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.
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.
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.
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 support, 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.
Lieutenant Fleishman couldn’t do anything about the size of the zoot suits, but he helped the trainees with more than marching. He believed in the WFTD program. When a new group of women arrived for training in February 1943, he told them they were “part of an experiment which will do more to advance the cause of equality for women than anything that has been done so far.”63
In the fog, rain, and mud of the Houston airfield, he taught the women how to survive the army. “There is a simple directive about Army life,” he said. “ ‘If the Army can dish it out, I can take it.’ ” Fleishman told them how important that attitude was. “If . . . it should develop that women can’t take it,” he said, “it might affect the whole program. . . . You will have to stick out your chin and show them.”64
• • •
By then the military’s need for more pilots was clear, and Cochran was asked to double the number of women in her training school. Changes had to be made. The WAFS and WFTD were combined and became the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Cochran would continue to run the training center in Texas, and Love would stay with the ferrying squadron in Delaware.
The training center was moved four hundred miles northwest from Houston to Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. And while applicants to the training school still had to have a pilot’s license, the flight time requirement was reduced from seventy-five to thirty-five hours (men entering the same training needed no pilot’s license and no flight time at all). The Wasps remained civilians, though they still expected that eventually Congress would militarize them like other women’s auxiliaries. But the trainees were working too hard to think much about it.
On the day the Houston pilots transferred their trainer planes from the old field to the new, residents of Sweetwater took picnics and went to watch. Some made bets about how many planes being piloted by women would crash, bets no one made about planes piloted by men. Those betting against the women were disappointed. A hundred planes left Houston, and a hundred planes landed smoothly at Avenger Field.65
Ann Baumgartner had been accepted for WASP training in January 1943. She’d meant it when she promised to help the war effort as she returned from England to the United States in 1939. She’d found a job with a medical research company in New Jersey and hoped to connect her premed education with the war effort. One afternoon Ann went to the roof of her office building to get some fresh air and saw a plane come through the clouds and across the Manhattan skyline. “Imagine . . . looking at the world stretching away around you,” she thought. She would learn to fly.
“I had read about the . . . women pilots in England,” she said, and later remembered thinking, “I just might be able to join them if I could fly an air ambulance.”66
Ann took a trial flight and knew immediately she was made to be a pilot.67 Several months later she got her license and started working toward the two hundred hours needed for a commercial license. She was close to that two hundred hours in September 1942 when she read Eleanor Roosevelt’s column supporting the use of women pilots in the war effort. Then she learned about the Army Air Forces’ plan for such a program. She was soon on her way to Avenger Field in Sweetwater.
• • •
At the time, Sweetwater was known for its rattlesnakes, tarantulas, black widows, and scorpions, as well as constant dusty wind and temperatures over one hundred degrees a good part of the year. In 1943, Sweetwater also became known as the home of the only all-women air base ever.68
Ann settled into a barracks close to the training center, which was more convenient than the living arrangements in Houston, though not terribly comfortable. The women wrote home about “chewing dust” and “Texas dust in their teeth.”69 Roommates took turns throwing telephone books at the two-inch-long roaches that ate holes in their robes and slippers. They learned to check their boots for scorpions before putting them on each morning. But most didn’t think to check their pant legs, until one trainee was stung as she got dressed. In a lot of pain and frightened at being poisoned, she went to the emergency room. She was “lucky,” the nurse told her. Sweetwater’s scorpions had poisonous and nonpoisonous seasons. Her sting was only miserable, not deadly. Yet she felt stung again when she got back and found her bunkmate charging the other trainees a dime to see the attacker, now trapped in a glass jar.70
Locusts descended on the training center too. They worked their way under sheets, got into women’s hair, and were so thick on the runway, planes skidded on them as they landed.71
On some nights the intense Texas heat kept everyone from sleeping in the stifling barracks, so the women took their small cots into the yard between buildings to find a breeze. Some of them also found a rattlesnake or two curled up with them when they woke. Others got up covered in crickets. The choice between sleeping with critters or sleeping in unbearable heat was a tough one.
There was another entirely different kind of pest to deal with at Avenger as well. A surprisingly large number of military pilots had “engine trouble” near Avenger and asked permission to make emergency landings—more than a hundred in the first two weeks after the Wasps arrived. The sudden rash of problems turned out to have nothing to do with engines and everything to do with the flyboys, as military pilots were often called. These men simply wanted to see the women pilots up close. Jackie Cochran made it clear that only true emergencies should result in unscheduled landings. It was irresponsible to report fake emergencies.
No one suggested that because a few men flying for the military were irresponsible, all military pilots were irresponsible. Such a suggestion would be unfair. Cochran recognized, though, that attitudes were different for her women. Fair or not, one bad apple was very likely to spoil the whole program.
Even after interviewing every applicant carefully, both Cochran and Love put rules in place to make sure their programs’ reputations were safe—rules that men did not have at all. In Sweetwater each barracks had a housemother, the way college dorms at the time did. The women weren’t allowed to smoke in town, though men and many women smoked everywhere at the time (people didn’t know yet that cigarettes cause cancer and other diseases). Trainees were told to dress modestly and nicely when off base and not to socialize too much. Aside from a few eye rolls, the women generally went along. The stakes were high and their focus was on graduating and getting into the sky. But Avenger Field was soon known as Cochran’s Convent.72
• • •
The program was extremely demanding, and not every woman who started WASP training finished. Some had family emergencies or chose to quit. That was the one advantage of being civilians—the women could resign if they wanted to. Unfortunately, some washed out, meaning they failed and were forced to leave, everyone’s biggest fear.
Overall, the women’s washout rate was about one third, the same as men in military pilot training.73 But a few classes had far more than the average number of failures. In one case twice the average number of trainees washed out, and the women suspected they were being judged differently from the men. Ann Baumgartner wrote, “It seemed as though we were judged on the very way we walked, moved, and thought.”74
It was possible that some check pilots wanted to be combat pilots, resented their assignments, and took their frustration out on the WASP trainees. It was also possible that a few check pilots were embarrassed to see women flying as well as they could. “Why the heck do [they] have to be afraid of us?” complained one Wasp.75 A few women felt some sympathy for them, since “one day they were supermen and all of a sudden the next day the girls were doing it.”76
Regardless of the reasons, it became obvious that a small number of instructors failed women unfairly. Both men and women in pilot training found washing out devastating. But for a woman to wash out knowing she was as good as anyone else was too much. And when at least one woman with excellent skills suspected she washed out because she wouldn’t let her instructor kiss her, it was time to do something.
A review board appointed to investigate confirmed the women’s suspicions. Some check pilots were intentionally targeting women for failure or getting back at the women who refused to date them. (Today this kind of behavior is called sexual harassment and, in the workplace, is cause for being fired.) The board made changes so trainees who failed with one instructor could train for a short time with another instructor before being washed out. That slowed unearned failures from instructors like Captain Maytag. He’d gotten his nickname from the popular washing machine because he washed out so many Wasps.77 He might not have faced punishment for his behavior, but if he was angry about not flying combat missions, he would have to find another way to show it.
• • •
Long hours, hard work, lots of studying, sore muscles, and a common love of flying built bonds among the women. Many made friendships that lasted the rest of their lives. When each pilot soloed for the first time, the others dunked her in the wishing well—a twenty-foot-wide, round, shallow pool where pilots often tossed coins for good luck. The women passed the time spent waiting for the weather to clear or a plane to be ready by playing cards. And, like regular military units, they made up new lyrics for familiar songs they could march to.
“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” became “We Were Only Foolin’ ” and started, “When we go to ground school we’re as happy as can be.” Other songs included “Yankee Doodle Pilots” and “Zoot Suits and Parachutes.” A college fight song turned into “Buckle Down, Fifinella.” The songs’ lyrics were funny and spirited and, sometimes, a bit rude. The Wasps loved them. The earliest classes started a WASP newspaper with articles about flying, movie reviews, and war news. Other classes kept it up. And once the people of Sweetwater got used to the idea of women trainees at Avenger, they invited them into their homes for Sunday dinner and welcomed them to the town pool in the blistering summer heat.
Most Wasps thought Avenger Field was the most desolate place they’d ever seen when they first arrived. Later they realized that they’d miss seeing Fifinella greet them each time they returned to Avenger.
Many official army units had mascots—cartoon figures of some sort that informally identified and were said to take care of the unit. The Wasps weren’t military, but they, too, had a mascot—Fifinella. Fifinella was a female gremlin created by Roald Dahl in his first children’s book, The Gremlins. Dahl had joined the British Royal Air Force in 1939 as World War II began. He knew the tales British airmen told about impish creatures who played tricks and sabotaged their planes. Dahl started writing stories about gremlins and fifinellas (female gremlins) as he recovered from serious injuries after his plane crashed in the Sahara. When his stories were published, Walt Disney suggested an animated film based on The Gremlins. The film was never made, but Disney did release the story as a book with illustrations by an animator at Walt Disney Studios. Those illustrations included drawings of Fifinella, or Fifi.
The Wasps asked Disney for permission to use Fifi as their mascot. Disney, who had developed mascots for many military units, agreed. The women thought of Fifi as nice rather than naughty, a protector of sorts. She welcomed everyone who entered Avenger Field with a smile on her goggled face. Class after class of women—eighteen classes in all—smiled back. Despite the hard work, discomforts, and fatigue, the Wasps at bases all over the country had reason to smile. As Betty Jane Williams explained, “The ability to do something you love and to do it at a time of need for your country–nothing is better than that if you have much patriotic blood in your system.”78
• • •
Ann Baumgartner and her classmates certainly felt that way when they walked across the stage at their graduation at Avenger Field. Jacqueline Cochran gave each of them silver wings, wings she had designed and paid for herself, since the military wouldn’t provide them to the nonmilitary WASP. These women were ready. According to one graduate, they all had “the love of flying, of patriotism, and also the spirit of adventure.”79 Like all the women who finished training and graduated as Wasps, they would need those traits when they got to their assigned bases and started their real work.