It's My Country Too

by Jerri Bell, Tracy Crow

  Josette Dermody Wingo

  (1924–)

  U.S. Navy

  Josette Dermody Wingo, from Detroit, joined the WAVES in 1944 for the remaining eighteen months of World War II. She served in an elite WAVES unit that taught men how to shoot down enemy aircraft. After the war, Wingo used the GI Bill to complete a master’s degree. When she retired from teaching, she began writing about her war experiences. The following excerpts are from her 1994 memoir Mother Was a Gunner’s Mate: World War II in the WAVES.

  Shooting the big guns is actually kind of fun, but breakdown is awful. When the sun sets, we have to take our guns apart and stow them securely before the guys can finish theirs and stand around teasing. Worst part of the day on the gunnery range. Worst part of my life. Taking the guns apart isn’t all that hard, Lord knows we practiced it enough with the wooden mockups that are easy because they have the firing systems painted red. We can all, by this time, break down a machine gun blindfolded and race some instructor’s stopwatch to put it back together. Nothing to it. Easy as pie. Just remember that the sear pin is in the correct position if it looks like a highchair; and don’t mention it out loud when the guys are around. It drives them nuts when we use a feminine image like a highchair for remembering. Too bad.

  The problem is, the real guns, the Oerlikons, are heavy machined blue steel. It takes me and Corman, one at each end, to carry the long barrel. Atkinson struggles awkwardly with the shoulder harness, leather half-moons that catch her legs as she walks toward the gunshed. Tolliver carries the empty magazines, big as bowling balls and twice as heavy. Dombrowski is the fifth member of our guncrew, she’s clumsy and always in a hurry, so she treads on Tolliver’s heels as she lugs our five helmets. “Shake a leg,” she grumbles to Tolliver.

  “Kee-rist. I’m hurryin’ as fast as I can.” Too late. The sailors have secured their guns and are waiting for us. They chant, “Release a man for active duty. Har har. It takes five of you broads to do what two guys can do.” We have to walk right by them, looking as confident and unwinded as we can. Let me tell you, it’s not so easy to look dignified and ladylike under these circumstances. Only thing to do is ignore them, but I’d sure like to have a word with the genius who dreamed up that slogan, “Release a Man for Active Duty,” for the WAVES. The guys won’t stop. “The WACs and WAVES will win the war. What the hell am I here for?” Holy Mary, I could be home, doing my part by serving cookies and jitterbugging in my aqua prom dress at the USO with our brave boys who have to behave nicely there. Too late, megirl. You’ll never get the gun grease out from under your fingernails.

  • • •

  What happened yesterday is all my fault. Lately I’ve been crawling into the sack at night and falling right asleep without saying my evening prayers; transgressions like that always catch up with you sooner or later. Sooner, in my case, why else did he pick my workbook to check, first thing as we slouched into the classroom, still half asleep?

  “Kee-rist, Jee-zus H. Kee-rist on a raft.” He flung the workbook, with the last two mimeographed pages not filled in, at my head. I ducked. Good reflexes are important in a career in the Navy. Remind me to put that in a recruiting brochure. “Dermody, you dum-dum. You’ve been gold-bricking long enough. Do this over. Do it right. Ya hear me? Otherwise you’ll find yourself a civilian with an Unsuitable Discharge. Out on yer ear. O-U-T spells Out-Goes-You. Crazy broads anyway. No job for a man, teaching dumb stupid broads. Nothing but bitches and lezzies.”

  A proper fit he’d worked up to. Do the medics know he’s over the edge? They probably don’t care. I turned back to my desk, not saying anything.

  “Can we help it if you can’t get sea duty?” Tolliver muttered in a semiaudible way.

  “You, Dermody. Repeat what you just said.” Spit sprayed out in a fan in front of his little pointed teeth.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  • • •

  “I’m never going to take his stupid class again, ever.” I heaved a great breath and tossed my workbook into the trash barrel. I felt a great, crazy sense of freedom, watching my future life arc into the innocent wire barrel. I strode ahead, ignoring the others and their gasps.

  Corman grabbed my shoulder, turned me around to face her. “You get that workbook back. Hear? Right this instance, Josette Dermody. Move it.”

  “Won’t.”

  She shoved her exasperated face into mine. I looked away.

  “What do I care?” The others gathered around as we stood arguing where the walkway branches off toward the mess hall. Corman handed her books to Dombrowski.

  “You all go ahead. Me and Miss Priss here have got something to talk over.” When they were out of earshot she says, “Okay, Dermody. Time to grow up. You’re in the Navy. Fish that out.”

  “I thought you were my friend.”

  “Knock it off, Dermody. You’ll give all of us a bad name if you act this way and get into trouble. Don’t you ever think of anybody but yourself? Honestly. Look alive now.” She had her arms on her waist, elbows out. If I ever remember Corman when I am an old lady, I’ll think of her, standing pigeon-toed, arms akimbo, pretty face flushed with exasperation, chivvying me, willing me, saving me, actually, from totally messing up.

  “I still hate him.”

  “Hate away, kiddo. Only two more weeks and we never see that handsome face again. If you don’t foul up, Dumbo, we’ll all be off to our new duty stations in another month. C’mon, pal, there’s a war on.”

  I walked back the way we had come, retrieved the duotang-covered notebook, and brushed it off. “The next time I get a notion to enlist, I hope my mother ties me to the bedpost.”

  “Me, too.” She tagged my arm. “Race you to the mess hall.”

  • • •

  We aren’t bored, not at first. It isn’t hard. Easier than Great Lakes. Groups of sailors are shepherded into the stark gunsheds all day long. Double rows of Oerlikons, 20-millimeter antiaircraft guns, are bolted to the deck. Mounted on top of the guns, where the cylindrical magazines of shells would ordinarily be, are suitcase-shaped metal boxes containing the projectors. A GI imitation of an arcade shooting range. Our job is to thread the projectors with a large reel of film of incoming Japanese planes, know how to turn the machine on, encourage the reluctant boys in blue to use the ringsight to hit the planes. Then we must write the score on each sailor’s hand-carried scorecard.

  Corman is spokesman—our head teacher. As each group arrives she stands in front and explains the drill. She doesn’t look much like a recruiting poster. They always have their full dress blues on, including hats, no matter what they are doing. Corman is as pretty as a recruiting poster, but she is wearing exactly what the rest of us are wearing, neat blue wool slacks, dark-blue rayon long-sleeved shirt, and a sky-blue butterfly tie, exactly the color of her eyes. No hat, no jewelry—none that shows, anyway. She stands by the charts of the silhouettes of the planes. She always amazes me, with her way of batting her eyelashes and using her honey-toned voice so disarmingly. She never lets on that she notices the guys are unhappy about a girl instructing them. Especially instructing them to shoot guns. A girl who never would see combat.

  “The most important thing is to estimate how far you must lead him,” she says. “Calculate how fast he is probably going, allow for the angle, and use the farthest ring you can.”

  A sullen, square-faced sailor in the front row raises his hand and says mincingly, “Miss, how can we tell how fast the little bugger’s going?” I had seen the sailor behind him give him a shove; looks like Square-face lost the draw today about who’s going to give the WAVES a hard time. Usually they have a bet they can fluster her or make her mad before the petty officer knocks them off. Dumb broads don’t know nothin’ is what they want to prove. Corman is unflappable.

  “Simple.” She gives him her homecoming queen smile and continues, “You know, I assume, that the top speed of a Zero is approximately 300 knots, a Betty 250 knots, and so on. A dive bomber usually comes in at an
angle of 70 knots.” She waves her hand at the charts on the wall.

  He isn’t through. “But mate,” he says, looking all boyish and earnest like he really cares, “sometimes they mush the planes, pull back at an angle to fly slower, and fool the gunners.” He looks around at his sniggering buddies with satisfaction.

  “I’m sure they wouldn’t fool you, Seaman,” she says, pulling a little rank on him. She looks at the rest of the class, “Remember, they’re most likely to be coming in fast and dirty. If you aim right at them, by the time the shell gets there it will be behind him. Never, never aim right at him. Just remember that and you’ll be okay.” She smiles encouragingly and flies her left hand gracefully in a glide pattern and uses her right hand to demonstrate a shell passing way aft.

  “What kind of frigging way is that to shoot?” the blue-jawed guy who had shoved Mr. Interlocutor before ventures impatiently. “We din’t do it that way at Guadalcanal.”

  Corman pauses for just a minute, letting the “frigging” sort of hang in the air, then ignores it. With a tiny little frown she says, “Nobody here needs to be told, I am sure, just how close we came to losing Guadalcanal. Man your guns.”

  Berneice Herron

  (1916–1988)

  U.S. Marine Corps Women’s Reserve

  Herron and her sister Eleanor, schoolteachers in southern Minnesota, worked in the defense industry after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. They enlisted in the Marines and served almost three years. They taught aircraft and ship recognition to Marine fighter pilots at El Toro Marine Air Base in Santa Ana, California, and then as rehabilitation interviewers helped to discharge women Marines from the Corps after VJ Day. During their enlistment they wrote home almost daily. Their mother saved their letters, which served as the basis for Herron’s 2006 memoir Dearest Folks: Sister Leatherneck’s Letter Excerpts and World War II Experiences, from which the following excerpts are taken. After the war, Herron completed a forty-seven-year career in education.

  [The pilots] were expected, by their Commanding Officers (COs), to attend one hour of recognition each day. We taught the same syllabus each hour, for six hours per day, so the pilots could attend any hour that fit best with their other classes. We had to keep close records of their attendance as their COs felt it was, or could be, a matter of life, or death, for the pilots to learn to recognize the planes that they would so soon be dealing with, out in the Pacific. . . .

  When our training school had burned down, at Cherry Point, we had received about three weeks of training. The rest of our learning was up to us!! We REALLY had to study!!! We were determined to be good teachers and we realized that what we were teaching could well mean life, or death, to our pilots! We did NOT take our responsibility lightly!!! No one was going to stand up in front of a class of fifty-sixty Marine fighter pilots and give them any “bum steers.” You would not have lasted, as their teacher, more than a minute. They were SHARP, in intelligence as well as looks!!! . . .

  It was not long before Eleanor and I were the only Recognition Instructors on base. What a Challenge, Honor, and Workout! When one of us would be in the classroom presenting a lesson, the other would be in our next door office helping Ruthie [their officer in charge, who preferred administrative work to teaching], studying, preparing future lessons, and digesting the messages from Washington!! It was a very busy schedule and very demanding, but we LOVED doing it.

  We taught mostly by slides that would project a very small image on a screen. In a matter of a tenth of a second the pilots had to discern whether the flash was a Japanese plane, an American plane, or a British one. They further had to tell whether it was a bomber, a fighter, or another type plane. . . . They also had to be able to distinguish ships . . . and finally they had to study and be able to identify submarines and Japanese Merchant Shipping Tonnage. . . .

  We fully realized that many of our pilots would leave our class, fly to San Francisco, then to Pearl Harbor where they would board their carrier and in a matter of two or three days they would be right out in combat.

  Many times pilots who had been in combat, and returned to our base, would come in and thank us and tell us that what they had learned in our classes helped save their lives. What SUPER news! . . .

  I am very sure that the number of enlisted females that taught fighter pilots could be counted on both hands, if even that many. Fewer male enlisted did the same thing. We were really fortunate to be selected for such an interesting and exacting experience!!!

  Our new classes would be varied in size depending on many circumstances. . . . Very often even though a pilot had finished his required hours he could continue coming, as material kept changing all the time. Plans were either being added or deleted. . . . They wanted to be kept up to date. Because of all these changes our class never became “dull”—everything was very dynamic and changing all the time. Whenever the Allies sank one of the Japanese ships, we had that ship immediately deleted from our syllabus. It almost was a “race” between our sharpest pilots and ourselves, as they would try to “catch us” with a sunken ship still on the syllabus. We were very determined to keep ahead of “Our Boys.”

  Many times we would have as many as sixty-seventy pilots per hour. Often times the entire flight of five would attend class the same hour. . . . In the sixteen months that we taught our pilots, we had hundreds and hundreds of pilots go through our classes. To add a little “spice” to our class, on Saint Patrick’s Day we told our pilots that anyone who didn’t “sign in” as “Irish” on that one particular day would not be recognized as having attended class that day. You should have seen all the “O’s” and “Mc’s” that were added to their names that day.

  Although we worked harder than we had ever worked in our lives, we also had many highly unusual and exhilarating experiences, due to our being Women Marines and being instructors in aircraft and ship recognition. . . .

  Our officers were very polite, very understanding, very sharp, and really listened while in class. Once in a while we would have a very high ranking officer attend a class or two. We recognized that he was in there to check on what type teaching we were doing and how well the officers paid attention. We must have “filled the bill” as we were never replaced, never demoted, our teaching capabilities were asked for in several Squadrons, and we were often told that we knew more about recognition than anyone on the base. To this day I am most grateful, to God, for such an interesting, most unusual, dynamic and challenging position we had in the Corps.

  Cornelia Fort

  (1919–1943)

  U.S. Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron

  On the morning of December 7, 1941, civilian instructor pilot Cornelia Fort was airborne with a student pilot in an Interstate Cadet monoplane over Pearl Harbor. She saw a military aircraft flying directly at her. She took the controls and pulled up over the oncoming plane. Only then did she see the Rising Sun emblem on its wings. Moments later, she realized that Pearl Harbor was under attack. Japanese Zeroes strafed her plane, but she landed and ran to safety with her student pilot.

  In 1942 Nancy Harkness Love invited Fort, then twenty-three, to join the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (later merged with the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs). On March 21, 1943, she led a flight of six new male graduates of a ninety-day flight training program ferrying BT-13 trainers to Dallas. Although ferry pilots were forbidden to fly in close formation, pilot Frank Stammes began flying close to Fort’s plane and then pulling up. On one pass his landing gear collided with the tip of Fort’s left wing. The wing tip broke away with six feet of leading edge attached. Fort’s plane went into a vertical dive and impacted the ground nose-down. When Fort became the first woman pilot to die on active duty, she was one of the most accomplished women pilots in the United States. She had logged 1,100 hours; Stammes, only 267. The following is an article she wrote for Woman’s Home Companion, published posthumously in June 1943.

  At the Twilight’s Last Gleaming

  I knew I was goi
ng to join the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron before the organization was a reality, before it had a name, before it was anything but a radical idea in the minds of a few men who believed that women could fly airplanes. But I never knew it so surely as I did in Honolulu on December 7, 1941.

  At dawn that morning I drove from Waikiki to the John Rodgers civilian airport right next to Pearl Harbor where I was a . . . pilot instructor. Shortly after six-thirty I began landing and take-off practice with my regular student. Coming in just before the last landing, I looked casually around and saw a military plane coming directly toward me. I jerked the controls away from my student and jammed the throttle wide open to pull above the oncoming plane. He passed so close under us that our celluloid windows rattled violently and I looked down to see what kind of plane it was.

  The painted red balls on the tops of the wings shone brightly in the sun. I looked again with complete and utter disbelief. Honolulu was familiar with the emblem of the Rising Sun on passenger ships but not on airplanes.

  I looked quickly at Pearl Harbor and my spine tingled when I saw billowing black smoke. Still I thought hollowly it might be some kind of coincidence or maneuvers, it might be, it must be. For surely, dear God . . .

  Then I looked way up and saw the formations of silver bombers riding in. Something detached itself from an airplane and came glistening down. My eyes followed it down, down and even with knowledge pounding in my mind, my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor. I knew the air was not the place for my little baby airplane and I set about landing as quickly as ever I could. A few seconds later a shadow passed over me and simultaneously bullets spattered all around me.

  Suddenly that little wedge of sky above Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor was the busiest fullest piece of sky I ever saw.

  We counted anxiously as our little civilian planes came flying home to roost. Two never came back. They were washed ashore weeks later on the windward side of the island, bullet-riddled. Not a pretty way for the brave little yellow Cubs and their pilots to go down to death.