Seized by the Sun Read online

  Several hours later Duncan Miller said, “Your stutter. It’s gone.”

  And so it was. A speech impediment that had bedeviled Gertrude for 30 years had fled during her first flight in a Mustang. It would never return. What must her thoughts have been?

  On silver wings Gertrude Tompkins discovered herself. The ox that had stood on her tongue for so long had vanished during her first flight in a Mustang, left behind somewhere in the clouds. Elizabeth later agreed that Gertrude’s newfound self-confidence came as a gift from the sky.

  Gertrude racked up hours in the Mustang during the day. She received the same training that combat pilots underwent and practiced aerial dogfighting with other trainees. There are tales of WASP pilots ferrying fighters engaging in mock dogfights with navy pilots in swift Corsairs and army pilots in powerful Thunderbolts. (When a WASP tells the story, the women always win.) In the evenings and on weekends Gertrude enjoyed spending time with Duncan. In Matamoros they bought a big Mexican sombrero and trinkets, laughed together, talked about flying, and kissed sometimes.

  This happy, carefree time was interrupted when Gertrude got a telephone call from Henry Silver, now in the army and based in New York. His tone was subdued and serious. The year before, Henry’s sister Margaret had died after giving birth to a daughter. The girl, named Ann, was now nearly a year old. The father was unknown, Henry said uncomfortably. The baby had been cared for by family friends, but it was time that she found a permanent home. Henry asked Gertrude to marry him and to be Ann’s mother.

  Beauty Is a Duty

  American women were encouraged by cosmetics advertisers to look pretty for the morale of the country during wartime. Hair was typically shoulder length. A popular hairstyle was called the Victory Roll, said to represent an enemy aircraft spiraling down to destruction. Hair turbans and snoods became popular. Courage Red and Victory Red were both lipstick colors of the era. Brown gravy applied to the legs suggested nylon stockings. Fitted military-style jackets and tailored skirts or slacks were popular with women. Teens were beginning to wear jeans with untucked dress shirts and rolled-down socks. Teenage girls were called bobby-soxers.

  Gertrude felt like she was being manipulated, especially after she got a letter from Vreeland a few days later, in which he emphasized what he felt was an important point. If Gertrude adopted the girl, her father pointed out, her new daughter would not “carry the inherited burden of our stutter.” Vreeland also reminded Gertrude that she was now 32 years old, and if she wanted a husband the time was passing quickly. Finally, he wrote how much he and her mother liked Henry and that if Gertrude married him he would be warmly welcomed into the family. She was being asked to choose between loyalty to her father and a career in flying.

  Gertrude did not give Henry or her father an immediate answer.

  12

  FLYING FOR HER COUNTRY

  Though it must have weighed heavily on her mind, Gertrude didn’t let her dilemma of whether or not to marry Henry affect her work. She graduated from fighter school in Brownsville and was given her coveted white card, which meant she would be among the 126 WASPs who flew the fastest and most powerful single-engine American fighter planes. And she would be ferrying P-51s.

  By 1944 about half of the WASP graduates were ferrying airplanes. Coast-to-coast flights could take several days, depending on the weather and on how fast the plane flew. The day of a WASP ferry pilot was long and unpredictable. At some bases a WASP might not know what type of plane she would be flying the next day—a multiengine bomber or smaller planes, such as Piper Cubs and liaison aircraft.

  For Gertrude, ferrying Mustangs offered a vagabond’s life. While Dallas’s Love Field and the Fifth Ferry Group was her official base and her footlockers were there, she seldom stayed at Love. Most of the time she was either in the air or waiting to pick up a new Mustang from the North American manufacturing plant in Los Angeles. When waiting to take delivery of a plane, she stayed with the Sixth Ferry Group WASPs stationed in Long Beach. On flight days she would take a military bus from Long Beach to the North American plant 20 miles north. If there was any place she called home during those hectic months, it was the cockpit of a Mustang.

  “Follow Me!” From left: WASPs May Ball, Jana Crawford, and Mary Estill head for a P-51 at Scott Army Air Base in Gary, Indiana, 1944. Courtesy of the WASP Archive, Texas Woman’s University Libraries

  Weather could extend her trips east. It often took three days to deliver a plane to an Eastern port city. One night she might stay over in Phoenix and the next in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. After delivery, she flew back to Los Angeles by hitching a ride on a westbound military plane. She also had clearance to bump military men, even generals, from commercial flights, and sometimes she did. When she arrived in Los Angeles there was always another Mustang to be flown east. After a night’s rest, she was off again. She was free of regimentation and on her own. She loved every minute of it.

  A WASP reporting to the ferrying flight line looked at the board to see what plane she’d been assigned and its point of delivery. Then she planned her route and her RONs—the places she would land to remain overnight.

  Besides ferrying, WASPs oriented pilots returning from overseas to new aircraft models and to the latest technical innovations. Some WASPs also trained radio operators to use the latest equipment and procedures. Some flew low-level night missions, dropping flares on troop training positions and gun emplacements. WASPs flew planes to check the weather, and they flew for bombardier schools and flight engineering tests. WASPs flew hospital planes. They taught instructors how to teach new pilots. They flew attack feints to train combat pilots. They were at the controls of administrative flights involving high military and government officials.

  Towing large cloth target banners that were fired at by gunners using live ammunition was another WASP assignment, and it could be dangerous. Mabel Rawlinson was a graduate of 43-W-3 on duty towing targets for army antiaircraft gunnery practice. She was shot down by friendly fire on August 23, 1944, at Camp Davis, North Carolina. They heard her cries when they tried to pull her from the burning wreckage. She died later in a hospital.

  Some WASPs helped Russia fight the war. It is possible that Gertrude was among those who delivered P-39 Airacobras and P-63 King Cobras from the Bell Aircraft Corporation in Buffalo, New York, to Great Falls, Montana. There they would then be taken by both male and female Russian pilots to Alaska. After refueling, the Russians flew them across the Bering Sea to bases in the Soviet Union. The P-39 was highly regarded in Russia, where it scored more aerial combat victories than any other plane used by the Soviets against the Germans. WASP Hazel Ying Lee, flying a P-63 King Cobra, was killed in a crash at Great Falls delivering this plane to the Russians.

  Ferrying Airplanes

  Airplane ferrying had been the main reason the air force wanted women to fly. Planes produced in the United States had to be flown from factories for deliveries to ports of embarkation and at other places in the country, as well as to Canada. A plane delivered to a port would be partially dismantled and placed in a protective cover before it was put aboard a ship for transport to a theater of the war.

  By the time the WASPs were disbanded, they had delivered 12,652 airplanes to bases all over the United States. By 1944 WASPs “were ferrying the majority of all pursuit planes and were so integrated into the Ferry Division that their disbandment caused delays in pursuit deliveries,” wrote Molly Merryman in Clipped Wings.

  During their brief existence, WASPs flew more than 60 million hours in America’s defense.

  P-51Ds in formation. Courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force

  Byrd Howell Granger, author of On Final Approach, wrote of a meeting between a male pilot and a WASP in Great Falls. The young man seemed impressed by the Russian women, waiting in their baggy suits to pick up P-39s to fly to Russia: “Say, now, have you seen those Russian women pilots? Aren’t they really something?”

  A very tired WASP, hunched over o
n her heels with her back against a wall, thought: Who do you think flew the darned things here? This same WASP flew the route from Buffalo to Great Falls often, and sometimes she gave lipsticks to the Russian women. “Don’t speak the same language, but our smiles speak just the same,” wrote Granger.

  WASP Anne Noggle (44-W-1) wrote in her book A Dance with Death, “All WASPs wondered how we would fare if we were called upon to fly in combat. We talked about it in our barracks during our six months of flight training…. Our questions and speculation were purely hypothetical.”

  For some women, combat was not hypothetical at all. Russian women are credited for being the first women to fly in combat. Russian women had a long tradition of serving alongside men as warriors. The legendary Amazons were a tribe of women who dominated the south of Russia during ancient times. During the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, one of the best-known fighting groups was the Women’s Battalion of Death.

  In Russia, women pilots had a very different experience during World War II than American WASPs. From the first days of Russia’s invasion by Germany in June 1941, more than 1,000 Soviet women pilots climbed into cockpits and fought ferociously. They frequently shot down superior-performing German planes. They created mayhem by bombing and strafing ground troops. Many Russian women pilots were killed in combat.

  In America, although not engaged in combat, WASPs were gaining respect and lustrous reputations as they fulfilled their duties. Hundreds of letters of commendation and favorable reports came from every station where WASPs operated. The Air Medal was given to Women’s Air Ferry Service founder Nancy Harkness Love. Jackie Cochran was presented with the Distinguished Service Medal.

  General Hap Arnold wrote that their “very successful record of accomplishment has proved that in any future total effort the nation can count on thousands of its young women to fly any of its aircraft.”

  Along with her own growing mastery of all types of planes and assignments, the glowing reputation of the WASPs must have made Gertrude feel proud and confident, and made her decision about marriage that much harder.

  13

  DILEMMA

  There was another factor that influenced the decision Gertrude was about to make regarding Henry Silver’s proposal to marry and to become the mother to his infant niece. Surprisingly, there was a growing movement to disband the WASPs.

  From the beginning the WASPs were civilians and thus different from all other women’s branches of the military. They were formed under the army air force but were the only women’s military branch established during World War II that did not have congressional approval.

  “I had expected militarization [becoming an official military branch] and looked forward to becoming part of the Air Corps,” said WASP Nadine Nagle, who joined in honor of her dead husband. WASP Clarice Bergemann said, “I thought I was in the military and I was surprised when I was told that it was civil service.” The women joined the air force expecting to receive air force pay; funds to cover hospitalization, housing, and living expenses; and the other benefits afforded to military service members.

  WASP Louesa F. Thompson (43-W-6) preparing for flight in a swift twin-engined P-38. Courtesy of WASP Archive, Texas Woman’s University Libraries

  The women were trained to meet and perform all the standards required of members of the military. WASPs had to follow military customs and procedures; they wore uniforms and were instructed in drill and military courtesy. In the expectation of being militarized, some were sent to the air force Officer Candidate School in Orlando, Florida.

  There was at least one proposal to place the WASPs under the Women’s Army Corps, the WACs, headed by Oveta Culp Hobby, the woman Jackie Cochran had clashed with and said she “loved to hate.”

  Both Nancy Harkness Love and Jackie Cochran had submitted proposals for militarization, but the proposals were turned down. By 1944 the conflict over militarization of the WASPs grew and intensified. By late summer of that year the American military had moved swiftly through France and was at Germany’s border. Many predicted the war in Europe would be over by Christmas (Germany actually would fight fanatically until May 8, 1945).

  Many in Congress felt that it was acceptable for women to be in auxiliaries “as stenographers, telephone operators and stewardesses” but that women in the military might lead to women in combat. Several members of Congress were concerned that women in the military would “insult society women who were volunteering in the war effort because they would have attractive uniforms.”

  Another congressman asked the army, “You are going to start a matrimonial agency, aren’t you?” The army replied that in World War I and so far in World War II there had never been a problem with nurses marrying soldiers. Another congressman was concerned that women officers might give orders to men in the regular army.

  Some voices were raised in support of women in the military: “Are we to deny the patriotic, courageous women of America the opportunity of participating in this war?” asked one congressman.

  Leading the push to disband the WASPs were many of the newer male pilots. Because of its vast training programs, America had more male pilots than airplanes by 1944. Some of these pilots were fearful of being assigned to the infantry as America advanced against Germany and Japan. The men’s lobbying resulted in a negative campaign against the WASPs in the media and Congress, a campaign that found many supporters because of the cultural belief of male superiority and privilege.

  The columnist Drew Pearson had begun to make an issue of women pilots “taking the jobs of men pilots.” Pearson railed against “[General Hap] Arnold’s efforts to sidetrack law by continuing to use WASPs while more than 5,000 trained men pilots, each with an average of 1,250 flying hours, remain idle.”

  A 1944 publicity shot of WASP pilots (from left) Gertrude Meserve, Celia Hunter, Ruth Anderson, and Jo Pitz. The P-47 Thunderbolt behind them was a third heavier than the P-51 Mustang but was also a high-performance World War II aircraft that performed admirably in combat. Courtesy of WASP Archives, Texas Woman’s University Libraries

  The WASPs were furious at what they considered a conspiracy, led by Pearson, who continued to beat the anti-WASP drum in his newspaper columns. He complained, “The government has spent more than $21,000,000 training lady fliers at the behest of vivacious aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran, wife of financial magnate Floyd Odlum…. After almost two years of training and the expenditure of millions of dollars, only 11 WASPs are able to fly twin engine pursuit planes and only 3 are qualified to pilot 4 engine bombers.”

  It was the last statement, especially, that infuriated Gertrude and the other WASPs. She knew the truth—that hundreds of women were performing flight duties across the country every day, sometimes at considerable risk. And they were flying every kind of plane in the US Army’s inventory.

  Ladies Courageous

  Ladies Courageous, starring Loretta Young, was released in 1944. Loosely based on the story of the WASPs, the film was “embarrassing to women pilots, who squirm through seeing it,” reported WASP Byrd Howell Granger. A New York Times reviewer noted that the film “represents a very curious compliment to the [WASP] … and the Army Air Force, which sanctioned and participated in the making of the picture…. Such hysterics, such bickering and generally unladylike, nay unpatriotic, conduct on the part of a supposedly representative group of American women this reviewer has never before seen upon the screen.”

  Gertrude sensed the growing desire of Congress to disband the WASPs and wondered if she had a future in the air. For several days her mind burned with conflict. Marrying Henry would mean giving up the WASPs to take care of a baby. Did she want to be a mother, and at what price? There was also her budding romance with Duncan Miller. He was cute; they had flying in common, and they could talk about aircraft characteristics and handling, weather conditions, and maneuvers for hours.

  It was now clear to Gertrude that the war was going to be won by the Allies, but what would she do after it was over?


  After sending his initial letter, Vreeland called his daughter, urging her to accept Henry’s offer. When her mother got on the phone, Gertrude felt like all her defenses were scrubbed away, that she was caught in a trap. Reluctantly she called Henry. She agreed to marry him and to raise his niece, Ann. The wedding date was set for September 22, and the ceremony would be held at the Tompkins family farmhouse in Bridgehampton, Long Island.

  Who Was Drew Pearson?

  Andrew Russell “Drew” Pearson (1897–1969) was a popular and powerful muckraking journalist noted for his column Washington Merry-Go-Round, which attacked public figures. In addition to his newspaper column, he had radio programs and appeared in several movies. His one-time partner, Jack Anderson, said Pearson saw journalism as a weapon to be used against those he judged to be working against the public interest. Anderson said that Pearson frequently resorted to combining factual news items with fabricated or unsubstantiated details. His writing attacked both right- and left-wing politicians and causes.

  The night before the wedding, Gertrude sat with her sister Elizabeth. “The atmosphere was heavy with resignation and not happiness,” recalled Elizabeth. Gertrude was crying and said she wanted to call the wedding off. Her father and mother entered the room and had a long talk with her, telling her she was just tired and overwrought.