Going Where No Woman Had Gone Before

It is always perilous to proclaim anything as “the first” of its kind. Inevitably there’s someone who drags out musty letters as reproachful proof otherwise. One English newspaper was so uneasy about this that its writers were under orders not to cite anything as “the first” but rather to use the fudge-phrase “one of the first”--until a friend of mine dutifully and puckishly referred in print to George Washington as “one of the first presidents of the United States.”

The American government learned about this danger when, in 1976, it proclaimed 10women pilots to be “the first women in an Air Force cockpit.”

Hold on there. Those 10 weren’t even born when the first women clambered into Air Force cockpits--the Army Air Corps, it was then. The wartime government had worked these women pilots like mules (which they loved) and then dumped them without even a thank-you (which they didn’t). But not even being remembered as the first? That was too much. That had to stop.

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During World War II, delicate flowers of womanhood managed to run assembly lines and offices and military aircraft, the latter so profoundly a male domain you’d have thought they ran on testosterone instead of gasoline.

The pilot shortage stateside prompted a flier named Jackie Cochran to organize WASP--Women Air Force Service Pilots. Some 25,000 women applied, and 1,074 earned their wings at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Tex. They ferried warplanes to both coasts to be shipped overseas. They towed aerial targets for male trainees to shoot at with live ammo. They played the enemy in dogfight simulations, tested experimental planes and new planes. They racked up 60 million miles in 78 kinds of aircraft.

Thirty-eight of them were killed, as assuredly in their country’s service as any corporal shot at Anzio, but because the Army could not bring itself to put the words “woman” and “military pilot” together, they died as civilians, without benefits, much less honors. Once, a dead woman’s colleagues had to break into a base Coke machine for the nickels to send her body home.

Vi Cowden of Huntington Beach--Vi Thurn then--a first-grade teacher from Spearfish, S.D., who’d saved enough from her $110 monthly salary for flying lessons and a pilot’s license, was in the fourth WASP class and one of 114 Army-trained to fly the newest and creamiest and speediest combat planes in the world.

At the war’s height, planes were coming off the assembly line so fast that the “mandatory” one-hour flight test before Vi showed up to ferry them to New Jersey or Long Beach sometimes existed only in a mechanic’s faked paperwork. Yet even as Vi headed down the runway at 100 mph, wondering whether some goof-off had forgotten to put in a screw, there was the wondrous sensation that “you’re the very first person who ever took this plane up.” It reminded her of South Dakota, where she had wanted to soar as the hawks did, where she would set out for a walk 1634104421the first one.”

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WASP proficiency, and a safety record to prove it, won accolades from the likes of instructor Paul Tibbets, who flew the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Yet one officer refused to take delivery of Vi’s plane because a woman had flown it. And the Army insisted that the women report in when they began their menstrual periods so they could be grounded. After Vi got wind of that, she officially “never had another one. I figured it wasn’t any of their business.”

Still, one military man confessed to her one day at Avenger Field that he had been so afraid to fly the P-47 that he checked into sick bay every morning. Then he saw her curly head in the cockpit, “and I thought, ‘If she can do it, so can I.’ ”

WASP work was so critical to the war effort that only a presidential party could bump them from commercial flights to pick up another plane. So it happened one day that little Vi Thurn was a big enough cheese that the airline bumped Frank Sinatra to fly her to Memphis instead. She got off in a pouring rain to see hundreds of women standing around under umbrellas, waiting in vain for Frankie.

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By Christmas 1944, the servicemen started coming home, and even though they didn’t have the WASP’s flying hours or skills on certain aircraft, it was wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, goodbye. Some of the women offered their services for $1 a year, just to keep flying, but to no avail. WASPs disappeared from the military’s 120 bases and its memory. Then, 30 years on, someone bleated that line about the first women in the cockpit. Barry Goldwater carried the WASP cause to a Congress that had once voted thumbs-down to commission them as officers.

Now, now come the honors and benefits and the lifetime pilot’s license and veterans’ hospital rights and a military grave--little and late but not unwelcome. Pleasant, sure, but not even close to the thrill Vi had last year, treated to a ride in the Goodyear blimp, when the fiance of a WASP granddaughter, who happened to be piloting the blimp, let her take the controls briefly over water. And for a moment she was back among the hawks.