12 12 Though it must have weighed heavily on her mind, Gertrude didn’t let her dilemma of whether or not to marry Henry affect her work. She graduated from fighter school in Brownsville and was given her coveted white card, which meant she would be among the 126 WASPs who flew the fastest and most powerful single-engine American fighter planes. And she would be ferrying P-51s.
By 1944 about half of the WASP graduates were ferrying airplanes. Coast-to-coast flights could take several days, depending on the weather and on how fast the plane flew. The day of a WASP ferry pilot was long and unpredictable. At some bases a WASP might not know what type of plane she would be flying the next day—a multiengine bomber or smaller planes, such as Piper Cubs and liaison aircraft.
For Gertrude, ferrying Mustangs offered a vagabond’s life. While Dallas’s Love Field and the Fifth Ferry Group was her official base and her footlockers were there, she seldom stayed at Love. Most of the time she was either in the air or waiting to pick up a new Mustang from the North American manufacturing plant in Los Angeles. When waiting to take delivery of a plane, she stayed with the Sixth Ferry Group WASPs stationed in Long Beach. On flight days she would take a military bus from Long Beach to the North American plant 20 miles north. If there was any place she called home during those hectic months, it was the cockpit of a Mustang.
“Follow Me!” From left: WASPs May Ball, Jana Crawford, and Mary Estill head for a P-51 at Scott Army Air Base in Gary, Indiana, 1944. Courtesy of the WASP Archive, Texas Woman’s University Libraries
Weather could extend her trips east. It often took three days to deliver a plane to an Eastern port city. One night she might stay over in Phoenix and the next in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. After delivery, she flew back to Los Angeles by hitching a ride on a westbound military plane. She also had clearance to bump military men, even generals, from commercial flights, and sometimes she did. When she arrived in Los Angeles there was always another Mustang to be flown east. After a night’s rest, she was off again. She was free of regimentation and on her own. She loved every minute of it.
A WASP reporting to the ferrying flight line looked at the board to see what plane she’d been assigned and its point of delivery. Then she planned her route and her RONs—the places she would land to remain overnight.
Besides ferrying, WASPs oriented pilots returning from overseas to new aircraft models and to the latest technical innovations. Some WASPs also trained radio operators to use the latest equipment and procedures. Some flew low-level night missions, dropping flares on troop training positions and gun emplacements. WASPs flew planes to check the weather, and they flew for bombardier schools and flight engineering tests. WASPs flew hospital planes. They taught instructors how to teach new pilots. They flew attack feints to train combat pilots. They were at the controls of administrative flights involving high military and government officials.
Towing large cloth target banners that were fired at by gunners using live ammunition was another WASP assignment, and it could be dangerous. Mabel Rawlinson was a graduate of 43-W-3 on duty towing targets for army antiaircraft gunnery practice. She was shot down by friendly fire on August 23, 1944, at Camp Davis, North Carolina. They heard her cries when they tried to pull her from the burning wreckage. She died later in a hospital.
Some WASPs helped Russia fight the war. It is possible that Gertrude was among those who delivered P-39 Airacobras and P-63 King Cobras from the Bell Aircraft Corporation in Buffalo, New York, to Great Falls, Montana. There they would then be taken by both male and female Russian pilots to Alaska. After refueling, the Russians flew them across the Bering Sea to bases in the Soviet Union. The P-39 was highly regarded in Russia, where it scored more aerial combat victories than any other plane used by the Soviets against the Germans. WASP Hazel Ying Lee, flying a P-63 King Cobra, was killed in a crash at Great Falls delivering this plane to the Russians.
Airplane ferrying had been the main reason the air force wanted women to fly. Planes produced in the United States had to be flown from factories for deliveries to ports of embarkation and at other places in the country, as well as to Canada. A plane delivered to a port would be partially dismantled and placed in a protective cover before it was put aboard a ship for transport to a theater of the war.
By the time the WASPs were disbanded, they had delivered 12,652 airplanes to bases all over the United States. By 1944 WASPs “were ferrying the majority of all pursuit planes and were so integrated into the Ferry Division that their disbandment caused delays in pursuit deliveries,” wrote Molly Merryman in Clipped Wings.
During their brief existence, WASPs flew more than 60 million hours in America’s defense.
P-51Ds in formation. Courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force
Byrd Howell Granger, author of On Final Approach, wrote of a meeting between a male pilot and a WASP in Great Falls. The young man seemed impressed by the Russian women, waiting in their baggy suits to pick up P-39s to fly to Russia: “Say, now, have you seen those Russian women pilots? Aren’t they really something?”
A very tired WASP, hunched over on her heels with her back against a wall, thought: Who do you think flew the darned things here? This same WASP flew the route from Buffalo to Great Falls often, and sometimes she gave lipsticks to the Russian women. “Don’t speak the same language, but our smiles speak just the same,” wrote Granger.
WASP Anne Noggle (44-W-1) wrote in her book A Dance with Death, “All WASPs wondered how we would fare if we were called upon to fly in combat. We talked about it in our barracks during our six months of flight training…. Our questions and speculation were purely hypothetical.”
For some women, combat was not hypothetical at all. Russian women are credited for being the first women to fly in combat. Russian women had a long tradition of serving alongside men as warriors. The legendary Amazons were a tribe of women who dominated the south of Russia during ancient times. During the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, one of the best-known fighting groups was the Women’s Battalion of Death.
In Russia, women pilots had a very different experience during World War II than American WASPs. From the first days of Russia’s invasion by Germany in June 1941, more than 1,000 Soviet women pilots climbed into cockpits and fought ferociously. They frequently shot down superior-performing German planes. They created mayhem by bombing and strafing ground troops. Many Russian women pilots were killed in combat.
In America, although not engaged in combat, WASPs were gaining respect and lustrous reputations as they fulfilled their duties. Hundreds of letters of commendation and favorable reports came from every station where WASPs operated. The Air Medal was given to Women’s Air Ferry Service founder Nancy Harkness Love. Jackie Cochran was presented with the Distinguished Service Medal.
General Hap Arnold wrote that their “very successful record of accomplishment has proved that in any future total effort the nation can count on thousands of its young women to fly any of its aircraft.”
Along with her own growing mastery of all types of planes and assignments, the glowing reputation of the WASPs must have made Gertrude feel proud and confident, and made her decision about marriage that much harder.
