Prologue
In the quiet early morning of December 7, 1941, Cornelia Fort was teaching takeoffs and landings. Cornelia was a flight instructor at the civilian John Rodgers Field next to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. She and her regular Sunday morning student, a defense worker named Ernest Suomala, liked to fly the little two-seater plane at dawn, when the air was calm and the beauty of Oahu revealed itself below them. Cornelia was twenty-two years old and had been flying for nearly two years. A former debutante from Nashville, Tennessee, she had recently escaped from polite society to follow her dream of flying professionally, moving to Hawaii, where she had been living for the past few months.
That morning, when Cornelia first noticed another aircraft flying in her direction, she wasn’t immediately worried. Sundays were a busy day for pilots, as they flew students and sightseers alike, and it was not uncommon to see other airplanes nearby. Then she realized the plane was making straight for them, and fast. Cornelia acted quickly, jerking the controls away from Ernest and jamming the throttle open, willing their own plane upward. As she later remembered, their little blue and yellow Interstate Cadet narrowly missed colliding with the other plane, which “passed so close under us that our celluloid windows rattled violently.” Cornelia looked down to see whose airplane had come so close to hitting them. She was stunned to see the red circles of the Japanese flag painted on the tops of the wings.
Then she looked back at the harbor. Thick black smoke was billowing below, a sight that sent shivers down Cornelia’s spine. When she looked up again, she could see dozens of planes in formation ahead, their silver fuselages glinting in the morning sun. The skies over Pearl Harbor were now thick with enemy aircraft. “Something detached itself from an airplane and came glistening down,” Cornelia later wrote. “My eyes followed it down, and even with the knowledge pounding in my mind, my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor.”
Quickly recognizing they were in danger, Cornelia hurried to land the tiny plane as the shadow of the Japanese Zero went over and bullets splattered off the ground all around them. She and her student leapt out of their cockpit and ran to the hangar as enemy planes dove toward them, strafing the airfield with bullets. They spent the rest of the morning huddled in the hangar, watching helplessly and anxiously counting as other planes from the airfield came in to land. “Two never came back,” Cornelia remembered. “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.” By midday the American fleet in the Pacific lay in ruins, and more than 2,400 Americans were dead.
The next day Cornelia’s friend Betty Guild came to see her at the airfield. Betty was a pilot, too, and had been home sleeping when the attack began. She’d woken to her brother’s screams: “It’s the real thing! It’s the real thing!” Betty dashed to the balcony as the sound of dozens of airplane engines bombarded her ears. From there she could see the dense clouds of black smoke obscuring the harbor. Betty’s boyfriend was a Navy officer who had slept in the guest room after getting her home from a late party the night before, and her father offered to drive him down to his ship, which was already burning. Betty wanted to go with them, but the two men snuck away while she ran upstairs to get her purse, not wanting her to be exposed to strafing Japanese planes overhead. Betty’s boyfriend survived that day, but many of their pilot friends did not.
At the airfield with Cornelia, Betty was still in a daze, her friend’s close call only adding to her sense of dismay. The two women went to look over Cornelia’s little blue and yellow plane, realizing that the bullets from the Japanese fighter had only just missed the gas tank or the plane would have certainly exploded.
After their experiences at Pearl Harbor, Betty and Cornelia were inspired to do whatever they could to help their nation in a time of war. The next year, when both women were invited to fly as civilians for the U.S. Army Air Forces, or AAF, they jumped at the chance. Cornelia Fort became part of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, a small group of elite women pilots led by the well-known commercial pilot Nancy Love. Betty Guild joined the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, or WFTD, which aimed to train thousands of pilots under the direction of the famed air racer Jacqueline Cochran, and feed them into the WAFS. Later, these two parts of the same program were given one name, the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP.
More than 25,000 hopefuls applied to join Nancy and Jackie’s program, with 1,102 women completing training and earning their silver wings. They went on to be stationed at 126 bases across the United States. From September 1942 to December 1944, WASP ferried new military planes from factories to points of embarkation for the war on two fronts. They flight tested planes. They towed targets behind aircraft to help train male gunners, who fired at them with live ammunition. All told, the WASP transported 12,000 planes over 60 million miles, released more than 1,100 male pilots for combat flying overseas, and proved beyond a doubt that women pilots were just as skilled and tenacious as men.
In the years after the war, however, the story of the WASP faded into the distant past. The women moved on with their lives, busy growing their careers and taking care of their families. Many managed to keep up with their flying, but others were kept grounded by lack of jobs or opportunities for women in the aviation field. It was only as the women grew older that they realized that their time serving their country had been forgotten.
They would spend the last decades of their lives fighting for their place in history.
Teresa James wears a full parachute as she prepares for her stunt flight in an open-cockpit biplane in the late 1930s. Courtesy TWU
CHAPTER ONE
Airminded
Only a few short weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Teresa James stood on the freezing platform of Pittsburgh’s Union Station saying goodbye to the love of her life. They were an attractive couple: Teresa a pretty, curly-haired brunette with brown eyes and a ready smile, and George—who went by Dink—looking so handsome and clean-cut in his new uniform, with his cropped hair and square jaw. The couple had been preparing for this moment ever since America’s entry into the war, but even so, they hated that the time for goodbye had come so soon.
Both Teresa and Dink had spent years anxiously following the news, waiting for the moment when their country might finally join the fight. They were children of European immigrants—Teresa’s mother was from Ireland and Dink’s was from Hungary—and perhaps, as a result, they took events overseas personally. Dink was a well-qualified pilot with 2,100 hours of flying time, and the Army’s Air Transport Command wanted him to join their Ferrying Division. But by the time the telegram from the Ferrying Division arrived, he had already gone with a friend and enlisted. He was now Private Martin, headed to training at Keesler Army Airfield in Biloxi, Mississippi.