Cornelia Fort arrived in San Francisco from Hawaii aboard an ocean liner in March. She and the other civilian pilots on the ship knew they were taking a risk amid rumors that the Japanese would attack again, but decided it was a risk they had to take if they were to serve their country. Cornelia made a will before sailing, and once safely home, she wrote, “Nothing ever looked so beautiful to me as did the California shoreline as we approached it.”38
Before she knew it, she was a celebrity of sorts. Reporters wanted interviews with the lady pilot who had been in the air when the Japanese attacked. What was it like? What would she do now?
“I want to get up in the air again,” she told them. She didn’t mention the telegram she’d received from Jacqueline Cochran a few months before the Pearl Harbor attack. Cochran had invited her to apply for the British ferrying service. The same telegram went to a number of women pilots with impressive flight records. Cornelia wasn’t able to leave Hawaii and get to the East Coast in time to join Cochran, but maybe now . . .
Back at her home in Nashville, newspapers and magazines lined up to get her story, and schools asked her to speak. She told everyone who would listen that she and women like her could aid the war effort as pilots. “I wish I were a man—just for the duration [of the war]. I’d give anything to train to be a fighter.”39
How could a woman think such a thing? Even though women might be nurses or do clerical work in the military, they didn’t actually fight wars, and Cornelia knew she’d never fly in combat. Times were changing, but not that fast. (The military opened all jobs to women seventy-three years later, in 2015.) Yet she was disappointed to find only one war-related job for a woman pilot—teaching Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP) courses as she’d done in Colorado.
The CPTP had been training pilots since 1936. As tensions had mounted in Europe, and the United States had begun to build up its military, General Hap Arnold had proposed increasing the number of civilian men with basic piloting skills. Those pilots could transition to flying for the military very quickly if they were needed. Arnold knew that Germany had had such a program, and by the late 1930s its air force, the Luftwaffe, was formidable. When he presented his idea, President Roosevelt approved.
Civilian flight schools ran the program, usually at airfields close to college campuses, where students could take their ground courses. At first, women were allowed to make up 10 percent of each class, but that ended once the United States was at war and the need for combat pilots grew. Cornelia had enjoyed her time as a CPTP instructor before the war, but now she wanted more. Hadn’t the women flying in the British Air Transport Auxiliary proved something? Surely, no one would argue that British women were more capable than American women. Besides, the American women pilots Jackie Cochran had recruited were doing just fine. And if women could teach men to fly planes, didn’t it make sense that they could fly the planes themselves? Cornelia and other women wondered if anything would change the military’s thinking.
• • •
No one wanted to say it out loud. The fact was, though, that by September 1942—nine months after the United Stated had entered the war—the Allies were losing. Even Franklin Roosevelt, always an optimist, called the news in the Pacific “all bad.”40
Shortly after the attack at Pearl Harbor, the Allies faced defeat at Guam, the Gilbert Islands, Wake Island, Java, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Then Japan defeated American forces in the Philippines. The losses were horrifying. In May alone over 32,000 American men were killed, wounded, or captured. Of those casualties nearly 5,000 were members of the Army Air Forces, or AAF (restructuring in 1941 had made the Army Air Corps part of a larger organization—the Army Air Forces—with General Hap Arnold as its chief).
Victories at the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway in May and June of 1942 gave the country hope on the Pacific front, but the human cost of those victories, as well as the loss of planes and ships, was terrible. By the time the country had been at war a year, over 67,000 Americans—7,700 from the Army Air Forces alone—had been killed, wounded, or captured.41 Hap Arnold knew those numbers would get much worse before the Allies got the upper hand against the Axis.
Already many pilots had been pulled from the Ferrying Command—where they moved planes from factories to military bases—and transferred to combat to cover the numbers of men who had been lost. That left deliveries of new planes from plants to bases six weeks behind schedule. Aircraft coming off assembly lines now filled tarmacs, with hundreds and then thousands of planes awaiting delivery.42 Something had to be done.
On September 1, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her daily newspaper column,
There is just a chance that this is not a time when women should be patient. We are in a war and we need to fight it with all our ability and every weapon possible. Women pilots, in this particular case, are a weapon waiting to be used.43
Hap Arnold finally agreed. It was time to use women pilots in noncombat flying jobs.
Nancy Love, who had described her idea for using women to ferry military planes to the Army Air Corps planning division in 1940, now worked for Colonel William Tunner doing scheduling and routing for the Ferrying Command. Tunner was desperate for more pilots and believed Nancy when she told him there were excellent women pilots who could form a squadron very quickly. She had done the research and had a list of eighty-three highly qualified candidates—nearly every woman in the country who she thought could meet the program’s requirements. Tunner asked for permission to pursue Love’s plan and got the okay on September 5. Nancy Love would lead a women’s squadron to be headquartered at New Castle Army Air Base in Delaware. There the women would learn the army’s way of doing things and then begin flying military aircraft from factories to the bases where they were needed. Nancy started sending telegrams that night.
Cornelia Fort was near the top of Nancy Love’s list of pilots to recruit, and one of the first to receive Love’s telegram. If interested, Fort should report immediately to Wilmington, Delaware, for an interview and flight test. If accepted, she would start training right away. Cornelia didn’t hesitate. She sent her mother a hurried telegram.
The heavens have opened up and rained blessings on me. The army has decided to let women ferry ships and I’m going to be one of them.44
Also at the top of Nancy’s list was Betty Huyler Gillies, who worked for an aircraft company on Long Island in New York and had known Love for some time. Not more than a dozen or so women in the country were licensed to fly the kinds of big ships she flew. Short and trim, Gillies looked younger than her thirty-four years, but the way she carried herself and her easy smile showed the confidence of a great pilot.
An original member and now president of the Ninety-Nines, the club to which Jacqueline Cochran, Nancy Love, and many other women pilots belonged, Betty had been urging women pilots to get ready for the chance to fly for their country. When Nancy Love’s telegram arrived, however, she was torn. She’d mourned the tragedy at Pearl Harbor and wanted to help. But she and her husband, Bud, were already mourning another tragedy: Their youngest child, a daughter just four years old, had died of leukemia soon after the Japanese attack. Betty’s grief ate at her night and day.
Betty and Nancy were friends, and Betty knew they’d work well together. Bud was an executive and test pilot with Grumman Aircraft—a company building military planes. His civilian job was considered essential to the war effort, so he wouldn’t be called into the military and would be there for their two older children. And while focusing on ferrying military planes might help her through her grief, Betty worried about leaving her family. She asked Bud what he thought. He told her to go.
Gillies flew to Wilmington the next day and was the first woman to qualify for the program. Cornelia Fort was second in line. They were now members of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS).
Love’s plan was to find the nation’s most experienced women pilots, give them four or five weeks of transition training on military planes and procedures, and start ferrying backlogged aircraft as soon as possible. She insisted the women have at least five hundred hours of flight time, though men entering military transition training needed only three hundred hours. Only about a hundred American women had that kind of experience, and twenty-five of them were already with Jackie Cochran in England. Some had husbands fighting overseas and no one else to care for their young children. Others were already working in war-related jobs. Twenty-eight women came to Delaware at their own expense in response to Love’s telegrams and passed their interviews, physicals, and flight tests. They were the best of the best, averaging twelve hundred hours of flight time when they volunteered.
Most of these recruits, including Betty and Cornelia, were college educated and well off, which made sense because taking flying lessons and owning or renting a plane cost a lot more than most people had during the Great Depression. And several of the “originals,” as they later called themselves, were beyond well off. Phyllis Burchfield’s family owned oil wells in Pennsylvania. Barbara Donahue came from the Woolworth five-and-dime store empire.45
Those who were not so well off had had to scramble to learn to fly, washing airplanes or doing mechanical work in exchange for lessons. Some flew for a living—one as a stunt pilot, another as a barnstormer. And several taught in the Civilian Pilot Training Program. Stunt pilots, barnstormers, and CPTP instructors sacrificed their higher wages to be ferry pilots. They would make $250 a month, less than they’d been making before and just two thirds of what civilian men ferrying military planes made. These women didn’t question their lower pay—women almost always made less than men for the same work. Besides, this was the first opportunity to actually fly for their country.
• • •
Love was confident that four weeks of twelve-hour days would get her pilots ready to fly a variety of military aircraft, complete paperwork, and follow army regulations. Still, there was no time to waste.
The women assumed Congress would pass legislation militarizing the WAFS before long. But getting anything through Congress took time, and ferry pilots were needed immediately, so Love had agreed to keep the program civilian in order to get started right away. And though she knew women could do the job, the military considered the program only experimental and wanted time to assess it before asking Congress to act.
That left some questions unanswered as the first volunteers gathered at New Castle: Did women need the same kind of fitness training as men who might go into combat? Should they follow the rules of military discipline? Wear uniforms? Be treated like officers? Salute? It was more important to get right to work than wait for all the answers.
• • •
Betty Gillies, Cornelia Fort, and the rest of the women hauled their luggage across planks over a muddy path to the wood building that was to be their home at New Castle. They settled into tiny rooms with iron cots, thin mattresses, and no curtains or shades on the windows, which overlooked a military base with hundreds of men walking past day and night. The women would have to turn off the lights or step into the hall to get dressed and undressed.
Because they were civilians, the women had to pay for their transportation to New Castle and for their own housing and food. But because they were on a military base and doing what looked like military work, they were told to be ready for regular military inspections of their rooms.46 Men who worked as civilian ferrying pilots didn’t have inspections. Neither did officers in the military, and all military pilots were officers. These women had careers, marriages, children, and homes of their own. Room inspections? If that’s what the army wanted, then fine.
Ground courses were the same for all the women pilots and some of the volunteers resented having to take courses they’d actually taught as instructors. Barbara Poole of New Jersey, for example, had been the youngest commercial pilot in the country at seventeen. When she was a CPTP instructor, every student she taught passed all the government tests to get a license. Yet now she had to take those same courses as if she’d never seen the material before. Evelyn Sharp, from a poor Nebraska family, not only taught flying, but had over three thousand flight hours and was a barnstormer, demonstrating skills many pilots only dreamed of.47 She, too, had to start from scratch.
Even as a young child, Cornelia Fort had hated being told what to do. At New Castle she argued, “As flight instructors, we know all that.”48 Nancy Love pointed out that not all the women had been instructors, and she wanted everyone to stick together no matter what. Even Cornelia stopped arguing. It wasn’t easy, though, especially when the women realized their courses were longer and more detailed than the same courses men in transition training took.49 Why couldn’t men and women all take the same courses together? And why did the military think women needed more classroom time than less experienced men?
The same frustrations followed the women into the cockpit.
At first the WAFS pilots were restricted to practicing takeoffs and landings in tiny PT-19 trainer planes, though they were all already licensed to fly much bigger aircraft. Most of their instructors were very good. They recognized how skilled these trainees were and sympathized with their frustration. But a few didn’t like the idea of women flying military planes. When Gertrude Meserve, a flight instructor at Harvard and MIT, showed her logbook to her check pilot—the instructor who gives a pilot his or her final test or check flight to determine if the pilot “checks out” on a particular type of plane—he seemed not to believe that her total of two thousand hours in the air was accurate. “I can always tell once I see how a girl flies whether or not she has padded her logbook,” he said sarcastically.50 Gertrude hadn’t padded her logbook at all. She was happy to prove it at the controls of the aircraft, almost daring the check pilot to find fault with her skills. He didn’t.
Eventually the women started flying bigger ships, which posed challenges for Betty Gillies. Betty had flown a lot of big aircraft, and she had far more experience than her instructors. Her skills were not the problem; her size was. She joked that it was a good thing she had signed up so early. Once all the requirements were in place, she would have been turned down for being too short. Military aircraft had no adjustable seats or controls, and at just under five feet two inches, Betty couldn’t reach the pedals in the big military planes. But being short wasn’t going to stop her.
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
