The Allies began to make progress against the Axis early in 1943. Russia stopped the Germans in eastern Europe that February. In May, British and American forces defeated the German army in North Africa and moved to invade Italy. The Allies also got the upper hand against German U-boats in the Atlantic, allowing supply and troop ships to sail more safely to England. In the Pacific, Americans and Australians battled the Japanese on island after island in miserable, bug-infested humidity. But victories in places like Guadalcanal meant they could advance toward Japan itself.
The US Army Air Forces spent 1943 attacking Germany from the air with American B-17 bombers flying from England across France and over Germany. The German air force—the Luftwaffe—fought back ferociously, and hundreds of Allied planes and crews were lost. Eventually American industries developed new kinds of engines and fuel systems—technology that allowed American and British fighter planes to escort the bombers over more miles without stopping. Fighter, or pursuit, aircraft were fast and maneuverable. Their mission in Europe was to protect the slower, heavier bombers from German defenses. Once fighter planes were able to escort bombers all the way to Berlin, the Allies gained control of the air. That, in turn, would eventually allow Allied soldiers to reach Germany and end the war.
Those fighter planes were crucial, and most people thought of fighter pilots the way they had thought of the aces of World War I—manly, daring, brave, skilled, and usually very handsome. It was true that fighter pilots needed tremendous skill, quick reflexes, and nerve. Fighter pilots risked their lives every time they took off, and thousands died in aerial combat. Of course, thousands of military men on ships and on the ground risked and lost their lives too. But somehow, flying fighter planes seemed more dashing, perhaps more glamorous, than any other military job. Even other pilots thought so.
If flying fighters was the job every military pilot wanted, ferrying planes from factories to bases was the job none of them wanted. Pilots who ferried planes in the United States flew long hours from factory to military base, base to maintenance plant, maintenance plant to base. Over and over. Often tedious and lonely, often uncomfortable, never glamorous but terribly important. When a regular AAF pilot trained to fly a bomber or fighter plane or cargo plane, that’s the only craft he flew. He became an expert on one particular aircraft and might fly nothing else for a very long time. On the other hand, ferrying pilots often flew a particular type of aircraft only once or twice. Instead of becoming experts on one plane, they had to be able to fly any kind of plane, from a single-engine, open-cockpit trainer to a four-engine B-29 Superfortress bomber—all on a moment’s notice. It wasn’t unusual for ferrying pilots to keep the instruction manual for an unfamiliar plane on their laps while they flew. They had no chance to become experts on a particular plane, and that was dangerous. Each type of aircraft had a different feel, different quirks, and a different level of power. It responded differently to turbulence or wind. It took off and landed differently. But the ferrying pilots flew all types of planes, and many pilots found the constant change unnerving.
As undesirable as ferrying was, though, the Wasps were happy to take ferrying jobs—the more the better. It was a contribution to the war effort and a challenge they welcomed. By the time they left training in either Delaware or Texas, they could fly primary, basic, and advanced trainer planes. They added to their credentials every chance they got, some pilots setting their sights on flying everything the Army Air Forces had. Before the war ended, Wasps had flown seventy-eight different kinds of aircraft. That’s an average of fourteen different types of planes per Wasp, more types of planes than a pilot in any other job was ever likely to fly.80
The women were assigned to bases all over the country, from Long Beach, California, to Onslow County, North Carolina, and from Fort Myers, Florida, to Detroit, Michigan. The commanders at many of those bases welcomed them as equals. Others made it very clear they didn’t want women pilots anywhere near them, though eventually half the ferrying pilots in the United States were women. Male or female, ferrying pilots never knew from one day to the next where they’d go, what kind of plane they’d fly, or how long they’d be gone.
Barbara Jane Erickson recalled a marathon ferrying adventure when she “made four transcontinental flights in a little over five days.”81 She gave credit to the weather, the quality of her four planes, and some luck. That may have been too humble. Not many pilots could handle eight thousand miles in such a short time, flying the kinds of planes BJ Erickson was piloting.
Teresa James—who started flying to impress a boyfriend and then fell in love with planes instead of the boy—learned the hard way to be prepared for anything. One morning she was assigned to fly a P-47 Thunderbolt pursuit plane from New York to Indiana. She figured she’d probably fly another P-47 back to New York later in the day. Teresa delivered the first plane and got some lunch, expecting to be in New York with the second plane by late afternoon. But the operations officer in Indiana said he needed a pilot to take a P-47 to California. James agreed. She hadn’t packed to be away overnight, but a quick trip to the PX for a toothbrush would get her by as long as she didn’t spill anything on her shirt at dinner. In Long Beach, California, the next day an operations officer asked if she knew how to fly a P-51 Mustang. She didn’t, but it was a beauty of a one-seater fighter. The officer handed her an information pamphlet and told her she was flying the Mustang to Florida in the morning.
Teresa rinsed out her shirt and underwear before she went to bed. In the morning, after practicing a few takeoffs and landings in the P-51, she was on her way. However, bad weather forced her to land and stay in Texas for several days—rinsing her clothes every night, since the base didn’t sell women’s things. On some mornings her undies were still damp; she couldn’t wash her pants at all—they’d never dry overnight.
James finally got the P-51 to Fort Myers, Florida, only to find orders to take an AT-6, a trainer plane, to Oklahoma. For days she’d been eating dry sandwiches from base snack bars along her routes because she hadn’t brought her uniform jacket with her and wasn’t allowed in an officers’ club without it. When she ran into another Wasp delivering a plane in Tulsa, she borrowed the woman’s jacket so she could get a real meal. Then she took a P-39 Airacobra, yet another fighter, to Montana and immediately had orders for another flight. This time she nearly fell over in relief: She was to take a P-47 to New Castle, Delaware. Home at last.
Still wearing the washed-out shirt and undies and the baggy, saggy, filthy pants, Teresa James returned to Delaware—four weeks, six planes, seventeen states, and eleven thousand miles after she’d left for a day flight.82 Her sister pilots met her in the barracks and practically collapsed laughing at the way she looked. The women quickly learned to squeeze a few toiletries, a skirt, blouse, and shoes for a ground trip back to base, and some clean underwear, into a small duffel they could cram into any plane. There wasn’t room for anything more.
• • •
Ferrying pilots often made unscheduled landings because of bad weather or mechanical problems. At bases where no one had met a Wasp, the women sometimes ran into issues that the men who ferried planes did not.
Thousands of P-51 Mustangs like the one Teresa James flew were being sent to England as quickly as they came off the assembly lines to fill the RAF’s desperate need for them. At 430 miles per hour, the Mustang was faster and more agile than any plane yet built and drew everyone’s attention. Nancy Love wanted the women to fly the new fighters, and they did—sometimes with surprising results. Pilot Carol Fillmore got orders to take a P-51 from California to New Jersey. She was near Athens, Georgia, when dusk forced her to find a place to put down. Fillmore called the Athens control tower and asked for permission to land. Silence. She tried again. Nothing. By then Carol was circling the field and called once more. An angry controller radioed back for her to “stay off the air, we’re trying to bring in a P-51.” Fillmore couldn’t see any other Mustangs in the air and finally realized what had happened. “For your information,” she told the tower, “the lady who is on the air is in the P-51.” With that she made her final approach toward the runway as the controller said, “You’re fine, you’re coming in fine, just great.” The dozens of trainees who had come outside to see the big ship they all wanted to fly watched Carol open the canopy. One trainee yelled, “It’s a girl!” Carol Fillmore climbed onto the Mustang’s wing to a huge ovation.83
Barbara Poole was ferrying a PT-19 a long distance when bad weather forced her to make an unscheduled landing. The little trainer plane had no radio, so she watched carefully and landed without clearance. Before she knew it, a high-ranking officer was ordering her away from the plane and off the base. She tried to explain, but he wouldn’t believe she was a ferrying pilot. Even when she got Nancy Love on the phone, he didn’t believe it. Barbara had no choice—she went into town to find a hotel and a place to eat. The officer had told her, “Don’t come back!” So how was she going to get her plane and take off when the weather cleared? She didn’t want to end up in jail, but she needed to deliver that plane on schedule. As soon as the sky began to brighten the next morning, Poole hurried back to the base, sneaked onto the tarmac (bases were less secure then than they are today), and took off without looking back.84
• • •
Early on, military command had concerns about women ferrying planes, and they kept close watch on the WASP’s delivery statistics. Could women deliver planes safely and on time as well as men? One mission answered this question.
More than twenty PT-17 open-cockpit Stearman biplanes were headed from Montana to Tennessee. The ferrying team assigned to them included six women, with Teresa James as team leader for the whole group. In that kind of operation, individual pilots set their own pace, and they don’t fly in formation because it’s safer to be farther apart and on their own. The planes took off from Montana one right after the other, each pilot deciding where to refuel and spend the night. But though all the planes left Montana at about the same time, they didn’t all land in Jackson, Tennessee, at the same time or even on the same day. The first six PT-17s to reach their destination were piloted by the six women on the team. Two days later nearly a dozen planes had still not arrived.
Air Transport Command wasn’t at all happy with a delivery rate of just over 50 percent safe and on time. Those planes were needed. Radio reports indicated that some of the missing pilots had gotten lost and two planes had been damaged. And the rest? Apparently those pilots had decided to take detours to visit girlfriends or family and have a little relaxation time.85
When the higher-ups saw which pilots had landed first they realized that the women’s delivery rate was perfect. Air Transport Command’s concerns about the competence of women ferrying pilots rightly evaporated.
• • •
Ferrying planes was nothing like combat, and no one pretended otherwise. But ferrying had its own risks. Jeanne Robertson was in a group ferrying planes over Texas when a sudden storm swallowed the group whole. Unable to go over or under the bad weather, Jeanne looked frantically for a place to land and saw an airfield. Ground crewmen ran to meet her as she taxied toward a hangar. They grabbed the wings of her small plane to hold it against the high wind the storm had brought. Another pilot landed behind her, and others found landing strips elsewhere. Sadly, “one fellow tried to continue on in spite of the storm,” Jeanne said. “He disappeared. We wondered if he tried to go through the storm and his plane was torn apart, but nobody ever knew.” They did know they were lucky to have landed safely.86
• • •
In March 1943, Cornelia Fort—witness to Pearl Harbor and a WAFS original—wrote to tell her mother about the used but slick gray convertible with red leather seats she had just bought. “If anything should happen to me—which I don’t think will—I want Louise [her sister] to have the car,” she said.
Less than two weeks later she and several male pilots at Long Beach were assigned a ferrying mission taking BT-13s, basic trainers, to Dallas. After refueling in Midland, Texas, Cornelia got ready to take off again. Some of the men who had landed at about the same time asked if she’d like to practice flying in formation with them on the way to Dallas. That was against the rules for ferrying pilots, but the terrain they were crossing was open and empty, and it seemed like the perfect place to hone their skills and have some fun. Cornelia should have said no, but she’d always been a bit of a daredevil. Whatever her reason, she agreed.
There had been cases of inexperienced male pilots showing off for the women by flying very close to their planes or rolling above them—a good reason not to fly in formation. It’s possible that’s what happened in the sky over Texas, though there was no proof of such negligence. But midway to their destination one of the pilots saw two planes veer off course. One wavered and then recovered. Horrified, he watched the other little plane, Cornelia’s, start a slow spin and then roll and dive nose-first right into the ground. He had no doubt he’d witnessed a pilot’s violent death.
Investigators concluded that Cornelia had made no mistakes. The BT-13 flying beside her had come too close, and its landing gear had struck her wing, tearing off the tip and much of the wing’s edge and propelling the jagged metal into the body of the plane. Fort had probably died instantly when the other plane struck, they said. She’d had no chance to bail out.87
For Nancy Love, Betty Gillies, and the other originals, the news was a terrible blow—like losing a family member. The twenty-four-year-old who may have been the first witness to the attack at Pearl Harbor now became the first woman pilot in American history to be killed while flying for the military.
Military pilots killed while flying were buried with full military honors, and their families received insurance money. As a civilian, Fort was not eligible for military burial or honors. Fortunately, Cornelia’s family could afford to bring her remains home to Nashville and honor her with a formal funeral. Hundreds of people attended the service, including Nancy Love and BJ Erickson. They were pleased when the stone marker at her grave was inscribed, KILLED IN THE SERVICE OF HER COUNTRY. But the Fort family was not allowed to drape Cornelia’s casket with an American flag as at a military funeral. They could not honor her the way the families of military men and women honored their loved ones.
Most people who had family members in the military during World War II hung small banners in their front windows with a blue star for each family member serving in the armed forces. If one of those family members died, a gold star replaced the blue. As the war went on, gold stars in windows blanketed the country, each one symbolizing a tragedy and honoring a hero. The Forts had not hung a blue star for Cornelia. And now her mother could not hang a gold-star banner in her window, though she had lost a child to the war just as if Cornelia had been in the military and been killed in action.
Cornelia’s sister pilots mourned her death, and many resented the fact that she didn’t receive military recognition. Those who had reported to Delaware with her felt their loss keenly. They knew it could have been any of them. But none of the women resigned or lost their nerve to fly. When a base in Michigan restricted their women pilots to flying nothing bigger than primary trainers soon after Fort’s death, the women were furious. The government’s official report on the tragic accident stated clearly that there was no pilot error on Cornelia’s part. Even if there had been, why would it affect other women pilots? If the male pilot involved in the accident had died, no one would consider restrictions for every male pilot.
Less than a month later Betty Gillies and three other originals were assigned to take Canadian trainer planes from Maryland to Calgary, Alberta, Canada—more than twenty-five hundred miles. Rather than think about Cornelia’s death, they made their trip a tribute to her.
Betty challenged the group to fly the fairly slow little planes (PT-19s averaged 100 miles per hour) from the first light of day to the last with as few stops as possible. The four landed, checked into a motel to sleep a few hours, and set off again as soon as the sky was light. They repeated that pattern the following day and the next. Gillies wanted to demonstrate the Wasps’ determination and skill. She wanted to show what the women pilots were made of.
When the four women safely delivered the trainers to Calgary in just four days, they set a record for the trip.88 They saw the commendation they received as a commendation for all the women flying for the AAF, especially their friend Cornelia.
• • •
The women flew on, fully aware of the dangers, and fully aware that their risks were small compared with those of the pilots overseas. The inconveniences they faced were small in comparison too. But some of those inconveniences applied only to women ferrying pilots and not to men doing the same job.
Men in the ferrying service sometimes faced dirty looks or insults because they weren’t in combat. The women certainly didn’t experience the same kind of prejudice, but when the men delivered their planes to the assigned base, they usually got a ride back to their home base on another plane headed that way. Top brass didn’t think the women should hitch rides with male pilots without a chaperone, so the Wasps had to find a train or bus or civilian flight back to base. It was slow and inconvenient, but that was the rule.
As the Wasps waited in train stations or airports, people sometimes mistook them for nurses or Wacs or Waves. When they learned who they really were, some told the women they had no business doing men’s work in the military. Others thanked them for their service as pilots and made room on train benches for an exhausted woman pilot to sleep. Those gestures were welcome comfort.
On many bases the women ferrying pilots weren’t allowed to eat in the officers’ club, though all military pilots were officers. When a commanding officer said no, they had two choices: argue their way into the dining room, or find a ride into town and pay for a meal in a restaurant. At one base the commanding officer refused to give the women housing or meals, even when they were stationed there for months.89
The women put up with the inequalities and occasional insults because they loved their jobs and had the respect of many military men. Moreover, they knew that every time one of them ferried a plane from factory to base, it was one more plane on its way to combat overseas. That plane would help win the war. Sometimes the women left notes in the cockpits wishing the combat pilot who eventually sat there good luck. On at least one occasion a combat pilot sent a thank-you note back. All the insults in the world wouldn’t change these women’s feelings about what they were doing.
Not long before she died, Cornelia Fort wrote,
As long as our planes flew overhead, the skies of America were free and that’s what all of us everywhere are fighting for. And that we, in a very small way, are being allowed to help keep that sky free is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever known.90
