WOMEN OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

In America the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) was a women’s pilot organisation employed by the United States federal civil service which was formed on the 5th August 1943. The WASPs were attached to the United States Army Air Force but did not have any military status. The female pilots were required to have flying licences and experience before being accepted. In order to obtain their wings and fly military aircraft their training was basically the same as the male aviation cadets but they were not trained for combat, only combat-like conditions. They were taught the manoeuvres necessary to recover from any position. Their role was to fly aircraft from the factories to military bases in order to free male pilots for combat. Over 25,000 women applied but only 1074 of the 1830 who were accepted completed the training. Thirty-eight WASP members had lost their lives when the organisation was disbanded in December 1944. In 1977 the WASPs were granted veteran status for their service during the Second World War. On the 10^th May 2010 the three hundred surviving WASPs travelled to Washington to accept the Congressional Gold Medal which President Barack Obama had awarded them the previous year. The following female pilots are a very small section of American women who made a huge contribution to the Second World War.

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Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran was named Bessie Lee Pittman and was born on the 11^th May 1906 in Florida. Her family moved to Georgia when she was eight years old. She grew up in poverty with little formal education. She married Robert Cochran when she was fourteen and they had a son in 1925 and the couple divorced in 1927. She had trained as a beautician and pursued her career in Alabama, Florida and in 1931 to New York where she took the name of Jacqueline, but maintained name of Cochran and was known to her friends as ‘Jackie’. In 1932 she took her first flying lesson and obtained her flying licence within three weeks whilst working as a cosmetics saleswoman. Her future husband, Floyd Odium told her that flying would help her to be one step ahead of the competition. In 1935 she started a cosmetic company by the name of Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics which prospered and she sold it in 1963. Jackie pioneered the field of aviation and was one of the prominent racing pilots of her generation. Before America entered the Second World War, she was part of an organisation that ferried American built aircraft to Britain under the “Wings for Britain” scheme. Jackie had an idea whereby female pilots could ferry military aircraft from factory to air force base, similar to Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) to enable male pilots to fight. She travelled to Britain to see her plan in action, by volunteering for service with the Royal Air Force (RAF) through the ATA which was actively recruiting women. Upon returning to America she refined her plans and eventually Jackie and twenty-five handpicked female pilots embarked for England where they trained and ferried aircraft whilst with the ATA. In America while Jackie was in England the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) was formed under the direction of Nancy Harkness Love. Upon hearing of this formation she returned to America. She lobbied Lieutenant General Henry Arnold, Chief of the Air Corps, for expanded flying opportunities for women as her experience in Britain showed her what could be achieved. Arnold sanctioned the creation of the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) headed by Jackie. With Nancy Love as head of the ferrying section and Jackie as director the WAFS and WFTD merged in 1943 to create the Women Aircraft Service Pilots (WASP). From August 1943 to December 1944, Jackie supervised the training of hundreds of women pilots. For her wartime service she received the Distinguished Service Medal (DSM) in 1945. At the end of the war she was hired by a magazine to report on global post-war events. She witnessed the Japanese surrender and attended the Nuremburg Trials in Germany.  In September 1948 Jackie joined the U.S. Air Force Reserve as lieutenant colonel and retired in 1970 as a full colonel. Just prior to and during her career in the Air Force Reserve she received three awards for the Distinguished Flying Cross for various achievements from 1947 to 1964. She died in her home in California on the 8^th August 1980 after a lifetime of aviation achievements.  In a typical rags to riches story Jackie Cochran rose from a poverty stricken childhood to become one of history’s most accomplished female aviators.

Betty Gillies (nee Huyler) was born in 1908 at Long Island to a fairly prosperous family. She was a pioneering American aviator and the second female to join the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) and the first to qualify to fly military aircraft. In 1928 she had enrolled in a nursing school and had her first flying lesson, and achieved her first solo flight in November 1928. She was issued with a private licence in May 1929 after which she purchased her own aircraft. In 1930 she married Bud Gillies, vice president of the Grumman Aircraft Corporation and continued flying to earn a commercial pilots licence. Women pilots were ready to take an active part as necessary when the United States entered the Second World War. When Betty received a telegram from her friend Nancy Love to join her at WAFS she left immediately. She had been flying for fourteen years with over 1,400 flying hours and was the first female pilot to qualify for the WAFS which was later incorporated into the Women Aircraft Service Pilots (WASP). When Nancy left to start another branch of WAFS Betty was promoted to squadron leader of the 2^nd Ferrying Group based in Delaware. Her role was to organise the ferrying of aircraft to the various air bases for dispatch to Britain and France. Betty and Nancy Love were the first women to qualify and fly the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. After the war her family moved to California where they had three children. Betty became a ham radio operator working from her home connecting calls to ships in the Pacific Ocean and maintaining contact with U.S. Navy personnel in the Antarctic. In 1964 she was appointed the first Federal Aviation Administration Women’s Advisory Committee by President Lyndon B.  Johnson. She received a Paul Tissandier Diploma from the Federal Aeronautique Internationale in 1977 and the National Aeronautic Association Elder Statesman of Aviation Award in 1982. Betty Gillies was a pioneer in aviation history and after lifetime of flight she passed away aged 90 in 1998.

Born in  Michigan on the 14^th February 1914, Nancy Love (nee Harkness) was a pilot, test pilot, air racer and creator of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). She was the first woman to fly American high performance aircraft. Financed by her doctor father Nancy earned her private pilot’s licence at the age of 16 years. She began working in the aviation industry and finally resigning in late 1935 from the position of pilot for the Bureau of Air Commerce. In January 1936 she married Robert Love, owner of one of the companies she has worked for previously. She competed in two national air races after her honeymoon but focussed on work within the aviation industry. She returned to the Bureau of Air Commerce where she refined her close attention to the details of flying. She devised check lists for her pre-flight schedules. In the autumn of 1938 she was approached by the directors of the newly formed Gwinn Aircar Corporation as a woman to sell its new product, a small aircraft with a tricycle landing gear. Instead of a selling post she was offered the position of test pilot as the tricycle landing gear represented an entirely new technological approach to a tail-wheel landing. At Gwinn, she helped to develop the landing to become function of the aircraft operation, and to learn how to test an aircraft’s performance to its limit. By 1940 she was a member of the Civil Air Patrol where she helped in the ferrying an aircraft from America via Canada to France. She gained valuable experience by ferrying new planes to Canada for dispatch to Britain and France. Her original proposal to form the Air Corps Planes Division was rejected. The proposal was the growing need of qualified male ferry pilots could be replaced by experienced women pilots. After America entered the war, her husband Bob who was a major in the reserves, was assigned as deputy chief of staff at Air Corps Ferrying Command headquarters and Nancy became an operations planner. Facing a shortage of trained pilots to ferry aircraft from the factories the authorities recognised Nancy was the ideal person to organise and lead the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) in the summer of 1942. The WAFS merged with Jacqueline Cochran’s WFTD in August 1943 to become the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) with Nancy as commander of the ferrying division and Jacqueline Cochran as director and training schedule. In 1944 the WASPs were disbanded and Nancy continued to work for the Air Transport Command. At the end of the war Nancy and her husband Bob were simultaneously decorated for their efforts during the war. She received the Air Medal and her husband received the Distinguished Services Medal, adding to his previous awards. After the war she had three daughters but continued as an aviator leader. In 1948, after the creation pf the United States Air Force she was given the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. Nancy died of cancer in 1976 at the age of 62 years, and she did not live to see the WASPs being accorded military status in 1979. Nancy was the champion for the recognition as military veterans for the women who had served as WASPs. Nancy Love was commemorated on the Michigan Aviation Hall of Fame in 1989.

Ola Mildred Rexroat was the only Native American woman to serve in WASP. Her father was a white publisher and editor and her mother was an Oglala-Sioux from Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and she was born on the 28^th August 1917 in Argonia, Kansas. Her family moved from town to town and “Millie” spent a lot of time visiting her grandmother on the reservation in South Dakota. She graduated from St. Mary’s Indian High School for Girls in South Dakota in 1932. She drifted from different jobs until studying and finally achieving a Bachelor’s Degree for Art in 1939. When the United States entered the war in December 1941 she and her mother went to Washington DC and Millie found employment at the Army War College. She heard about the WASP but did not have any flying experience and so she learnt to fly at the local flight school. She was sufficiently qualified to apply to the WASP after thirty-five hours of lessons to obtain her flying licence. Accepted into the WASP Millie graduated from training in 1944. She was stationed at Eagle Pass Army Airfield where she took on the dangerous job of towing targets for the male pilots to practise gunnery. After WASP disbanded, she joined the Air Force Reserves and she was recalled into active service during the Korean War. Millie worked as an air traffic controller in San Antonio and Albuquerque then spent approximately twenty years at Santa Fe Municipal Airport. She briefly re-joined Civil Air Patrol in which she was active in the 1950s. She served two terms as President of the North American Indian Women’s Association as she never forgot her Indian heritage. On the 30^th June 2017, aged 99 Millie died in Hot Springs, South Dakota.

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