from the small Texas town where she was born—said of the lieutenant, “He was firm, but he was compassionate. He was concerned. He did everything in the world he could to bring out the best in you.”121 The women couldn’t have had a better teacher.
Mitchell had told his wife that it didn’t take superhero strength to fly a B-17 bomber.122 It took skill. He recognized that most women, even with exercise, did not have the muscle power of fit men, so he taught the Wasps how to put their hands palms up under the throttle instead of on top of it. The underhand hold reduced the strain on their shoulders. Slipping one foot under a rudder pedal when the leg on the other pedal starting shaking with fatigue released some pressure and gave leg muscles a few seconds to recover. However, tricks like that only went so far. The women needed to be as strong as they could be.
When they weren’t in the air, Mitchell had them doing strengthening exercises. They tore folded newspapers and squeezed tennis balls to build muscles in their hands and wrists. And though lying on the floor under a cot and pushing it off the ground might have looked a little strange, it worked as well as any equipment in a gym to build shoulder and upper arm muscles.
Just as Betty and Nancy had flown the B-17 with one or two engines shut down as a regular part of their training, the new trainees did too. If both left engines or both right engines failed during an actual mission, a pilot had to be able to continue flying. Mitchell’s students used what he’d taught them, but by the time they landed, they were ready to collapse from exhaustion anyway. The lieutenant assured them he’d seen plenty of big men do the same thing.123
Mitchell and the Wasps went up at night, and through storms, and in the cold. Over the roar of the engines they heard chunks of ice break off the propellers and slam into the sides of the uninsulated metal plane. They went above the clouds, higher than any of the women had flown before, and shivered in the twenty-degrees-below-zero air, and in altitudes so high there wasn’t enough oxygen to breathe without a mask.
Unlike small one- or two-seat planes, the B-17 had a bathroom on board—sort of. A pilot or copilot could maneuver out of his or her harness, crawl through the two-foot opening behind the seats, step along the eight-inch catwalk above the bomb bay, walk past the radio desk, inch around the ball gunner’s hatch, move between the machine gun platforms, and find in the far back of the plane a bottle and a funnel.
Frances Green realized on one night flight that she really needed to go. Her oxygen mask was connected to the big tank they all shared in the front, the tube only a few feet long. So Lieutenant Mitchell attached her breathing tube to a small bottle of oxygen and told her she had three minutes. No more. Frances found her way in the dark to the back of the plane and began working her way out of the layers of clothing she needed in the frigid altitude. Men who had to use the funnel could unzip those layers without removing them—a real time-saver. But it wasn’t as easy for a woman. Frances worked as quickly as her cold fingers allowed. She nearly froze as she relieved herself and then stood up to start getting all those layers back on. The last garment was a pair of leather pants that zipped up the leg, but the zipper got stuck in her long johns. She tried to get it up. She tried to get it down. No luck.
The next thing Frances knew, she was waking up on the metal floor with someone holding an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. “You were almost a goner,” the young crewman staring at her said. Frances usually joked about everything. Not this time. If Lieutenant Mitchell hadn’t set a stopwatch as she headed for the back of the plane, she would have died because of a faulty zipper and lack of oxygen.124
When the training course ended, thirteen of the seventeen women in Ohio checked out on the B-17. All of Lieutenant Mitchell’s six women students passed their tests. More than that, they looked forward to piloting the bomber as much as possible. They felt confident and ready to take charge of the Flying Fortress. The men who had seen them pilot the plane in training knew they’d do well.
• • •
The military used dozens of different types of bombers during World War II, each designed for a particular purpose. The B-17 and several bombers developed later in the war were considered heavy bombers based on the size of the bomb load they could carry and the distance they could fly. All were four-engine planes. Other bombers were classified as medium or light and were designed with two engines.
One widely used medium bomber was the B-26. Early in its service the accident rate for pilots training on the B-26 was high, and many pilots were hesitant to fly the plane. Wasps flew the B-26 at bases in Idaho and Alabama and did well. Most liked the aircraft despite its reputation. Like General Tunner in Delaware and the commander in Michigan, a commander in Alabama decided the Wasps could change the attitude of the men who refused to take the B-26 up.
Four Wasps who had trained on the B-26 were asked to fly two of the bombers over a base in Alabama and put on a bit of an air show for the hundreds of men in training who were on the ground. The trainees couldn’t see who was flying the bombers in an impressive display of what the plane could do. When both planes landed smoothly and four women pilots climbed out of the cockpits, most of the men decided that maybe the B-26 wasn’t so dangerous after all and they could learn to fly it.
Even after the success of the WASP demonstration, though, some women flying the B-26 ran into instructors and male pilots who welcomed them as pilots of military aircraft but still doubted women could fly bombers. A near disaster in Boise, Idaho, changed that opinion at one base.
Two Wasps who had been assigned to ferrying the B-26 went up as pilot and copilot in the bomber and had a good flight. But as they approached their landing, one of the two engines quit, leaving the plane unbalanced and extremely difficult to control. Sirens sounded as emergency equipment raced toward the runway, and everyone at the field turned to watch, afraid they were about to witness a tragedy. The women managed to turn the plane smoothly and started to bring it down toward the runway. However, the runway was narrow to begin with, and parked planes lined both sides of the pavement. If the bomber swerved or skidded at all, it could result in disaster.
Path to Victory in the Pacific, 1944
The plane came lower and lower and finally touched down, straight as an arrow, taxiing to a stop as if both engines were humming. A fellow Wasp said later, “The cheer that went up after they landed! It was something to see and we were so proud of them!”125
• • •
As powerful as the B-26 and bigger B-17 bombers were, Hap Arnold and other AAF senior officers were convinced that the army needed a bigger class of bomber to defeat Japan without losing hundreds of thousands more American lives. Although the United States had bases in China, an ally in the war, the island nation of Japan was a very long flight for the planes of the 1940s. The weight of a loaded bomber required a tremendous amount of fuel, and a plane had to do more than get to its target—it had to get back home, too. Arnold was betting on a new aircraft as the way to meet the challenge—the B-29 Superfortress.
The B-29 was classified as a very heavy or long-range heavy bomber. It weighed twice as much as a B-17, and its wingspan was wider by almost forty feet—the length of a school bus. Most importantly, it could fly thirty-five hundred miles without refueling. By April 1944 there were enough B-29s and trained crews to launch an attack on Japan. If the navy and marines could capture the island of Saipan in the Pacific and build an airstrip there, the new bombers could fly over fifteen hundred miles to the Japanese homeland and make an Allied victory possible. News of the island’s capture after a hard-fought battle came in July. By November
an airstrip would be waiting for the B-29s and their crews.
The B-29 was a remarkable plane. Boeing had begun work on its design as the military began building its resources before the war. Even so, it took until late 1942 to build a prototype. The first of thousands of the new planes rolled off the assembly line in 1943 with little time for thorough testing. The pilots who flew the early B-29s found that the plane’s engines tended to overheat and catch fire, often before takeoff. Naturally, once reports and rumors of those fires got out, pilots wanted nothing to do with the Superfortress, no matter how far it could fly.
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets—a twenty-five-year-old flight instructor for long-range heavy bombers—needed pilots for the B-29. But men who were afraid of the plane or uneasy about training on it didn’t usually do very well. Tibbets had to have excellence. Having flown the plane himself, he believed skilled pilots could fly the B-29 safely. The trick was in understanding the plane. He just had to convince the men in his command he was right.
Tibbets decided to try the tactic that had gotten military pilots into the P-39, B-26, and B-17. He asked for two Wasp volunteers from a nearby base. Dora Dougherty and Didi Johnson said they’d be happy to fly the biggest four-engine bomber in production. Tibbets didn’t discuss the fire hazard. Instead he told them to get the plane out of the hangar quickly after starting the engines and to take off right away—always. They did what they were told, and in just a few days of training with Tibbets, the Wasps were flying the B-29 smoothly. Lieutenant Colonel Tibbets decided they were ready for their check flight.