Female pilots from World War II return to training site in Texas

[Copper]

FORT WORTH — Most of the women who walked to the aircraft parked at Alliance Airport, some of them relying on walkers and canes for help, hadn’t flown over the brown earth and scrub of West Texas since the war.

Their heartbeats quickened as they climbed into small aircraft, pulled headsets over their ears and heard the rumble of engines cranking up, emotions and memories flooding to the surface as they launched one by one for Avenger Field in Sweetwater, a historic footnote to World War II but so much more to the women who earned their wings there.

"It was the greatest time of my life, the greatest opportunity I ever had," said Helen Snapp, a 90-year-old woman who traveled in the back seat of a T-6 Texan, a 1940s trainer with 650 hp and a throaty growl that remains one of the best planes she ever flew.

Many decades before women donned flight suits to fly Apache attack helicopters and F/A-18 Hornets, another generation had already broken the cockpit barrier.

They were 1,074 members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, the WASPs. They earned their wings at Avenger Field, which in 1943 and ’44 teemed with ambitious young women learning to fly the Army way.

On Thursday, 38 of them from all parts of the nation flew back to Sweetwater in what was dubbed Operation Fifinella, after a Disney character that became the WASP mascot.

'Let’s fly’

The idea for the fly-in originated with Cindy Wiesner, whose mother, Sylvia Miller Burrill, 84, earned her wings as a WASP in 1944. They were coming to a WASP reunion this weekend in Irving and were disappointed that no trip was scheduled to Sweetwater.

"This might be the last reunion," said Wiesner, who lives in Vermont. "Everybody is doing nice tributes, but these gals are alive. Let’s fly!"

Lillian Yonally of Albany, N.Y., who earned her wings in 1943, climbed into a B-25 Mitchell on Thursday for the hour-long trip.

"I got my instrument rating in a B-25 in April of ’44," she said. "We flew from Sacramento down to Texas, went into Mexico and brought back four bottles of something. Because it was a day and night mission, it fulfilled our requirement. I’ve got a lot of stories, but I don’t know if they should all be published."

The airlift was organized by Lana Kraeszig, a private pilot who lives in Pecan Plantation in Hood County. In a matter of a few weeks, she managed to secure 32 airplanes, including an American Airlines DC-3 from the 1930s, to take the WASP to Sweetwater.

Active-duty women pilots and other Air Force personnel served as escorts for the women once in Sweetwater, where they toured the WASP museum before heading back.

Owners of the airplanes — from Pecan Plantation, Fort Worth, Cleburne, Burleson, Colleyville, Farmers Branch, Roanoke, even as far as suburban Houston — donated their expenses.

"I said, 'This will be really fun to do. I’ll get a bunch of girlfriends, and we’ll do this,’ " she said. "But it’s taken on a life of its own. I had to call in reinforcements."

It wasn’t hard to find pilots.

"Anytime a veteran wants to fly, I try to make it work," said Brian Porsch, who owns a T-6 with a seductive brunette painted on the nose. "I’m a dentist, so I just rearranged my patients to do this."

Revisiting an idea

More than a decade before World War II, the War Department considered — briefly — the notion of using women pilots. But the head of the Army Air Corps called it "utterly unfeasible" because women were too "high strung."

By 1942, as the military ramped up its training of pilots and prepared to send them overseas, the War Department turned to the idea again, which had been renewed by famed female aviator Jacqueline Cochran in a letter to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

On Sept. 15, 1942, the Army opened a women’s pilot training base, first at Houston, then relocated to Sweetwater.

More than 20,000 women applied for the program, including Betty Jo Reed, who lives in North Richland Hills. She called the Pentagon in 1943 after seeing a Life magazine article about the WASP program and actually got Cochran on the phone. Soon she was on a train from her home near Chicago to Sweetwater.

"It was the most exciting time of my life," she said, who was 21 when she signed up.

"Everyone in the country was contributing to the war effort," she said. "Who could have had a better time than doing it by flying?"

After earning their wings, the WASP were sent to one of the military’s hundreds of bases stateside. They flew cargo, served as instrument instructors, towed targets for anti-aircraft practice, flew test missions and many other duties. They flew every type of aircraft in the U.S. inventory at the time, though never in combat.

Strangely, though, they were not actually in the military. They held no rank, and the 38 women who died as WASPs received no military honors at their burials.

Making an impression

Congress granted the women status as veterans and awarded them honorable discharges in the late 1970s, just as the military was again opening some flying jobs to women. Women can serve as pilots in every service now in every unit, except special operations.

It’s not difficult to imagine the reception the women routinely received from men in the military, except, of course, when there was flirting to be done.

To find out more For more information go to www.operationfifinella.org or www.waspmuseum.org.
Texas Woman’s University in Denton holds all of the WASP archives. www.twu.edu/library/wasp.