Above and Beyond : Female World War II pilots risked their lives for their country, yet it took years for their efforts to be recognized. The bond shared by the veteran fliers, who meet today in Anaheim, is as strong as ever.

In her Leisure World home, Yvonne Pateman speaks with the same sauciness she no doubt had at 25 when she was seated in the open cockpit of the PT-19 she flew in World War II.

“I wanted to fly. That’s what I joined to do,” says Pateman, 77, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant who didn’t want to be “a ground-bounder or waffle-butt.”

Pateman, of Laguna Hills, is part of a nationwide sisterhood with a strong, historical bond looking to reunite in Anaheim this week. There’s not a ground-bounder or waffle-butt in the bunch.

They are members of a group called Women’s Airforce Service Pilots. While other young women worked in factories or waited at home for their men in uniform to return from World War II, these women took to the air.

And in significant numbers: 1,074 female pilots joined the effort. Thirty-eight were killed in the line of duty--some brought down by gunfire, some by faulty engines and other hazards of flying.

The war effort “needed everybody,” recalls retired Lt. Col. Betty Jane Williams, 78, of Woodland Hills. “An airplane doesn’t respond to sex. It only responds to skill, and I was bitten by the aviation bug.”

Pateman was bitten by the same bug.

“My family thought I was out of my mind,” she says.

Every other year, the members of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, known as WASPs, hold a reunion convention. Of the surviving 600 pioneering female pilots, 260 will gather today through Sunday at the Disneyland Hotel.

High on the agenda is honoring the memories of the 38 who lost their lives while carrying out assignments. Such tasks included testing planes, ferrying top-secret weapons, delivering aircraft and towing targets through the sky to provide anti-aircraft gunnery practice for male troops.

The WASPs consider themselves one of the best-kept secrets of World War II.

They remained an unrecognized part of the war effort during their service, serving without benefit of military rank or insurance on their lives. When a pilot lost her life, the others would pitch in what they could to help survivors with expenses.

The women wore uniforms, lived in barracks, piloted 78 types of military aircraft and flew more than 60 million miles. Still, the women who graduated from the group’s elite training program were not officially a part of the military during World War II and were considered civilians by the government for 35 years after.

By 1944, half of the Ferrying Division’s fighter pilots were WASPs, and they made three-quarters of all domestic fighter deliveries with a lower accident rate than the male pilots had, the WASPs say.

“We could hold our own,” says Williams.

For the most part, the male and female pilots got along. But the women did encounter some problems. In some cases, the men pulled dangerous pranks of bravado and peppered female pilots with insults. The women say the male pilots’ resentment was most pronounced during training.

Beverly Beesemyer, 78, of Laguna Hills remembers a time when she and her WASP colleagues who had already graduated from flight training encountered a group of male flight students who “thought they were pretty hot pilots.”

“They tried to fly formation and got too close to us” during a landing practice, she recalls. “Way too close to us. On they ground, they came up and said, ‘So, did we scare you?’ and they laughed. I guess they resented that we had already graduated. What really scared us is that they weren’t trained yet and they didn’t know what they were doing.”

As the WASPs settled in, though, they earned quiet recognition from the male pilots they’d come to admire the most.

“It was the pilots returning from combat who really said they respected us,” Beesemyer says. “That’s what counts.”

Among the biases that existed in the military command at the time was the belief that menstruation affected a woman’s ability to pilot an aircraft.

“They said our equilibrium was off and that we flew differently during that time,” Beesemyer says. The female pilots were ordered to report to their training sergeants when they were menstruating and then subjected to testing. Some of the women chose to ignore the order; they already knew there was not a problem and resented the intrusion.

As the end of the war drew near, the military dissolved the civilian support groups brought in at the beginning of the conflict. The WASPs were disbanded in December 1944.

“We were summarily dismissed . . . deactivated with nothing,” Williams says. “They just said, ‘Goodbye.’ ”

Williams says that in the postwar years, tempers were at a low boil among the female pilots over their treatment. Then, in 1976, tempers boiled over: The Air Force billed 10 female graduates as “the first women in an Air Force cockpit.”

“That’s when things got ugly,” Williams says. “We were the first women in an Air Force cockpit,” she says.

In 1977, Congress passed a bill introduced by then-Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) that gave the WASPs honorable discharges and declared them veterans. It took a two-year bureaucratic battle after that to make it official.

“All we wanted was a grateful nation to recognize us and to be buried in a military grave,” says Williams, who flew military missions in the United States during the war to free male pilots for overseas duties. “It was very unjust behavior that took 35 years to correct.”

With their recognition a matter of public record and the passage of time, most of that bitterness is gone today, says incoming WASP president Violet Cowden of Huntington Beach.

“When we get together now, we get together as friends,” says Cowden. She was a 25-year-old first-grade teacher when she joined the war effort. “We talk about the experience, but we also tell stories about our grandchildren and things like that.”

Scheduled to speak at the WASP reunion are the pioneers among pioneers in the organization--women who not only made a contribution to the war effort but also carried their legacy into the future.

Christy Cook, a young pilot with more than 50 hours of combat time, will be there. She’s the granddaughter of WASP Carol Selfridge. Also there will be Margaret Ringenberg, who flew around the world in 1994 at age 72.

The gathering will also hear from Jan Wood, a WASP who flew around the world in 1956, as well as veteran pilot Bobbi Trout, the first woman to receive the Howard Hughes Memorial Award for excellence in aviation.

“We all came from different backgrounds and did different things,” Cowden says of her World War II colleagues. “These women did just about everything. They even flew in the eyes of hurricanes.”

Although the WASPs were initially restricted to daylight flights in liaison aircraft, the group of female civil service pilots gradually took on more dangerous roles.

“When you’re a pioneer, you don’t want to be called a sissy,” Williams says.

Nancy Love began paving the way by obtaining permission to fly B-17s and P-15 Mustangs. Her efforts were followed by Jacqueline Cochran, who convinced Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commanding general of U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, to allow the female pilots to tow targets for male gunnery pilots--who at times left bullet holes in the tow planes.

“It only happened to me but once,” recalls Beesemyer, who made an emergency landing while towing targets for male gunnery pilots in Las Vegas. She discovered a hole in the tail of the smoking aircraft after the ordeal.

The women who became WASPs--they were chosen from among 25,000 volunteers--were already pilots before the war.

Some of them scrambled to log in enough flight hours to qualify for service, flying on weekends and after work.

“I didn’t have a car, so I would ride my bike to the airfield, and come back to teach,” recalls Cowden, who went on to serve as a pursuit pilot delivering P-51’s and other aircraft from factories to military bases. “The kids in class always knew when I had been flying, because I would be smiling.”

Pateman, former president of the WASPs, was working as a “wire-plugger” at Western Electric in New Jersey when she went to Texas for flight training.

“I remember I thought I was ready, until I went to the hangars and saw the big planes with the open cockpits,” Pateman recalls. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God! What did I get myself into? I don’t have enough money to get home!’ ”

A month later, Pateman was making an emergency landing in a pea patch near Sweetwater, Texas, in her military craft. She wasn’t frightened, just low on fuel. When she found herself in trouble, she scouted out the field and landed safely--a coolheadedness that impressed her instructor.

After refueling, she was right back in the air again.