• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

W.W. II Pilots Relive Glory: Members of Wasp Fly Aboard Restored Warbird

Posted on: Friday, 2 June 2006, 21:00 CDT

By Renee Koury, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Jun. 1--They defied convention -- and defied gravity -- six decades ago when they became the first women in history to fly for the U.S. military as Women Airforce Service Pilots.

On Wednesday, three of the World War II aviation pioneers, now in their 80s and living in the Bay Area, made a short return flight.

Eleanor Wortz of Los Altos, Jean McFarland Koehler of Sunnyvale and Maggie Gee of Berkeley flew through crystal blue skies from Livermore to Moffett Field in a restored B-24 Liberator, like the ones they piloted as the unconventional flying ladies of World War II.

"It felt pretty good," said Wortz, 84, who emerged beaming from the plane's tiny hatch after the 23-minute hop. "It's been so long . . . I'd forgotten how it is."

Wortz was wearing the original skirted dress uniform with silver wings she wore as a 23-year-old flier. She lamented that at 84, she could no longer pilot the plane herself on Wednesday, just ride in the flight deck.

"Flying is what I love to do and I couldn't," she said. "But it made you remember. I had two years of flying in the Air Force and it was a good life."

Wortz was joined on the B-24 "Witchcraft" by her fellow WASP veterans Koehler, 87, and Gee, 82.

All three professed a love of flying as young girls during an era when few women entered a cockpit. It was only the exigencies of World War II, when pilots were growing scarce, that turned the military to women for help.

Wortz, Koehler and Gee were among exactly 1,074 women, out of 25,000 who applied, to earn their silver wings in WASP training from 1942 to 1944.

Though they were an exclusive group, the WASP were not bestowed military status, couldn't serve in combat or fly outside the United States.

Instead, they helped the male Air Force pilots mainly by ferrying fighter planes from one base to another. Some died in crashes during their domestic flights. Many, like Gee, helped stage mock dogfights in the air. Koehler's job was to tow targets behind her plane while Air Force fliers shot at the targets for practice.

"When I reported for duty the first day, the officer said, 'Yeah, we need help, but we don't need women,' " Koehler recalled. "All I could say was, 'Yes sir!' What I wanted to say was entirely different than that."

But she and others said the women generally were treated with respect. They lived on the bases in barracks far from the men. They often dined in the officers' mess hall. They were invited to the dances.

After the war, the women said, their piloting careers ended. With hordes of male pilots returning from war, the veterans got the jobs while the women were shut out.

"In those days women weren't taken as seriously," Koehler recalled. "They were considered too emotional to fly."

Instead, Koehler went on to a series of jobs, including helping repair bush pilot planes in Alaska, and then nursing at Stanford Hospital. Gee went on to become a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Wortz hung on to aviation longer: She learned Portuguese to land a job in Brazil teaching theory of flight to Brazilian students.

Wednesday's flight was part of the Wings of Freedom Tour, arranged by the non-profit Collings Foundation of Massachusetts, which restores World War II planes.

The aging WASP members are dwindling. About 400 are still living. About two dozen so far have been tapped to take the bumpy, noisy rides aboard the restored Wings of Freedom planes, still fitted with machine guns and bomb-target sighting equipment.

The plane carrying the three Bay Area WASP members was piloted, appropriately, by a younger female pilot, Caroline Lindgren-Collings, daughter-in-law of the foundation's founder. She also is the only female pilot who's licensed to fly a B-24 Liberator. Once a common World War II aircraft, the one at Moffett this weekend is the only one left that flies.

"It's such a privilege to be the one to fly these ladies who are my heroes," said Lindgren-Collings. "What they did for women in aviation was nothing less than heroic. WASP was an experiment to see if women could be pilots and they proved we could."

In 1977, the nation officially recognized WASP's contribution in World War II and bestowed its members with full military status and benefits.

Contact Renee Koury at rkoury@mercurynews.com or (650) 688-7598.

-----

Copyright (c) 2006, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

Source: San Jose Mercury News

More News in this Category