Museum honors WASPs for service

SAGLE — Betty “Birdlegs” Reed first flew in an airplane as a 6-year-old.

Her father read her newspaper clippings about Charles Lindbergh that prompted her imagination to take to the sky, and her sister was born the day of Lindbergh’s historic landing in Paris, the last leg of the first transatlantic flight in 1927.

“I think my dad would have been a pilot if he didn’t have a family,” Reed, 87, said. “He loved aviation.”

She finished high school during the war years, and got a job earning $18 per week at an airplane company in Illinois. Of her paycheck she spent $9 an hour taking flying lessons.

“It was sort of automatic,” she said.

She wanted to fly.

In 1943, as a 20-year-old, she read a LIFE magazine article about a group of women pilots that served the war effort.

The article prompted her to blindly make a telephone call to Washington, D.C., and resulted in her initiation into a fraternity of women who flew war planes, filling in the jobs men would have done had they not been needed flying combat missions in the European and the Pacific theaters.

She earned the nickname “Birdlegs” at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, where as an elite member of a group called WASP, for Woman Airforce Service Pilots, her childhood dreams met reality on a stage that would be her destiny.

Reed was among 20 former WASPs to be recognized at a Saturday ceremony at the Bird Aviation Museum and Invention Center in Sagle.

A monument for the WASPs, and the entire cadre of women who served in a variety of capacities during The Big One, was unveiled following a 9 a.m. fly-in at the museum’s airfield.

“There are at least 30 planes out there on the field,” Chip Lawrence, a volunteer at Saturday’s event said. “We are in the thousands of visitors.”

By noon, parking lots were filled to capacity with more than 800 cars in a converted hayfield that served as a parking lot at the museum near Garfield Bay.

Pilots and former pilots, both civilian and military, were among the visitors who came from across the country to meet the WASPs.

Donna Hinman, of Spokane, who grew up in a military family, visited with WASP members who sat under billowing white awnings autographing books about their units.

 “Because of these woman, and what they did,” Hinman said, “I get to play with my grandbabies.”

Enlisted into the war effort in the early 1940s, the more than 1,000 women who served as aviators under the command of the military, shuttled planes from factories to ports across the continental U.S. where the planes were dismantled and shipped overseas.

The women piloted planes from factories on the east and west coasts to shipping points, where they were transported to theatres in Europe and the Pacific. Many of the planes went to Alaska where Russian pilots climbed into their cockpits for their final flights to the Eastern Front.

Betty T. Blake was among the first women enlisted into a unit that ferried planes either refurbished or fresh off the assembly line.

Blake wasn’t drawn into the service by a sense of duty or self-sacrifice, she said.

Her motivation was more base, she said with a huge smile.

“Selfishly, I wanted to fly all the beautiful wartime airplanes,” she said.

Blake, who now lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., was drawn by a sense of adventure in the blue skies.

She once met her hero Amelia Earhart, she said, who commented on her smile.

“We both had a gap between our front teeth,” Blake said.

Earhart noticed the similarity.

You are just like me, she said.

“I told her, ‘I hope I can fly like you,’ ” Blake replied.

Women like Blake, who were in the ferrying command, flew P-51 fighter planes from Long Beach to Newark, where they were pickled, or, partially disassembled, wrapped in plastic and loaded onto ships for Europe.

On the return trip, the women picked up P-47s at a plant on Long Island and flew them back to the opposite coast for transport to the Pacific.

Sometimes they flew to Great Falls, where pilots would fly the planes to Alaska to be turned over to Russian pilots.

The planes came off the assembly lines so fast, that the female pilots were in the air for long stretches at a time shuttling freshly minted machines east and west, said Debbie Jennings, a historian whose WASP exhibit at the Seattle Museum of Flight was the largest and most comprehensive in the U.S.

“Most people in the U.S. don’t know that women flew fighter planes here,” Jennings said.

Dorothy Olsen, another of the first women enlisted in the female aviator program said she and fellow pilots spent so much time in the air ferrying planes from coast to coast that they had little time for the trappings required of women of that era.

The WASPs were required to keep up with their make-up and had a duty to look clean and professional. They pressed their uniforms under mattresses, if mattresses were available, but often wore the same kit for a week or more.

“You could only have one uniform,” she said.

By the end of a several-week stint in a cockpit, “It could stand up in a corner on its own.”

Marty Wyall was a junior bacteriology student at DePaul University in 1943 when she read the same LIFE magazine article that spurred Reed to join the WASPs.

She called her parents to inform them she was quitting school to fly airplanes.

Her father said no.

“I had to wait another year,” Wyall said.

She passed her physical exam, administered by a flight surgeon who did not forward the paperwork to her commanders.

“I don’t think woman should be in the military,” he told her.

Wyall was upset at the prospect of losing her slot in the program and told the doctor. He replied that she should refrain from speaking to a colonel in that tone.

“I don’t know what I said, but I must have said some of the right things,” Wyall recalled.

She remembers her days as a recruit were filled with arduous calisthenics to strengthen muscles including hours of pull-ups.

“You had t have the muscle to milk up the flaps,” she said.

Some female aviators sat on pillows, but Wyall was blessed with long legs.

Long enough “to reach full rudder on both sides,” she said.

“These were military planes,” she said. “They were built for men.”

Of the 25,000 women who applied to the WASP program, 1,830 were accepted and 1,074 graduated beginning in December 1943.

The women were paid for their services, but were expected to doll out for expenses including their parachutes.

“We paid for everything but the gas,” Wyall said. “I was lucky to have $40 left by the time they took out expenses.”

WASPs were not militarized, meaning they were considered civil service employees.

In their two years of service, WASPs flew more than 60 million miles in operations that included towing targets, strafing operations for the education of ground troops, and ferrying missions.

Thirty-eight WASPs were killed in either training exercises, as they tested or ferried planes.

When the unit was officially disbanded Dec. 20, 1944, after two weeks notice it cut deeply into the units.

Betty Blake was at an airfield in Indiana, unable to fly her P-51.

The men, mechanics and engineers, and woman like Blake, walked out the planes in the falling snow to say good-bye, she said.

“We all cried,” she said. “It was a bad day.”

Records of the WASPs were sealed and remained classified, rendering a piece of American history locked in dust.

In 1977 Congress granted veteran status to the women who served as WASP, and two years later issued honorable discharges.

In 1984, each WASP was awarded the World War II Victory medal and President Obama last year awarded the Congressional Gold medal to approximately 300 surviving WASPs.

Albert Lewis, a Washington, D.C., attorney, whose mother, Dorothy, was a WASP instructor before joining the unit as an aviator is glad the unit finally found its place in history.

The women kept in close contact after the war years, he said, and he grew up in the shadow of the WASPs.

“They raised me,” he said. “They flew every military airplane there was, in virtually every state in the union.

“In that regard they were better trained than the men. It’s kind of a shock people didn’t know about them.”