Sky Girls

by Gene Nora Jessen

  The idea of women flying in the military was not on anyone’s radar in the United States in the late thirties. Charles Lindbergh, touring the Soviet Union in 1938, was dismayed to find women flying in the Russian Air Force. He grumbled, “I do not see how it can work very well. After all, there is a God-made difference between men and women that even the Soviet Union can’t eradicate.”

  In fact, Russian women made a disproportionate contribution to their country’s war effort. One of the bravest fighting groups of World War II consisted of Russian women. They flew old, World War I surplus, slow, open-cockpit airplanes in air battles, particularly in the defense of Leningrad. Since they couldn’t possibly outfly modern airplanes flown by the Germans, the women flew at night with no navigation or position lights so the Germans couldn’t see to shoot them down. When elite German pilots were downed and survived, they were mortified to learn that the deed was accomplished by a woman. The humiliated Luftwaffe pilots swore that the women who flew in the dark were witches, and they became known as the Night Witches.

  Upon their entry into World War II, the British immediately recognized that airplanes don’t know the difference between male and female pilots. Though the Brits weren’t ready to send women into combat, they readily acknowledged the need for more pilots of every kind. To join the British Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), 275 “Yanks” had crossed the Atlantic to ferry new combat airplanes from the factory to bases and to maintenance, freeing combat pilots for their primary assignment. Although civilians, the pilots were outfitted in uniforms and held rank. The ATA eventually numbered thirty-five hundred personnel from twenty-four countries, of which six hundred and fifty were pilots. One hundred and seventy-four were killed.

  Twenty-five highly qualified American women were recruited by Jacqueline Cochran for the ATA even prior to U.S. entry into the war. The women flew one hundred and twenty different aircraft—small, large, and huge. Hazards were very real even without flying combat missions. Since all aircraft observed radio silence and updated en route weather was not available, the sarcastic aviation “must go” adage was firmly in place: “The weather doesn’t matter since we’re going anyway!” Flying in crummy weather was the norm. Barrage balloons surrounded major cities and airports, and they were held aloft by cable to deter low-flying German airplanes bombing and strafing.

  If ATA pilots took off during an attack, the barrage balloons were lowered for them along a specific path. Getting a green light invariably meant taking off in low visibility and holding a compass heading with assurance that the obstructions had been pulled down along their narrow route. That kind of flying took not only skill but faith. Britain’s own famed pilot, Amy Johnson Mollison, was killed flying for the ATA. She was seen parachuting through layers of clouds, landed in water, and her body was never recovered. Her husband was convinced that she had been shot down.

  When the United States entered the war, unprecedented numbers of pilots were needed, and the need could not be met. The Army Air Force Ferry Command was allowed to utilize women on a noncombatant status, recruiting twenty-three pilots, each with at least five hundred flying hours. This small group became the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) under the command of Nancy Harkness Love. These women were already experienced pilots, easily able to move into the assorted airplanes, releasing male pilots for combat.

  Tiny Betty Gillies, who used wooden block rudder extensions so that she could reach the rudder pedals, became the first WAFS member. The pilot described her need for rudder blocks for the Lockheed P-38: “If I had put enough cushions behind me to reach the rudder, my nose would smash right into the gun panel.”

  Cornelia Fort was the second WAFS member. Fort had been a flight instructor in Honolulu, teaching a student in a Piper Cub on December 7, 1941. During the training flight, Fort noticed a military airplane coming right at her. She grabbed the controls away from her student to make a steep turn away. Looking back at the airplane that had come so close, she saw red balls on the tops of the wings. She actually heard bullets all around her.

  Fort suddenly realized that an entire formation with the emblem of the Rising Sun was over Pearl Harbor. There were bombs exploding in the water and on ships, and parked airplanes were blowing up in neat lines at the airport. She made it home safely, simply because she was not a worthy target for more than one pass. However, others of the school’s little yellow Cubs washed up on shore within days, casualties of war. When Fort joined the WAFS, she said, “I, for one, am profoundly grateful that my one talent, my only knowledge, flying, happens to be of use to my country when it is needed. That’s all the luck I ever hope to have.”

  While ferrying a BT-13, Cornelia Fort was reported to have been struck by a show-off army pilot; however, the army denied any military involvement despite witness reports. What is known is that Cornelia Fort gave her life for her country.

  Director of the Women’s’ Training Program, Jacqueline Cochran was instrumental in bringing lower-time female pilots into the Ferry Command, ferrying aircraft and towing targets pulled behind the airplanes for gunnery practice. Yes, some target-tow airplanes were hit. It was a dangerous business.

  The Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) evolved and absorbed the WAFS. Walt Disney created a symbol for the WASP, a lady gremlin with wings named Fifinella. The pilots later, with good humor, called themselves the “Order of Fifinella.” Dependence upon the WASP grew as the women flew everything built in the United States.

  In a training demonstration, WASP Dorothea Moorman and Dora Dougherty were checked out in the B-29 Superfortress by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr., later-famed pilot of the A-bomb airplane Enola Gay. Their mission was to demonstrate the behemoth with its crew-killer reputation to reluctant transitioning male pilots. They flew the maligned “beast” to Alamogordo, New Mexico, to demonstrate the airplane to flight crews there. Dougherty reported, “Flight crews, their male egos challenged, approached the aircraft with renewed enthusiasm.”

  Was the WASP program successful? It was. Safety and reliability were outstanding, and the purpose of freeing male pilots for other flying surely was accomplished. Civilians Barbara Erickson (London) and Nancy Love received the Air Medal, and Jacqueline Cochran received the Distinguished Service Medal.

  Jacqueline Cochran went on to fly a Northrop T-38 jet and break every speed, altitude, and distance record for women. In 1962, she established more than thirty speed records in a Lockheed Jetstar, then flew 1,429 miles per hour in a Lockheed F-104G Starfighter. These airplanes were not readily available to other women, but Cochran’s connections with the military opened the door for her.

  Jackie Cochran’s achievements belied her origins. Orphaned at an early age, the little girl’s schooling ended at the third grade. She had worked in a beauty parlor, which led to a successful cosmetics business of her own. The always hard-charging Cochran had learned to fly at age twenty in three-weeks’ time at Roosevelt Field, Long Island, simply to run her business more efficiently by not being dependent upon airline schedules. Competition fever was a natural for Cochran. She won the Bendix Race and became a multiple Harmon Trophy winner. She served the Ninety-Nines as president.

  Cochran’s one failure was not being able to have the WASP become part of the armed forces. Though under the control of the military, wearing uniforms, and carrying weapons, members of the WASP were never attached to the military. As a result, if a pilot was killed in training or in service—and thirty-eight were—the women had to take up a collection to send the body home. There were never any benefits until 1979, when Congress finally passed legislation for veteran’s benefits for the surviving members of the WASP.

  Hanna Reitsch was probably the most astounding woman pilot to come out of the war, and she can still be named one of the greatest test pilots of all time. Reitsch was a German-Austrian who started flying at age eighteen in gliders. Her first world record came early in her training when, totally unplanned, she stayed aloft for over five hours in a glider, establi
shing a world record for women.

  Reitsch abandoned plans for a career in medicine and dedicated herself to aviation. She was the first woman to fly jet airplanes, rocket planes, and helicopters, the first pilot to fly a glider over the Alps, and the only woman to fly a robot V-1, commonly known as a buzz bomb, modified for pilot control. During World War II, Reitsch tested all types of military airplanes for the Luftwaffe.

  An intriguing chapter of her life concerns the final days of World War II. It has been reported that Hanna Reitsch flew Hitler to safety in a helicopter and that he fled to South America in a submarine, but she said that was not true. She has described her last flight into Berlin, landing on the street, and meeting the demented Fuerher in his bunker. On the last day of Hitler’s life, Reitsch escaped the bunker in a tank amid falling buildings and gunfire. Into the 1970s, this remarkable woman was still setting glider and helicopter records.

  INTERNATIONAL PILOTS

  A Korean woman, Kyung O. Kim, whose name translated to “Beautiful Golden Tree Castle,” startled her traditional father with her wish to fly. She learned to fly in the Republic of Korea (ROK) Air Force, which during the Korean War was composed of 34,999 males and one female. Beautiful Golden Tree Castle became a captain in the ROK and carried classified documents to and from military airports in L-19s. The lone Korean female civilian pilot came to the United States in 1957 for college, and she met a host of sister pilots who became intrigued with her dream of flight for other Korean women in a country with no civilian airplanes.

  The New York/New Jersey Ninety-Nines began a project called a “Colt for Kim,” which spread nationally and internationally. They started collecting S&H green stamps to purchase a Piper Colt trainer for teaching Korean women to fly. In 1962, Kyung O. Kim was presented with the keys to her Colt. The woman who had arrived in the U.S. with neither English nor any path to her dream returned home with a college degree and an airplane, plus the solid support of the American aviation community.

  Australia’s “First Lady of Aviation,” Nancy Bird Walton, was a barnstormer in New South Wales. She described early flight planning done by telephone: “Follow the river to the fork, look for the sheep shed, then look for a gate with fresh droppings around it, the strip is just a bit further.” Having learned to fly in 1933, Nancy Bird (her name was an interesting coincidence) became involved with the Far West Children’s Health Scheme. Children of the station hands, shearers, and boundary-riders in Australia’s distant western regions suffered from various crippling illnesses caused by dust and flies, their illnesses amplified by the absence of fruits and vegetables. Nancy Bird used her airplane to carry children out for medical attention and to respond to all manner of emergencies.

  Flying conditions included desolate country with no navigational aids, three-digit temperatures, and dust storms that howled for days. Bird had to be prepared to handle breakdowns and emergency landings herself. Though the people of the outback had seen airplanes come in before, their experience did not include the startling sight of a slip of a girl climbing out of the cockpit. One station laborer exclaimed in astonishment, “My God! It’s a woman!” and Nancy Bird adopted that exclamation as the title for her book. She laughed, “Many of the stock-buyers needed a couple of whiskies before they had enough Dutch courage to fly with me.” Always an optimist, Nancy Bird observed that “above the clouds the sun is always shining.”

  When in Australia, I commented to Nancy Bird how friendly Australians were when they heard my American accent. “Of course,” she said, “the British had their own troubles in the war and were unable to come to our aid in our time of great peril. You Americans helped us, and we’ve never forgotten it.”

  Britain produced daring and colorful women pilots in the early years, particularly Amy Johnson Mollison, who flew solo from Britain to Australia in 1930 in an open-cockpit biplane, taking nineteen days for the task. Take out a world globe and trace your finger along that route, imagining nineteen days in that frangible airplane over jungle, desert, and ocean. Upon the brave pioneer’s arrival in Sydney, all six of Australia’s women pilots joined into a formation flight to meet and escort her. Amy, the U.K.’s Amelia Earhart, died while serving her country in the ATA during World War II.

  The colorful Irish lass, Lady Mary Heath, withdrew from the 1929 Women’s Air Derby, but competed in the pylon races in Cleveland that year. She had soloed her Avro Avian on the Cape Town to London route, a treacherous flight in 1928. Later, she flew seventy thousand miles with KLM as second pilot in Fokker Tri-Motors.

  Lady Heath fought the bureaucratic battle in Britain for women who followed, with the English Air Ministry skeptical about entrusting passengers’ lives to a woman. Finally, a committee resolved the issue of physical tests for women pilots, and the athletic Lady Heath accomplished the breakthrough. Nancy Bird Walton loved to point out a condition of employment in English aviation in the late twenties: “Must be of the male sex.”

  Strikingly beautiful Sheila Scott had been an actress and fashion model before her addiction to flight. She became Britain’s first pilot to fly around the world solo, doing so in a single-engine Piper Comanche 260 in 1966, just the first of three global journeys. Achieving over one hundred world records was no small task. However, her 1971 polar flight was the most remarkable and difficult.

  Scott undertook a thirty-four-thousand–mile flight from equator to equator via the north pole. NASA tracked her Piper Aztec via satellite to prove that she did actually fly right over the true north pole, which is hard to find exactly since the magnetic compass doesn’t work there. Scott carried instrumentation for three experiments in the environmental, biomedical, and positioning fields. The data was transmitted via the satellite Nimbus to the Goddard Space Center in Maryland. Her major awards included the Harmon Trophy and the Britannia Trophy, then Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth decorated Scott with the Order of the British Empire (as she did Nancy Bird Walton). Scott authored three books describing her spectacular flights. Only cancer could shoot her down.

  WORLD FLIGHTS OF THE SIXTIES

  Was it prosperity? The women’s movement? More women flying? I don’t know, but the sixties seemed to be the time for world flights—the completion of Amelia Earhart’s disrupted 1937 circling of the globe.

  When Jerrie Mock complained of momentary boredom in 1963, her husband suggested, “Why don’t you fly around the world?” This led Mock to resume Earhart’s attempted around-the-world flight. The mystery of Earhart’s disappearance had generated a light industry for historians, researchers, promoters of wild theories (and the sale of their books), snake oil salesmen, and charismatic authors of dumb conjecture.

  Jerrie Mock wasn’t really interested in solving the mystery or disproving that Amelia Earhart was living with Elvis in Wisconsin. She saw an incomplete project. Unfinished. In default. She committed to fulfilling Amelia Earhart’s dream, which had been laying fallow for some twenty-seven years.

  Along with a partner, Jerrie and Russ Mock owned an eleven-year-old single-engine Cessna 180. She chose to make the flight in this small airplane because that’s what they had. I met Jerrie when she was a 700-hour private, instrument-rated pilot. She was getting fuel tanks installed in Wichita, Kansas, for ocean-crossing range, which left room for only one five-foot-two-inch pilot. Of course, the skeptics were certain there was no way she could pull this off.

  Though she was barely edging into her fortieth year, the press patronizingly dubbed Mock “the flying grandmother.” True, the grandmother owned a mighty slim logbook for such an ambitious flight, but she knew her airplane, and she was a quick study of the volumes of information necessary to marshal that little airplane around the world. Complication intervened in the person of Joan Merriam Smith, a twenty-seven-year-old likewise diminutive dynamo, who had fallen under the same spell. Neither woman knew the plans of the other. When the media discovered that two record flights were underway, they, of course, turned it into a race.

  Smith was planning a longer flight than M
ock, sticking more to Earhart’s route along the equator. Of the two, Joan Smith’s scenario made more sense, since her Piper Apache had two engines and she was the more experienced, professional pilot. On the other hand, the airplane was old, and Murphy’s Law was firmly in place. For Mock, everything that could go wrong, did.

  Smith got off first on March 17, 1964, with Mock following two days later. Both suffered mechanical problems on the shakedown leg.

  Mock’s radio problems were eclipsed by Smith’s leaking fuel tanks, and though on widely separated routes, both encountered abysmal weather. Amazingly, with unparalleled self-confidence, Mock made the first actual instrument approach of her life to the Azores after crossing the Atlantic Ocean.

  Both pilots surmounted enormous challenges along the route. But Mock’s mechanical problems continued. Jerrie Mock completed her flight around the world, Columbus to Columbus, in 158 flying hours over 22,858 miles in 29 days. She entered history as the first woman to make such a flight, and she did so alone, twenty-seven years after Amelia Earhart had tried it with a navigator. A congratulatory telegram from Joan Merriam Smith awaited her return, and President Lyndon Johnson presented Jerrie with the FAA’s Decoration for Exceptional Service.

  Meanwhile, Joan Merriam Smith plowed onward on her longer course, finishing in twenty-three actual days of flying, but fifty-nine elapsed days from takeoff. The next year, early in 1965, Smith’s beloved Apache burned after an emergency landing. Five weeks later, at the age of twenty-eight, Joan Smith died while testing Rayjay blowers on a Cessna 180 (ironically, Jerrie Mock’s airplane of choice). She was awarded the 1965 Harmon Trophy posthumously.

  Anniversaries seem to attract significant commemoratives, and so did the thirtieth anniversary of Earhart’s 1937 flight. Ann Pellegreno’s airplane mechanic Lee Loepke mentioned in 1962 that he’d acquired a “basket case” Lockheed 10, a sister ship to Earhart’s, and he was rebuilding it. He suggested that Pellegreno might like to fly it around the world on the thirtieth anniversary of Earhart’s flight. Pellegreno was then a one-hundred-hour Aeronca Champ (trainer) pilot, and Loepke idea seemed pretty silly at her experience level, but he’d planted the seed.