THE WASPS: Women Pilots of WWII
Produced by: Joe Richman/Radio Diaries, Inc.
All Things Considered (NPR) 12/18/02



MICHELE NORRIS, host: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.

LYNN NEARY, host: And I'm Lynn Neary.

In the early 1940s at the start of World War II, the US Air Force faced a dilemma. Thousands of new airplanes were coming off assembly lines and needed to be delivered to military bases nationwide. But most of America's pilots were overseas fighting the war. To solve the problem, the government launched an experimental program to train women pilots. Today from Radio Diaries producer Joe Richman brings us the story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOOR OPENING AND SHUTTING)

ELIZABETH EYRE TAYLOR (Pilot): Fastening my seat belt. Throttle is set. Fuel pressure is fine. OK. Now we're going to start the engine. All clear.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLANE ENGINE STARTING)

TAYLOR: My name is Elizabeth Eyre Taylor. And we're in the Great Barrington Airport in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. And I'm 79 years old. This is an Archer II-Piper Archer II aircraft. All right. Now we're taxiing down the runway. It's a little cold and we have a bit of a crosswind on takeoff. It's a bit windy today.

Often when I go to the airport there's male pilots that come in and they see an old lady there and they say, 'How long have you been flying?' I say, 'For 60 years.' And they say, 'Sixty years?' And I say, 'Yes, I was a WASP.' And they said, 'A WASP? What's that?'

Cherokee zero-six-two. OK. We're ready to go.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLANE ENGINE)

WASPS: (Singing) Santiago Blue...Going back home to where I come from. Go down, down to the airport.

LIBBY GARDNER (Pilot): My name is Libby Gardner, and I flew the B-26, the medium bomber, which was often referred to as the Widow Maker.

KADDY LANDRY STEELE (Pilot): My name is Kaddy Landry Steele. And I was assigned to the 369th Tow Target Squadron at Bakersfield, El Paso.

CHARLYNE CREGER(Pilot): I'm Charlene Creger.

ETHEL MEYER FINLEY (Pilot): I'm Ethel Meyer Finley.

LOUISE BOWDEN BROWN (Pilot): My name is Louise Bowden Brown.

CARO BAYLEY BOSCA (Pilot): I'm Caro Bayley Bosca from Springfield, Ohio. I fell in love with every airplane that came along, like the P-51, the B-24s. I love the P-47. Oh. We all loved to fly.

Unidentified Women: (Singing) Dun, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, du-du, do.

(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO NEWSCAST)

President FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.

STEELE: They needed pilots. There weren't that many people that flew in 1940, period, you know. The Army only had about 1,800 pilots after Pearl Harbor. And they were needing millions.

FINLEY: I received a telegram in December of 1942 asking if I was interested in flying military aircraft. I didn't know anything about the WASP program.

DORA DOUGHERTY STROTHER (Pilot): There had been rumors about something like this, so I quit school and started to work at the airport so that I could build up my flight time so that I could qualify for the program.

FINLEY: At that time, there were some over 3,000 women who had a private license or more. And they started going down the list.

STEELE: And I started reading this telegram. And then on the bottom it said, 'You will'-it didn't say, 'We'd like you to have' or anything-'You will report to the Statler Hotel on such-a-such a date and such-a-such a time for an interview.' And I thought, 'My God, I've been drafted.'

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Unidentified Man #1: This is Texas, cradle of our Army's airforce. This is an AAF field, too. And out of those bunkers are stepping girls, girls who give a new angle to an airforce story. Everywhere they're badly needed for ferrying duties so that the men can go off to fight while WASPs help get their ship started on the road overseas. They're WASPs, Women Airforce Service Pilots.

BOSCA: 'Dear Mommy, the first day. It's really a lot different than I thought it would be. It's a big field with lots of airplanes. Man, oh, man, think of the money we're costing Uncle Sam. It is still in the experimental stage. They are still quite doubtful of women pilots. We were supposed to be in bed by 10:00 and up in formation at 6:45, and that is all I know so far. We find out the rest hour by hour tomorrow.'

(SOUNDBITE OF BUGLE)

Unidentified Man #2: The trainees live in barracks, six to a bay. They're civilians but under Army discipline, so everything is strictly GI. They must go through the same rigorous training given any soldier. Up at 6 then a hard day ending long after the Texas sun has set.

MARTY WYALL (Pilot): Sweetwater, Texas, is the most God-forsaken place. I mean, just dust, sagebrush and dirt and...

CREGER: ...mesquite and rattlesnakes. And even at night it's as hot as hell. Excuse my English.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

FINLEY: And here are all these women from different walks of life, millionaire heiresses like Florsheim Shoes, Upjohn Drug Company, and then you had poor kids like me from the farm. And everybody was in the same boat, had the same ill-fitting clothes. You know, you arrived in your own clothes, but then you would report to supply thinking, 'Well, should I order 10 or a 12?' and the sergeant behind the desk could say, '42 or 44.'

STEELE: Flight suits we were wearing were for men.

LEANORA ANDERSON (Pilot): I mean, it was enormous. Enormous. You know, it was just enormous in every direction. Mine stood by itself.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG)

Unidentified Women: (Singing) Going back home to where I come from.

TAYLOR: We'd have to get up in the morning. We'd march to the flight line. Everybody would be singing.

STEELE: They'd say fall in, and we'd all fall in. And they'd say, 'Hip, hop, march.' And we'd march to wherever we were going. And I wasn't in the habit of having saying, 'Yes, sir,' to every shavetail that came along, some of them even younger than I and some of them pretty stupid. I thought, 'This is a big mistake,' until we got started in the airplanes.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLANE ENGINE)

Unidentified Man #3: Next comes the training flight. Oh, let the motor roar. Each flying student is required by Army regulation to don a parachute.

TAYLOR: And you go out and put this big parachute on and climb up into the airplane in your goggles and your helmet. And we had to war fur-lined jackets, fur-lined pants and fur-lined boots because we were in an open cockpit and it was cold. It was in the wintertime. So we'd climb in and then an instructor would take you up and then he'd say, 'OK, honey, I'm going to show you how to do a slow roll.' He'd say, 'Fasten your seat belt. Make sure it's fastened.' So you'd fasten your seat belt.'

Unidentified Man #3: With the student at the controls, the instructor in the rear seat directs her in the finer points of flying military planes in a military way with tricky maneuvers.

(SOUNDBITE OF AIRPLANE)

TAYLOR: And the first time you do that, and he turns you over upside down, your arms fall out and your legs fall out and all the dirt falls out of the plane and you're just hanging there in a seat belt. And often you would see this white thing floating down to the ground because somebody had forgotten to fasten their seat belt and there some girl would be floating down to the ground with her parachute.

(SOUNDBITE OF AIRPLANE)

BROWN: I'll tell you the first time I flew an AT-6, tears rolled down my cheeks. I just thought, 'Well, I'll never master this. It's too much for me. Take me back to the farm.' But anyway, you get over it. It's a funny thing, but you do.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Unidentified Man #4: No longer are they the rookies of six months ago, but a smooth and well-disciplined detachment. Now the WASPs are ready to go to work and do a job that has delighted all the airforce officials. Good weather and bad, they fan out to various bases in California, Texas, Delaware, Michigan...

JULIE STEGE (Pilot): We did a lot of odd jobs that they didn't want to waste a man on.

TAYLOR: Ferrying planes, testing planes, flying officers around, towing targets.

NELL ėMICKEYî BRIGHT (Pilot): We were in a tow target squadron. Our main mission there was training these boys at Ft. Bliss in anti-aircraft because they were going to go overseas and try to shoot the enemy planes out of the sky. And to learn how to do that, they had to have somebody up there flying these targets for them to shoot at. And we were the ducks.

(SOUNDBITE OF AIRPLANE ENGINE)

Unidentified Man #5: Now guns ready, they practice on a target towed by a plane.

(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)

BRIGHT: You know, they were shooting live bullets at the target.

(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSIONS)

BRIGHT: And one night we were towing in a B-26 and the flak started bursting in front of us. And the target was behind us. So we had to take some evasive action to get-and called the ground forces and told them that we are not completing this mission. We're rolling in our target and going home. We'll come back tomorrow and see if you can shoot any better.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

STEELE: Most of what we did was very monotonous. Those searchlight missions-we were up there at night flying these patterns, flying 45 degree angle to the right, 180 degree turn with a 45 degree angle-for four hours we're doing this. Eighteen- to 21-year-old men are not very good at that because they're all hotdogs, but women have been trained all their life to do repetitive jobs. You do the dishes, you know, three times a day. You make the beds every day. We're used to that kind of thing. And if we got some that were fun like the strafing and so on, that was just enough to keep us stimulated. You know, we didn't have to be flying under bridges or up box canyons all the time.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GARDNER: I will admit that some months into it, I began to be a little bored with flying around in a rectangular pattern.

BOSCA: The older men didn't think we could fly the airplanes. They didn't think we were strong enough. They didn't-I don't think they trusted us.

VIOLET COWDEN (Pilot): I would have gone into combat any minute for the simple reason I think if I would have had some training I think I probably would have been pretty good at dogfighting.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Unidentified Man #6: In mass production in the United States is the B-29 Superfortress, the largest, fastest and most powerful bomber ever built.

STROTHER: It was 1944 in July, and the B-29 was going to be the biggest and the best bomber in the world. It was made for the long range. Nobody, of course, knew anything about any atomic bombs or anything at that point. But it would be the aircraft that would allow us to win the war in the Pacific. And that's why they were very anxious to get this into the inventory. But it had experienced some engine fires. And they were having these problems at the training bases with people who were reluctant to fly it. Each airplane had its own reputation. And they did not want the B-29 to have a bad reputation. And there was a man named Colonel Paul Tibbets. He had the idea that if he could get two women to fly this, that he could take them to the training bases of the B-29 and show the men that it was so easy to fly, even a woman could fly it. That's how he choose the two of us.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLANE ENGINE STARTING)

STROTHER: It was an awe-inspiring feeling-the power that you could feel in those engines. It was like flying an apartment house practically. I forget what the wingspan is--144 feet, I think. But when you're flying, it felt so easy compared with what I thought it would feel like. It was easy to turn it. It was easy to climb it. It was easy to even stall it. It was a dream ship. I had no problem at all. And the word spread all over. My gosh, there's two women flying this thing.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLANE FLYING)

BROWN: The worst thing that happened to me-we were in fighter school and my roommate was killed. She was flying formation in an AT-6 and she was in the backseat. Her instructor was up front. And she was in the middle of a formation of three airplanes. And the fellows behind her must have taken their eyes off the other wing and their wing went through her hatch and hit her on the head and knocked her out. And her instructor couldn't raise her, so he bailed out. And she went in with the airplane. I had to take her body home to New York state from Brownsville, Texas. I had to tell her parents. I did not like that job.

FINLEY: Thirty-eight women were killed in either training or assignments. Evelyn Sharp out in Oklahoma, that was an engine failure-a P-38. There was one out of Shaw Field. She was out testing a BT-13. They found her; she had crashed. Some of them were pilot error and some were engine problems, and some were collisions. And it was rather a sobering thing, but I don't know that it affected anybody's desire to go out right away again.

STEELE: Wars aren't very much fun. We were all losing our relatives, our boyfriends, our husbands, our brothers. And it just made everybody want to do as much as they possibly could to win the war and get it over with. But in the meantime, we were enjoying it.

DAWN SEYMOUR (Pilot): You must understand that we loved to fly. And that was built in every single one of us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BOSCA: A lot of times you're by yourself. And to be up there by yourself flying...

STEELE: You can just fly around and look around and play hide-and-seek in the clouds. COWDEN: And sometimes I'd fly and have cumulus clouds all around me. And I'd be pretending I was in New York City and going down all the high-rises along the side were clouds.

GARDNER: We just felt we had really won a prize to get to fly these airplanes, which were off limits for us in any ordinary way, and to get paid for doing it and to know that we were contributing to the war effort-it was just too much. Very few men ever got a chance like that and here we were getting this chance.

BROWN: We had the best airplanes in the world, the best instructors in the world. We had that made. And then all of a sudden, the Army says, 'We don't need you anymore.'

BOSCA: 'To each member of the WASP, I am very proud of you young women. You have freed male pilots for other work. But now the war situation has changed and the time has come when your services are no longer needed. If you continue in the service, you would be replacing instead of releasing our young men. I know that the WASPs wouldn't want that. So I have directed that the WASP program be inactivated and all WASP be released on the 20th of December of 1944. My sincere thanks and happy landings always, H.H. Arnold, Army airforce.'

Unidentified Man #7: General Henry H. Arnold of the Army airforce.

(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)

MARTY WYALL (Pilot): There was a huge crowd there. General Arnold made the primary speech, and it was a wonderful send-off.

General HENRY H. ARNOLD (Army Airforce): Frankly I didn't know in 1941 whether a slip of a girl could fight the controls of a B-17 in heavy weather. Now in 1944, it is on the record that women can fly as well as men.

WYALL: At the end of the ceremony, we all marched down. Of course, we all had our hair up. We were looking real nice. And then we sang the song, 'We're the last last class of Avenger Field.'

Unidentified Women: (Singing) We're the last last class of Avenger Field.

WYALL: It was a whole day of celebration. And then the next day we all packed and left the field and went home.

Unidentified Women: (Singing) Because we ain't gonna be here much longer. We're the last...

STEELE: It was December 20th, 1944. And that's when we left. It was sad. It was really sad. I knew that I would never, never get into those airplanes again.

Unidentified Women: (Singing) ...silver wings, Santiago blue and a heart that sings 'cause we ain't gonna be here no longer.

CREGER: (Singing) Santiago gold and blue and a heart that's true and we ain't gonna be here much longer.

GARDNER: Two of the girls went up to Alaska and became bush pilots. Some found jobs in charter services. They dusted crops. They taught other people to fly. But they were the real exception. There just were not jobs for women as pilots.

STEELE: Not only the WASPs but all the other women that took part in the war effort-the women that manned the factories, the women that ran the farms, the women that built the ships-they all lost their jobs because the men came back. After the war, we went right back to where we were. We were supposed to be home and have children and raise families and we weren't supposed to be flying airplanes. We weren't supposed to be doctors and lawyers and engineers and all those things. We were before our time.

BOSCA: (Singing) If you have a daughter, teach her how to fly. If you have a son, throw the bastard in the sky. Singing zoot suits and parachutes and wings of silver, too. He'll ferry airplanes like his mommy used to do.

BROWN: Twenty-five thousand women applied; 1,837, I think, were accepted for training and 1,074 graduated.

STEELE: It doesn't seem real to me sometimes, you know, that I actually did that. If you were out in a crowd in a social conversation and someone said, 'Do you remember World War II?' and you said, 'Oh, yes, I flew for the airforce.' And they would say, 'Come on. Don't be ridiculous. They didn't have any women in the airforce.'

(SOUNDBITE OF PLANE ENGINE)

TAYLOR: Break to engineer. Fort, Cherokee, zero, six, two.

I'm flying at-I'm at 1,200 feet. The air speed is 60. We have a crosswind from the left. Turning onto our final approach right now. About to land, we hope.

(SOUNDBITE OF PLANE LANDING)

TAYLOR: Whoa. And we're back home again in one piece.

STEELE: Sometimes I have dreams where I'm flying B-25s, B-26s, P-47s and all those beautiful, you know, warbirds. I mean, I think it's funny because I haven't flown for so many years. And it seems strange to me to, at 85, be dreaming about flying airplanes. Very often we can get a chance to ride in one of these airplanes that we used to fly. And I don't want to ride in one. I don't want to ride in another AT-6 or a B-25. I want to remember it like it was when I did it. I think it's much more real to me and much more enjoyable to me to remember the way it was.

Unidentified Women: (Singing) Santiago blue and a heart that sings, 'cause we ain't gonna be here no longer.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CREDITS

NORRIS: The behind-the-scenes story of making the documentary appears on our Web site: npr.org.

NEARY: Thanks to all the WASPs in our story: Leanora Anderson, Caro Bayley Bosca, Mickey Bright, Louise Bowden Brown, Vi Cowden, Ethel Finley, Libby Gardiner, Charlene Creger, Dawn Seymour, Kaddy Steele, Julie Stege, Dora Strother, Elizabeth Taylor and Marty Wyall.

NORRIS: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.

Š Joe Richman/Radio Diaries, 2002