For 35 years, they were a hidden footnote in World War II history, when they should have been in a Memorial Day parade.
The wartime files of the Women Airforce Service Pilots — WASPs — and the 38 women pilots who died during their service, were classified and sealed, hidden for no other reason than to keep them out of the public eye.
There were no national security concerns found when the files were finally opened in the late 1970s. There was only a story of 1,074 young, female pilots who aced the same flight training that male pilots received, and took their jobs at home while the men went to fight in the skies overseas.
On paper, the WASPs assignments were to ferry military aircraft from factories to 120 military bases across the country, but it wasn’t long before their jobs got much more dangerous than that.
“We were basically used as target practice,” said Betty Jane Williams, who lived in Woodland Hills for many years before her death in 2008. “We flew target sleeves behind our planes so ground troops could practice firing live ammunition at a moving target. A couple of times they almost blew me out of the sky.”
When they weren’t being used as target practice, they flew war-weary planes to repair depots, then put the refurbished planes through combat maneuvers and steep dives to see if they were ready to return to war.
In all, 27 WASPs were killed on active duty missions, and others had their feet shot as bullets from errant target practice ripped through the undercarriage of their planes. Eleven more women died in crashes during training.
“For 35 years, people had no idea what we had done or that we even existed,” Williams said. “I look at women flying in combat now, and realize we blazed that trail. It makes me feel proud.”
She grew up in rural Pennsylvania during the Depression, a farm girl constantly bugging her father for flying lessons he couldn’t afford.
“Girls just didn’t do those kinds of things,” Williams said. “But the 1940s had arrived, and so had war. Everything changed.”
Jan Wood, who lived in Reseda, was a junior at UCLA studying to become a teacher when she saw a billboard saying the government needed women pilots to fill in for male pilots fighting overseas.
“I sold my accordion for $350, hopped in my 1929 Ford with a Tear Drop trailer hooked on back, and drove to Olancha, California,” said Wood, who died in 2018. “I spent the money on 35 hours of flight training so I could become a WASP.”
Both Williams and Wood lived long enough to see women flying combat missions, and both had absolutely no doubt the WASPs of World War II could have done the same.
“An airplane doesn’t respond to gender, it only responds to skill, and we had plenty of that,” Williams said.
By December, 1944, male pilots were returning home to reclaim their jobs, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots were disbanded. Wood went back to UCLA to finish her degree, going on to teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 41 years — and she continued to fly.
Williams worked at Lockheed for 25 years as a flight instructor. She was later inducted into the Women in Aviation, International Pioneer Hall of Fame.
It would be nice to say the WASPs were welcomed into the military with open arms by the all-male command, but that would be a lie. In truth, they were treated like unwanted, second-class citizens.
The women had to pay their own way to the training sites, buy their own uniforms, and pay for their room and board. They weren’t considered veterans, rather they were classified by the government as federal civil service employees, and thus not eligible for veterans benefits after the war.
Worse, the families of the 38 WASPs who died had to pay to have their daughters’ and sisters’ bodies shipped home. The government wouldn’t pay the bill. And, since they weren’t veterans, there could be no traditional military honors at their funerals, including draping an American flag over the coffin.
It was shameful enough to bury their service in classified, sealed documents.
It wasn’t until 1977 when President Jimmy Carter signed legislation giving the Women Airforce Service Pilots the veteran’s benefits and public recognition they deserved.
The WASPs had waited long enough for that Memorial Day parade.
Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.