In 1942, the United States was faced with a severe shortage of pilots, and leaders gambled on an experimental program to help fill the void: Train women to fly military aircraft so male pilots could be released for combat duty overseas. The group of female pilots was called the Women Airforce Service Pilots - WASP for short
WASP (from left) Frances Green, Margaret Kirchner, Ann Waldner and Blanche Osborn leave their B-17, called Pistol Packin' Mama, during ferry training at Lockbourne Army Air Force base in Ohio. They're carrying their parachutes.
If they died doing their jobs, they didn't get a military funeral. They were pioneering civilian volunteers in WWII (1942–1944), totaling 1,074 women who flew over 60 million miles.
They ferried 12,000+ aircraft, towed targets for gunnery training, and instructed, all to free up male pilots for combat. Though they served, they were denied military status until 1977.
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Very cool.
ReplyDeleteThese were the real ground breakers in the US. Russia used women as combat pilots in WW 2; it was an all hands effort for them, but after the war they restricted them again. The US Navy started allowing women as military pilots but not combat pilots in 1974. There were a lot of non-combat flying jobs to be done. One of those women, Rosemary Mariner, was the wife of my on-wing in A-4s in the strike pipeline back in the early 1980's. They were both good mentors. The first time I carrier qualified my airplane broke and the carrier was full of men just coming back from cruise (I am a woman), so they put me in medical quarantine for the night. Now I think about 12% of Naval Aviation are women, and such things that these women faced are ancient history.
These women took the easy jobs that an airman burned out from combat could have done. Millions of men performed the deadly training and combat jobs, yet a bare thousand women are held up as the symbol of sacrifice in WW2. As a percentage of the total force at that time, they were but a rounding error.
ReplyDeleteWhy? Because they weren't flying into flak and facing dozens of 109s and Zeroes everyday.
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