The Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II

WASP trainees learn from their instructor pilot. Public Domain

After a long struggle to gain recognition for their wartime contributions, the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program of World War II has become legendary. Each of the more than 1,000 women who served in the program has a unique story.

Paula Loop is one such woman. Born in Manchester, Oklahoma in 1916, she grew up poor on a farm. Her parents raised her to work hard, and she eventually graduated from the Oklahoma College for Women with a business degree. While working as a secretary in Ponca City, Oklahoma, she applied for a scholarship in 1939 to receive free flight training under President Roosevelt’s newly established Civilian Pilot Training program. After the war broke out, she wanted to help the effort, and in 1942 applied to a new program called the Women’s Flying Training Detachment.

Founded by famous pilot Jacqueline Cochran, WFTD trained female pilots for non-combat domestic flight missions during the war. A year after its founding, in August 1943, the WFTD merged with the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS), forming the WASP program.

Jacqueline Cochran talks to a group of WASP trainees. Public Domain

Paula was one of the WFTD’s early recruits. She met all the qualifications, including the requirement to have at least 200 hours of flight time. She graduated from her class a few months before the WASP program was formed. Over the next year, she logged over 1,000 hours ferrying bombers, fighters, and training aircraft around North America.

Dangerous Missions

The WASP pilots performed a variety of missions other than transporting planes. The most dangerous of these were live-fire exercises, involving towing targets behind planes for male army recruits to practice shooting at with anti-aircraft guns.

Deanie Bishop was one of eight women who passed the rigorous tests necessary to fly a B-26. Her job was to keep the plane in a flight pattern as B-24s flew by, shooting at the target she towed. One on mission, a lieutenant named Bill shot a few bullets into her tail. When Deanie landed, she ran over to criticize his gunnery skills. He must have said the right thing, because Deanie ended up marrying Lt. Bill Parrish.

Most dangerous of all were nighttime “searchlight missions,” where soldiers were trained to seek out planes with a spotlight before firing. When a pilot was caught in the spotlight, she couldn’t see anything and had to fly solely by instrument readings.

WASP Nell Bright described what this was like in a 2020 interview with the Commemorative Air Force. Relating one of her experiences pulling targets in a B-25, she said, “one night the crew chief had rolled out the target and the boys from Fort Bliss were supposed to get the target in the searchlights.” Bright noted that they failed to do this, saying, “Well, I don’t know what they got in the searchlights,” and that “flak started coming up in front of the plane, so we did some evasive action.” As a result, the mission was cut off: “We called ground control and told them we’d come back another time when the boys could learn to shoot the back of the plane rather than the front.”

WASP Casualties

While ferrying missions were more mundane than getting shot at, there were still dangers involved. More casualties resulted from ferrying than from live-fire exercises.

In early July 1944, Paula Loop undertook a routine mission to transport a military trainer aircraft from Enid, Oklahoma to Seattle. On July 7, she stopped in Sacramento, California to refuel. In a brief letter home, she wrote about how it was “wonderfully cool here.”

They were the last words she ever wrote. That afternoon, on the last leg of her trip, she crashed into an Oregon mountaintop. The crash killed her instantly, sparking a small forest fire. It was not until 57 years after the crash, in 2001, that the U.S. Forest Service finally surveyed the site to prepare for the removal of the plane parts. While the definite cause of the crash was never ascertained, Paula most likely encountered a strong gust of wind while crossing the mountaintop and was unable to regain control of her plane.

Like all WASP pilots, Loop was considered a civilian employee. She thus received no military benefits. While her fellow WASP Geraldine “Jerry” Hardman escorted her casket back to Oklahoma, loved ones had to pay the transportation costs. Although Paula didn’t receive a military burial, her parents draped her casket with an American flag to honor her service.

Approximately 37 other women pilots died in the line of duty. In addition to this, three more inactive WASPs—Verna Turner, Virginia Hope, and Margaret Isbill—were killed in a private plane crash on Dec. 7, 1944. Though these three women aren’t included in the “official” list of the 38 WASPs killed while the program was active, their names were added in 1990 to the WASP Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

The Order of Fifinella

In December 1944, the WASP program was disbanded. Shortly before they went separate ways, the pilots formed an organization known as the “Order of Fifinella.” Fifinella is a character originally designed by Walt Disney for an unproduced adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book “The Gremlins.” A lady gremlin with wings, she seemed an appropriate symbol for their group, and they received permission from Disney to use Fifinella as their official mascot.

Through the Order of Fifinella, the WASPs stayed in touch. Thirty years later, in 1975, Bernice “Bee” Haydu became the president of the Order. During her two terms, she led a successful effort to get Congress to grant veteran benefits to WASP pilots. They were given retroactive military status and honorable discharges in 1977. This allowed them, among other things, to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

A Congressional Gold Medal

During a ceremony in 2010, WASP Deanie Bishop Parrish accepted a Congressional Gold Medal on behalf of all her fellow pilots. It was the culmination of years of effort to gain more recognition for their wartime contributions. With her daughter Nancy, she co-founded the organization “Wings Across America” and spent more than a decade traveling around the country, recording interviews with more than 100 surviving WASPs.

President Obama awards the WASP pilots the Congressional Medal of Honor in the summer of 2009. Official White House Photo by Pete Souza. Public Domain

Their website, Wasp on the Web, offers a comprehensive collection of information about the organization and the women who served in it.

Nearly all of the original 1,074 WASP graduates have passed away. One of the few remaining is Nell “Mickey” Bright, who survived getting shot at by anti-artillery aircraft during a nighttime searchlight mission. She just turned 103 on June 20.

“If you had fear and you were scared then you should quit flying,” Ms. Bright told an interviewer. When asked if she was afraid herself, she replied, “No, we just thought it was a lot of fun.”

Her attitude towards flying can be applied to most other of life’s endeavors as well.

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