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.
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.
The women took off with Tibbets and an inspector from the Civil Aeronautics Administration on board. They did exactly as they’d been taught, but while they were demonstrating their ability to fly the plane with two engines shut down, the cockpit suddenly filled with smoke. One engine had caught fire!
Without hesitation Dora Dougherty gave clear instructions to everyone on board, radioed the tower for emergency equipment, and, with Didi as copilot, brought the plane down smoothly. When she climbed out of the cockpit onto the tarmac, the CAA inspector could hardly wait to sign her logbook, certifying her to fly the B-29. He’d never seen anyone do it better. 126
• • •
Tibbets had had a B-29 set aside for the Wasps to use for demonstrations. The Fifinella mascot was painted in bright colors on the nose of the bomber, with the name Ladybird above it. Tibbets wanted to be sure the men watching the flights got the message: “So easy a girl can fly it.” Dougherty and Johnson then went on a goodwill mission in their Ladybird. They flew generals, pilots, gunners, bombardiers, and all the other members of a bomber crew around New Mexico. “At stake was the ability of that aircraft to deliver the bomb it was built to fly,” Dougherty said later. “It made me want to do a perfect job.”127 And she did.
We completed our checkout by the end of the third day (despite an engine fire during the first flight) and thereafter demonstrated our ship, Ladybird, decorated with a painting of Fifinella on the nose, at the very heavy bomber training base at Alamogordo, New Mexico. After a short time, the purpose of the flights had been achieved. The male flight crews, their egos challenged, approached the B-29 with new enthusiasm and found it to be not a beast, but a smooth, delicately rigged, and responsive ship.128
Before long, though, the women were ordered to stop their tour. The head of the Air Staff in Washington, DC, was concerned that they were “putting the big football players to shame.”129 That was the end of Dora and Didi’s flying career in the B-29. Only about a hundred pilots anywhere on Earth knew how to handle the Superfortress safely. Now the two who’d been assigned to convince other pilots to train on the plane were grounded as soon as the job was done. They were grounded because they were women and their ability as pilots might embarrass someone.130
The B-29 soon proved its worth. In March 1945 over three hundred B-29s took off from Saipan and flew about three thousand miles to Japan and back in the biggest air attack in history. The B-29 would bring the war closer to an end.
The United States was the first country to develop an atomic bomb. It was tested in New Mexico in July 1945, two months after Germany’s surrender. Japan had continued to fight the war, and military leaders advised President Harry Truman (FDR had died in April 1945) that an invasion to defeat Japan would take another year of war and cost at least another one hundred thousand American lives. Truman decided to use the atomic bomb to force Japan’s immediate surrender. Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets was chosen to fly the B-29 bomber that would carry and drop the bomb on the city of Hiroshima. He called the plane the Enola Gay after his mother. On August 6, 1945, Tibbets and his crew dropped a single bomb more powerful than the combined force of all the bombs already dropped in the war. It destroyed 90 percent of Hiroshima and instantly killed over eighty thousand people. Tens of thousands more later died of radiation exposure. On August 9 the United States dropped a second bomb, on the city of Nagasaki. Six days later Japan surrendered. The nuclear age had begun.
• • •
At about the same time that women started flying the big bombers, Ann Baumgartner at Camp Davis learned she was being transferred. She certainly wasn’t sorry to leave Davis. The harassment and dangerous discrimination there was nearly unbearable. Ann had done target towing, flown searchlight flights, and piloted drone mother ships. Now she and another Wasp got orders to report to Wright Field in Ohio to become experimental test pilots.
Wright Field was the biggest air force airplane testing center in the world. Engineers there experimented with every one of the million-plus parts of an aircraft to find the best materials and the best, most efficient designs. They experimented with pilots, too. How much force was safe when a plane took off? How high could a pilot fly before the lack of oxygen in the air had serious negative effects? How cold could a pilot be and still do the job? And did men and women react the same way to pressure, oxygen levels, and temperatures? That’s where Ann Baumgartner and Betty Greene came in.
The two Wasps rode in a B-17 bomber above forty thousand feet with sensors taped to their bodies to measure temperature. They went into a pressure chamber and practiced writing their names in lower and lower oxygen levels to see the effect on their brains and coordination. They tried various kinds of equipment under different weather conditions. And finally, in the least glamorous assignment anywhere, they worked with a doctor to develop a way for women to urinate while strapped into a pilot’s seat.
As Wasp Frances Green had learned when she almost died from lack of oxygen in a B-17 during training, the simple act of peeing had proved to be one of the most complicated problems Wasps faced. One woman said it was the worst thing she had to deal with as a pilot. The problem was especially serious in fighter planes, trainer planes, and other aircraft that had no toilets. Many had space for just one pilot and no other crew. Men used a tube they could slip into their unzipped flight suit without getting up. It collected their urine into a bag, which they disposed of later. A tube didn’t work for women, no matter how many designs engineers tried.131
Unfortunately, Ann, Betty, and the female doctor they worked with couldn’t develop a good solution either. Ann found that even the best design they came up with was inconvenient and difficult to use. Most Wasps chose to avoid taking in liquids before long flights. But aside from the discomfort that caused, dehydration is dangerous and can make a person’s thinking fuzzy, something a pilot can’t afford. Needing fluids without having a good way to urinate made for a constant balancing act—one Ann wished she could solve.132
In every other way Ann’s work at Wright Field was a great success. Betty Greene returned to Camp Davis when her assignment at Wright Field ended, but Ann Baumgartner accepted an offer to stay. She became the only woman to perform experimental military test flights at Wright, which made her the only woman pilot lucky enough to spend time with the elderly gentleman who frequently came to the test flight hangar to talk with the young flyers.133 That elderly gentleman was none other than Orville Wright.
Still active and interested in new technologies and advances in flight, Orville Wright was particularly keen on the jet propulsion engines being tested at Wright Field, named for Orville and his brother Wilbur, who had died more than thirty years earlier. Engineers in Europe and the United States had been experimenting with jet, or turbine, engines for some time. They knew that a jet-powered plane would be able to fly faster than a plane powered by propellers. They believed jets would open a new chapter in flight. But any practical use of jet engines was so new, they hadn’t been showcased at the New York World’s Fair, which had closed less than four years earlier. The jet engine was now nearly ready for pilots to try, because World War II, like most wars, had pushed governments, scientists, and engineers to put all their efforts into developing war-related technologies as quickly as possible.
The engines in a propeller plane create energy that turns the propellers. The propellers then produce thrust. In a jet the engines pull in air, compress it, and then use fuel to combust it (combustion occurs when certain kinds of fuel react with oxygen to release heat—this is why many fires can be extinguished by cutting off their oxygen supply, or smothering them). The exhaust produced by the combustion shoots out the back of the engine much faster than the colder air coming into the engines. This creates the thrust that pushes the plane forward. Think about running. As the runner sets her foot down, the muscles in her leg push, or thrust, her body forward.
Orville Wright wanted to see what this next generation of aircraft would be like. “Aviation will soar ahead,” he told Ann, “though its progress between our 1903 flight and today still takes my breath away. Women even fly military planes now!”134 Wright had no hesitation about women flying military planes. He asked Ann, “What kind of girl would want to fly an experimental jet? A pioneer like me, maybe?”135
Ann would never put herself in the same category as Orville Wright. He’d invented the airplane, for goodness’ sake. He’d almost started aviation. But she wondered if she might be a kind of pioneer too. She got an answer in the fall of 1944 when she became a pioneer among pioneers as the only woman in a group of pilots scheduled to test-fly the Army Air Forces’ first jet.
Ann wasn’t near the head of the line waiting to fly the strange-looking craft on that bright October morning. That privilege was reserved for the colonels and majors who ran the testing program at Wright Field. Waiting was okay with her. No one knew exactly what to expect of a jet, including Ann. Watching someone else take off first seemed like a good idea.
It was the deafening noise of the jet engines everyone noticed right away. Their painfully high pitch was different from prop engines and sounded powerful in a way none of them had heard anywhere else. Ann and the others watched as the jet started taxiing on its first takeoff. It used more and more of the runway as it built speed. Would it ever leave the ground? And what about landing? They were told, “You’ll have to land first time around. The slower acceleration of power in the jet will not get you off and around again.”136 No second chances. Ann hoped she was ready.
Finally it was her turn. She guided the jet down the runway in its long takeoff and felt the plane start to climb. But before it reached altitude, the roar of the engines stopped suddenly, as if they had stalled—as if they had shut down without warning. Ann felt a second of panic before realizing the plane was still climbing into the sky. Right. The noise of a jet engine is behind the pilot, where the turbines push the plane forward. She relaxed.
Ann’s first experience of flying in near silence was astonishing. Something she would never forget. For thirty minutes or so she flew the only jet in American skies. And she knew she was the first woman to do it. However, she didn’t know she would fly such a plane only once. Or that it would be nearly ten years before another woman flew a jet.137 She didn’t know her days as a WASP were coming to an end.
• • •
Baumgartner wasn’t alone. Betty Gillies, Nancy Love, and the other Wasps flying huge bombers, pursuit planes, and trainer planes didn’t know they’d be going home soon either. With factories continuing to send planes off assembly lines all over the country, men still being drafted into the military by the thousands, and a new group of women just beginning their classes at Avenger Field, every WASP and WASP trainee received two letters—one from Jacqueline Cochran and one from General Arnold. Both used gentle, kind words, but their message was harsh: The WASP program was over. By the end of the year, just two months away, there would be no more Wasps. Hap Arnold wrote, “I have directed that the WASP program be inactivated and all WASP be released on 20 December 1944.”138
