Seized by the Sun Read online

  The WASP candidates had to be at least 21 years old, but the minimum age for male pilot candidates was only 18. The women had to pay their own way to flight school, but the government paid for men to travel to flight training. If the women washed out they had to pay their way back home, while washed-out men were drafted into the army. Women paid $1.65 per day for their room and board; the men got theirs free. The women contributed their own money to an emergency fund for the death or accidental injury of a fellow student; the men each got a $10,000 insurance policy issued by the government. The women had to purchase their uniforms at a cost of at least $100, while the men were provided a uniform allowance of $200, and more for the higher ranks.

  Weak Women?

  The WASPs flew the biggest and toughest airplanes that the US Army flew in World War II and did so with all the skill of the men, as statistics would later show. The male accident rate for domestic flights in the war was .088 per 1,000 hours flying time. For women, that rate was .060.

  Early in its development, the B-29 Superfortress, the giant plane that would drop the atomic bombs on Japan, was rumored by pilot trainees to be balky, difficult, and dangerous to fly. In 1944 Colonel Paul Tibbets selected two WASPs to fly the big plane to different air force bases to show the men it was not a difficult plane to fly. The women would land, get out, and walk around in full view. The men would have second thoughts, either reassured or reproached.

  A B-29, the largest bomber of World War II. Courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force

  After the top brass heard about it, Colonel Tibbets was ordered to stop the women from making future flights in the Superfortress. Tibbets was the pilot of the Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

  Gertrude’s pay to start was $150 a month, with $26 paid for overtime; the men were paid only $75 a month while in training but were commissioned second lieutenants with many benefits, which the women were not. After flight training, Gertrude was to be paid a flat $250 a month, but unlike her second lieutenant male counterpart who made $150, she did not get a $21 supplement, $45 for quarters, and $75 flight pay each month, a total of $291.

  If she were injured or became ill, she must provide for her own care. (Later, she could pay a fee for use of army hospitals.) The men were provided automatic health care at no personal expense.

  And last, ominously, the death benefit for a woman killed in the line of duty was a flat $200 and a plain pine box. There was no military escort, and she wasn’t entitled to have the American flag on her coffin. Her family would have no right to a Gold Star, displayed by those who lost a loved one in the war.

  Despite the inequalities, the women were proud to be flying for their country and put up with the inequities. There were some silly rules too: in the beginning women trainees were ordered to wear hairnets or turbans. Higher command was concerned about hair becoming tangled in propellers, canopy closing devices, and controls. “We were all so anxious to fly we’d have dyed our hair green, if it had been required,” wrote WASP Jean Hascall Cole.

  During the early flight classes, the women had no official uniform. Jacqueline Cochran quickly decided that each trainee would purchase, at her own expense, tan cotton gabardine slacks, a long-sleeved white shirt, and a tan overseas cap. (An overseas cap is a like an upside-down boat). Since they were worn during the general’s inspections, the pants came to be called “general’s pants.”

  Gertrude had little difficulty with military routine. Her experience at Bergen School and at Ambler had conditioned her for life with other women. But she didn’t feel much camaraderie with the younger women, and in her spare time she found herself writing letters and reading. She worried about the possibility that she might have difficulties with her stutter when it came to using the radio. And it is likely she was still grieving over the loss of Mike Kolendorski.

  She did well at her morning physical exercise and military drill, and she breezed through classes on maps and charts, weather theory, flight records and logs, parachutes, radio orientation, and more.

  She heard lectures on military law and courts-martial and got her lowest scores in training in this subject, a 77. In all other classes she got 80s and 90s. She took notes during intelligence and security classes. The class work went on at length, covering military courtesy, equipment and uniforms, discipline and leadership, command and staff functions, and control tower operations. Over time her courses grew more practical and technical: theory and use of flaps, weather estimating and recording, carburetor ice, hydraulic systems, fuel systems, flight instruments, and electrical systems. Much of this she remembered from her earlier private lessons, and she passed her tests with ease.

  Weather, weather, weather. The instructor said, “The plane won’t kill you but the weather will.” She paid close attention as they entered yet another phase of orientation, this one on fogs, fronts, thunderstorms, turbulence, and electrical storms. She learned about the automatic pilot system, radio compass operations, Morse code, and marker beacons, which helped the pilot to know her aircraft’s position along its route. She was issued her first parachute.

  Despite her distance from some of the younger women, Gertrude did become close with several of the trainees and earned the affectionate nickname “Tommy” Tompkins. Among her closest friends was Mildred “Mickey” Axton, a bright, vivacious brunette from Kansas. Mickey was married and the mother of a small baby who was being cared for by Mickey’s mother while Mickey and her husband, Wayne, flew for their country. Tommy and Mickey would be the only ones in their barracks bay to graduate. Mickey had been licensed to fly since 1940. She left the WASPs in April 1944 when her mother became ill. Mickey applied for a job with Boeing and was hired as a flight test engineer. In May 1944 she became the first woman to fly the huge B-29 Superfortress.

  Gertrude’s first flights were with an instructor. She had eight hours of flying “dual,” with the instructor sitting in the front seat of the open cockpit trainer and the WASP trainee in back.

  Morse Code:

  Talking in Dots and Dashes

  Morse code is a series of short and long signals—dots and dashes—that are used to transmit letters of the alphabet as well as numbers. They can be sent by blinking lights, special flag signals, or radio transmission.

  The simplest letter in Morse code is e, a single dot. SOS is three dots, three dashes, and three dots, shown this way: … - - - …

  Morse code was widely used by the military in World War II. Ships and aircraft communicated using light flashes of Morse, maintaining radio silence so as to not alert the enemy. WASPs could identify airports by the individual signals that were continuously transmitted in Morse code. Morse code was also used to send telegrams and other messages.

  Most of their instructors were male. Some were kind and patient, but a few were downright mean. In a dual-control aircraft, when the instructor shoved his control stick back and forth rapidly, the connected control stick in the student’s cockpit would hit her knees, said WASP Annelle “Nellie” Henderson. This was referred to as a “stick beating,” and there was one particular blond male instructor who did this to Annelle. WASP Jean Hascall Cole saw Nellie’s knees afterward. “They were black and blue.”

  Gertrude Tompkins with parachute and harness during flight training, 1943. Courtesy of the WASP Archives, Texas Woman’s University Libraries

  WASP Jean Moore switched instructors three times in primary training. “My first instructor drank too much.” Her second instructor was incompetent and sent her up for a check ride, which is a test of a pilot’s skills, before she was ready. As a result, she nearly washed out of the program. Finally, she got “Mr. J. R. Smith, an instructor to instructors. Smith was great.”

  A few weeks into training the women were allowed their first solo flight. The airplane was usually an open-cockpit Fairchild PT-19 Cornell. Soloing was what they’d been waiting for.

  After Gertrude soloed, she began flying cross-country, reading maps and following roads. Cross-
country flying presented a unique problem for the women. WASP Ruth Adams recalled that when a female pilot inevitably had to urinate during a long flight, she had to somehow shed her “great big fleece-lined leather jacket,” then “a big fleece-lined leather overall,” her flight suit, and “some kind of winter underwear.” Once she managed to get all that off, she had to “scoot over to the edge of her seat to where she could pee without getting it on to anything. Then she got all this paraphernalia back onto herself and never got off course.”

  A PT-19 Cornell. Relatively easy to fly, this was the first plane assigned to Gertrude during her WASP training. Courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force

  Aerobatics were part of airplane handling, and the women started by learning gently curving, rolling, climbing, and descending maneuvers called lazy eights, Immelman turns, and chandelles. A glance at the sky over Sweetwater revealed a dozen maneuvering aircraft at any moment, each one neatly recovering from spins and stalls and zooming off to do it again. Gertrude loved the advanced aerobatics, such as snap rolls, half rolls, and slow rolls.

  Fellow trainee Jane Tallman posted a menu of maneuvers in the ready room:

  Slow rolls (plain)

  .05

  Slow rolls (with whipped cream)

  .15

  Half rolls

  free

  Snap rolls

  .25 up

  On their early solo flights, some of the trainees got lost and had to land on ranches or farms. They called the base to be picked up. Others navigated their flights by noting the town names on the water towers.

  They were all shaken by the first accident they witnessed. During primary training, WASP Margaret Oldenburg had lifted off in a PT-19 and crashed within seconds. Since the crash was close to the end of the runway, many of the women got to look at the plane after the pilot was taken to the hospital. The engine was in the cockpit, both wings were torn off, and the tail assembly was ripped away. Flying is serious business, the instructing supervisor warned, and he wondered aloud if women were up to it. Later investigation would discover that the plane was “out of rig” (i.e., the plane’s maneuvering surfaces—the rudder on the tail and the flaps on the wings—were not synchronized), and flight restrictions had been placed on it before Margaret took it up.

  Some of the men on the base were openly hostile to the women. That a man might purposely expose a female pilot to danger seemed unthinkable. But rumors of sabotage swept the Sweetwater ready room: a disgruntled aircraft factory employee was reportedly pulling up grass and stuffing it in fuel tanks; there were crossed fuel lines and coolant lines; sugar was supposedly poured in aviation fuel; tires were said to have been expertly slashed so as to blow out not on takeoff but on landing; there was a rumor of a parachute wrapped with a loosely corked vial of acid inside.

  A WASP instructor and trainee, Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas. Courtesy WASP Archives, Texas Woman’s University Libraries

  Sabotage? Really.

  Several WASP accounts are firm about their aircraft being sabotaged. After having to parachute from an out-of-control BT-13, WASP Lorraine Zilner learned her rudder cables had been cut partway through. WASP Mary Ellen Keil had a fire start from an oily rag left in an AT-6 engine; during another takeoff attempt, all the flight controls came loose from the side of her airplane. “I don’t think it was anything but sabotage,” she said. “Nobody could be so careless.”

  “The stories of sabotage seemed unlikely to many of us, but the possibility was taken very seriously by the girls who had encountered unexplained, serious damage to their aircraft,” wrote WASP Jean Hascall Cole in Women Pilots of World War II.

  The women were told to double-check their equipment, planes, and engines. Some of them were sure that a few men on the base wanted the women to fail.

  The male officers made the women switch from hairnets to turbans, concerned that the women’s long hair might become tangled in the controls of their aircraft. Gertrude’s hair was short, but even so, she was required to wear the turban. Although turbans were popular in the 1940s, for female pilots they were a nuisance and were hated by most of them.

  WASPs of class 43-W-7 taking a break on a PT-19 during primary training. The WASP Archives at Texas Women’s University identifies Gertrude Tompkins as being on the far left, leaning on the wing, wearing dark glasses and saddle oxfords. The family believes that Gertrude is at the top of the picture with her arm leaning on the fuselage. Courtesy of WASP Archives, Texas Woman’s University Libraries

  Meanwhile, Jacqueline Cochran was getting reports on trainee performance. The reports said that the women needed more instruction on the “whiz wheel,” a circular slide rule used by aviators before modern technology provided easier means of navigating. They also needed more training in crosswind landings. There were too many ground loops. A ground loop is when a plane does a spin after landing, often caused by crosswinds. The report also said the trainees did not have enough cross-country flying instruction, and they lacked knowledge about group flying and formation flying. What’s more, they knew little about military customs and courtesies.

  After primary training, Gertrude left the PT-19 behind and moved on to the next phase, basic training.

  9

  BASIC AND ADVANCED TRAINING

  Some things remained unchanged after moving up to basic training: the classrooms, the marching, the calisthenics, as well as cleaning the barracks, washing clothes, and answering letters. But there was one big difference. Gertrude would now take the controls of the infamous BT-13, a 440-horsepower single-engine plane made by the Vultee Aircraft Corporation. Nicknamed the “Vultee Vibrator,” it was also referred to as a bucket of bolts. It had a bad reputation. The BT-13s the women trained in were old, rattling, shaky, and, as Gertrude found out soon enough, unreliable in spins.

  WASP Lorraine Zilner had a particularly bad experience in a BT-13, she recalled, when “all of a sudden the plane just went completely out of control and flipped into an inverted spin. I stayed with it, I worked with it, I did everything possible. I stayed with it as long as I could, and then I tried to get out…. My chute had just barely opened when I hit the ground…. That was the end of that airplane.”

  The BT washed out a dozen less-capable women in 43-W-7, and the airplane eventually killed nine WASPs in accidents.

  But Gertrude’s greatest fear in flying the BT was that she now would be required to speak using the radio. Her primary training plane had only an intercom between instructor and trainee. In the BT, radio communication with the control tower was required. She had to call before taxiing out to the runway, had to call the tower for flight instructions, and had to call the tower again for landing instructions.

  Gertrude worked very hard to memorize her calls and control her stutter, speaking slowly and distinctly. She may have sung her radio procedures, said her friend and fellow WASP Mickey Axton. She did not stutter when singing. In any event her instructors gave her passing marks.

  WASPs pray to the BT-13 for luck, Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas. They disliked flying the unpredictable and sometimes dangerous training plane. Courtesy WASP Archives, Texas Woman’s University Libraries

  Once aloft, despite being wary of the BT-13, she felt thrilled at the privilege of being allowed to fly planes that were off-limits to the public.

  Film and the 1940s

  The WASPs’ favorite off-duty pastime was watching movies. Americans were riding a wave of patriotism generated by filmmakers in response to Pearl Harbor. By 1942 war films dominated the silver screen, with Casablanca, Wake Island, Mrs. Miniver, and Eagle Squadron being big at the box office. In 1943, 13 of the top 20 box office films were about the war. A year later, Americans still watched war movies, such as Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Since You Went Away, and Hollywood Canteen. In 1944, when fears eased and America appeared to be winning the war, many moviegoers went to see less combative fare such as Going My Way, Gaslight, National Velvet, and Meet Me in St. Louis. But the subject of war didn’t d
isappear entirely from popular films: in 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives, a story of homecoming veterans, won nine Academy Awards, including Best Motion Picture.

  Most World War II war movies are today scorned by film critics as propagandistic, although Casablanca is considered a classic.

  Planning cross-country flights on the wing of an AT-6 Texan. The women loved the swift little advanced trainer, and Gertrude made her cross-country solo flight in a Texan. Courtesy of the WASP Archive, Texas Women’s University Libraries

  If Gertrude had mixed feelings about the BT-13, she soon reveled in flying the heavenly AT-6 Texan. Quick, powerful, maneuverable, and fun to fly, the AT-6 was a favorite among training pilots. Gertrude dashed through each morning’s end-of-class tests so she could be in the cockpit sooner.

  In pilot’s lingo, the plane “lifted off hot,” meaning it rose quickly under her touch. It seemed to ride the skies with silken ease. The AT-6 had a covered cockpit like a greenhouse, and as the morning sun climbed higher over the Texas plains Gertrude pushed back the canopy, allowing in a little air. She felt thrilled as she pierced a cloud, and marveled as she dived at more than 200 miles an hour. She felt the hot beams of the sun on her neck before heading for home at Avenger Field. After she landed, she told her friend Mickey she felt Mike’s love up there.

  While Gertrude handled real airplanes with ease, she met her match in the Link trainer. The Link was a hooded black box inside which the women handled simulated controls. It trained them for night and bad weather flying. Gertrude had developed excellent flying habits, but inside the Link she kept insisting on using her instincts when she should have relied on her instruments. After her first session in the Link she emerged fearful and drenched in sweat. The instructor failed her. She was acutely aware that almost half the class had washed out for one reason or another, and she was afraid the Link would cause her own failure.