Oral history interview with Susie Winston Bain, 2000

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WOMEN VETERANS HISTORICAL PROJECT
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Susie W. Bain
INTERVIEWER: Hermann Trojanowski
DATE: October 11, 2000
[Begin Interview]
HT: Today is Wednesday, October 11, 2000. My name is Hermann Trojanowski, and I’m with Mrs. Susie Winston Bain at the Special Collections Department of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. We’re here to do an oral history interview for the Women Veterans Historical Collection.
Mrs. Bain, could you tell me a few things about yourself, some biographic information such as where you were born, when you were born, where you lived before you enlisted, and a little bit about your family life before you joined the WASP [Women Airforce Service Pilots] in World War II.
SB: Okay. I was born in Markham, Texas. I think Markham probably had about forty-five people in it at that time. I was maybe forty-sixth when I came along. I was reared mostly in Bay City, which was a very much larger town of 5,592 at the time I lived there. We thought that was a great big city.
Mother was a musician. She taught music. She’d have been a concert pianist, but she met my father and didn’t quite get to finish all of her training. She graduated from Baylor Belton in two years, where it usually takes four, in music. She was a wonderful, accomplished person.
My father was reared on a ranch, and—oh, I have to tell you something. Can I tell you things that—
HT: Sure. Yes. Please.
SB: [laughs] Well, anyway, having been reared on an old Texas ranch, he had certain ideas about horseback riding. When I was up here at the University of Texas, I’d never been able to go to camp because we really couldn’t afford it those days. I was a child of the Depression, obviously. I just thought, oh, that would be the most wonderful thing in the world, to be able to go to summer camp.
So this gal came to the university when I was a sophomore there, and she said she was looking for an accomplished horsewoman. I thought, “Aha, now’s my chance.” I said 2
to her, “Yes, I’m an accomplished horsewoman. I’ve been riding all my life, and I would certainly like to apply for the job.”
She said, “Well, that’s fine,” she said, “but you might have to deal with swimming first because you might have to have multiple jobs there at the camp.” It was a Campfire Girls’ camp up near Fort Worth.
I thought, “Oh, that sounds so exciting.” I said, “Oh, yes. I can swim. I passed my junior lifesaving course, so I’m a good swimmer, too. I can certainly teach all those little girls.”
So anyway, for some unknown reason, she hired me. I got up there—oh, before, there’s a funny thing that I started to tell you about my father. I found out that I was supposed to know how to put on a horse show. I’d never even seen a horse show, let alone know how to direct one and do all this stuff with the kids. Also, you were supposed to post. I think they rode western saddles, but they were trying to teach these girls the accomplishment of posting in a saddle.
So the first time, my father took me out to this riding place, and I got on an English saddle. I’d never posted in my whole life, but anyway, I’d watched people do it, so up and down, up and down. I thought, “Oh, boy. I’ve got this thing licked.”
Well, he looked at me one time, and he said, “Listen, girl, you sit that saddle. You’re in Texas, you know. We don’t post here.”
Anyway, we did post, and I had to learn how, but I thought that was kind of funny. He was just an old Texas rancher from way, way back, and he certainly did not post.
We got on through that. I went to school and graduated in Bay City, Texas, and did pretty good. We got seventy-five people in our graduating class, and somehow or other I finagled valedictorian. I was so proud of myself because I was going to get a scholarship to the University of Texas. I thought, “Gee, whiz. That’ll come in really handy.” We were not people of great financial acumen.
What I got was a twenty-five dollar scholarship, which paid for my tuition fee, which was grand. I was proud to have it. But the rest of it we had to make up some way. So it was touch and go there for a while.
My father was trying real hard. He was in the automobile business, but it was Depression time. I remember my mother would call up the guy at the market, and she’d say, “Now, Cecil, send me a nice steak.” That was maybe once a month. We didn’t have nice steaks all the time. But it was kind of funny.
I’d say, “Well, Dad, how can we afford steaks?”
He said, “Well, I just trade an automobile for groceries, and we work this out somehow or other.” He did. We always had food on the table. We didn’t live like the Vanderbilts, but we didn’t know we were poor. Everybody else was poor.
We had a really good time, about seven of us girls, in what we called “the gang,” and we thought we were the most important things in our little school, of course. Anyway, I look back on it now, and I think, god, what a snob I was. [laughs] We didn’t think about it back in those days.
Anyway, I graduated and went to the University of Texas.
HT: That’s in Austin, of course.3
SB: Yes. That’s in Austin. I’m going to backtrack a little bit and get back to my campfire days. We did okay, and the two old cowboys, they were just darling, with the old Texas drawl and everything, and they showed me. The woman who had been there before me was quite an accomplished horsewoman, and he had watched the shows and helped her with the shows. So he showed me how to have the girls do all this stuff and change gaits and everything.
Somehow or other, I got through it. I don’t know how. Anyway, then I could tell everybody I had been to camp. So I was proud of that. [laughs]
All right. Now I’m back in Austin, and everything was going really well. Times were bad then. I graduated in 1940, and, you know, girls then, maybe boys, too, I don’t know, we just didn’t think much about war or anything. We just went in there to learn and play and do all the things that we thought college kids did. I was at a sorority meeting, and all of a sudden, we had—we didn’t have TV, of course, then, but we did have radio. All of a sudden, on the radio comes, “Pearl Harbor has been bombed.”
Well, we all just sat back in our little chairs, and we couldn’t believe it, because the most important thing in our lives at that time was try to get some guy we met in chemistry class to ask us to go to one of the exciting Germans, as they were then called. Those were all-night affairs, and, of course, it was just so much fun. It would start about ten o’clock, and you could dance all night, and that was just the biggest thing. Kay Kayser and all those big bands were in then at the university, and they had a great big dance hall, and it was just a wonderful, wonderful time.
HT: And these were called Germans?
SB: Germans, yes.
HT: Like Germany?
SB: Yes. I never did know why, except it’s the only place that I know of where they started and went all night long. But that was part of the thing. Of course, the housemother was always there to check us in when we came in the next morning.
Oh, maybe one more funny thing I should tell. I don’t know. You can cut out half of this if you want to, honey.
HT: No, that’s fine.
SB: Anyway, this housemother was a character. I was on the Student Council thing at this particular dormitory, and up in the top letters, just below the roof of the thing, was “Helen M. Kirby Hall.” Anyway, she’d done something that we disapproved of, grounded some of us or something. We thought we’d try to get even with her, some of my cohorts and I.
They lifted me up on top of the roof, and they made a big letter E out of cardboard, and they held me by my heels over the edge of the roof, and I just pulled out the A, Helen M. Kirby H-E-L-L. That was a terrible thing to do, but, you know, in college days it was funny. She never did know about that. We hid it behind a Coke machine. Why in the world she never found out, I don’t know.4
I felt very bad about it later. It wasn’t a very nice thing to do. But she made us angry, and we just got even with her, we thought. If they’d found out who was responsible—of course, nobody would snitch on the other one, so they never did find out.
I was on the Student Council, so it was my job to go around and interrogate everybody and try to find out who had done this terrible thing. I just couldn’t find out, for the life of me, who had done it. [laughs] Anyway, that’s just one of those silly things that happened.
Back to the war thing. As I said, we just did not—we were not cognizant of the danger we were in. We read the papers every once in a while to kind of keep up with sports and stuff like that, but we weren’t interested in the government. We just weren’t. Kids now know more. My goodness, we didn’t know anything. We were so stupid.
Oh, I want to tell you one thing. The head of the school, president of the school body—people were dropping out like flies. A lot of the guys were dropping out, and he said, “Listen, this can’t be, especially you people who say you’ll be doctors and engineers and all these important things. You’d make a much better contribution to the war effort by going on and finishing your studies and then do something on a higher level than just being in the infantry or the [unclear], something like that right now.”
I was one of the dropouts, because my father had called me up on the phone and said, “Susie Marie,” my second name, “I think you’d better think about this thing now. I’m in the automobile business, and I’m not going to have very many automobiles to sell. Everything’s going to be going to the war effort.”
He was right. It all went there, and he didn’t sell many automobiles for the duration. So he said, “I guess we’ll have to be very careful with my finances. And you have a little bit of money left over that we put aside. Why don’t you take that and go to Houston and take a secretarial course, then come back after the war and finish your studies, get your degree?” So that made sense to me. Fairly practical-minded in those days anyway.
I went on into Houston and took the course and then got a job at a CPA, where you typed twelve copies of a long, long balance sheet. You made one mistake, and boy, you erased twelve times or you started all over again. You couldn’t really start over again, because they were huge companies like Howard Hughes and some of these big, big, big oil companies that we were doing the business for. You just had to be accurate. That’s all there was to it. You had to get it right. I tried very hard, but—
HT: So this would have been in the spring of 1942 that you left college?
SB: Yes.
HT: Pearl Harbor was in ’41.
SB: That’s right. I finished the semester there.
HT: [Unclear].5
SB: Yes. Then I saw that there wasn’t any point in even going ahead and getting into the sorority. I never was more than a pledge, but that’s all right. It was a fun time.
HT: What were you studying while you were at the University of Texas?
SB: I’m almost ashamed to tell you. I was studying home economics, of which I know nothing. My ambition at that time was to get married and learn how to cook and sew and raise a family. I thought that’s what women should be doing. That’s how limited my scope was at that time. I know my English teacher said, “This is stupid. Why in the world are you studying home economics?”
I told him, and he was kind of ahead of his time a little bit. He thought maybe women could do a little bit more than iron and cook and bake the bread and wipe the diapers and this kind of stuff. He said, “Get something a little more solid from your major. Do something interesting.”
I never will forget that, because I really felt, at that time, after he was coming on in that way, that maybe it was stupid for me to make that remark and I’m going to school and spending all this money to learn how to be a housewife. I surely could learn that some other way. Anyway, I quit.
Thinking back on these horrible copies we had to make, they were just dreadful and I was bored to death. There was no challenge to it whatsoever. I could not see that I was making any contribution to the war effort. People were dropping like flies, out enlisting, and there was nothing for women at that point to enlist in, really. All the women’s service started later than that.
All of a sudden, I just saw this caption. I was living in Houston, and that’s where the [Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron] WAFS first started, and I saw that if you—well, let’s see. No, they had started before that. Actually, I had worked a year. So they still were in Houston, though. There was one class of WAFS that had to have, I think, something like 500 or 600 hours to begin with. I don’t remember the exact number. After that, they backed it up a little bit.
Then [Jacqueline] Cochran got involved. She’s a controversial figure, there’s no question about that, but there would not have been a WASP without her because she’s the one that knew how to do it and put it together, and she had a lot of influence. We all still think the world of her, even though, as I say, she is controversial.
Nancy Love, on the other hand—Nancy Love was in charge of the Ferry Command. She had all these thousands of hours, and her job was to try to find twenty-five or thirty women that had a lot of hours that could come on in and maybe learn how to fly at least the little cubs or whatever, even though they had all these many, many hours. So she got the Air Transport Command started, the Ferry started.
Well, before this happened, Cochran had gone over to England—[General Henry] “Hap” Arnold, at his suggestion. I have to back up a little bit because I keep my story exactly chronological. Anyway, Cochran had met Mrs. Roosevelt. Oh, she’d won some wonderful honor in flying, and she was an absolutely accomplished aviatrix. She’d met Eleanor Roosevelt, and Eleanor was pretty strong-minded herself, as I’m sure her husband would say and most everybody else. Anyway, she kind of got the idea. Cochran always had thought there was something women should be able to do in the air force with 6
all these hours they had. Of course, you had to buy them and pay for them. Some of the girls were even teaching in the Civil Air Patrol. I don’t guess we even had Link trainers at that point, but they were teaching some of the boys because they had all these hours and everything.
I can’t remember whether it was Mrs. Roosevelt or Cochran that went in and spoke with—I think they spoke with the president at that time, if I have it correctly, and he was kind of interested. Then they got Hap Arnold into it. Of course, he was a wonderful person. We all just adored him. He was really a champion of the cause. Without any question, he is the one that got us going. He thought, “Well, gee whiz, why don’t we see what we can put together here.” And they really couldn’t get anything going for a while. Then they said to Cochran, Hap said to Cochran, “Why don’t you go over to England, take a few women over there and just observe what’s going on over there.” Women in England had been flying for a long time. Of course, they had been in the war for a long time, and they desperately needed help over there.
They put twenty-five women over there. They flew right along with the English gals, and they learned how that situation was set up. Then Hap called her back home, and he said, “Now, you need to come on back. We desperately need people to ferry these planes, and we’ve got to send the boys on overseas. They’ve got to get off the flight line and into the air, go overseas, and do what they can do. Then we still have planes to be flown from the factories to the ports of embarkation.”
So she came on back and was very much astonished to find out that Nancy Love had already started a Ferry Command with the women with all these thousands and thousands of hours. She was pretty hot under the collar because she thought she was going to be the very first one to start something. Anyway, she got to working on the fact that maybe we wouldn’t have to have as many hours as Nancy’s squadron demanded. She felt that maybe a couple of hundred hours and she could start maybe a—they didn’t call it the WASP then. It was some—I can’t even remember the name, what they called it, some kind of training stuff.
Anyway, that was her job, to find a few people. I think she found about twenty-five or fifty, something like that, to get this thing off the ground, get it started, still in Houston. The WAFS, they called them, the ferry pilots, were still flying out of Houston. I’m sure there were some sparks flying around there, but be that as it may, both women shared the function very well, each one did.
Let’s see, how did it go from there? Oh, then Cochran took it a little bit further. She got two classes started that had to have this many hours, maybe 200 or something. They were still training in Houston. My friend from Austin I met at this last reunion there was in the second class.
What they did when the time came, Jackie Cochran had talked the army—the air force that it was in—into maybe letting her start a program and have more girls come in and get them qualified. You just couldn’t find that many girls in the country that had 200 hours, and they were desperately needed then.
It’s okay when we were really needed. They wanted us then. [laughs] I’m being silly. Anyway, so my friend and her W-2 class flew the planes to Sweetwater, Texas. This was an operation owned by Aviation Enterprises. They had made this deal with Cochran and the air force that that would be our new training ground. So these girls that were just 7
graduating from the second class—the first class graduated at Houston—the second class did all their training in Houston, but when it came time to graduate, Jackie had them fly the planes, the AT-6s, into Sweetwater.
Oh, they were really hot pilots, then. They’d gotten their wings. They were going to get them when they graduated. They flew these planes into Sweetwater, Texas, where the rest of us got our training, us people that came on later on. When she got there, there was a contingent of men pilots there. They were from—I think it’s the RCAF, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and they were still studying. They had to graduate that one last class before they could leave and the women could take over.
For the first time, there was sort of a coeducational type thing there. I’m sure the sparks were flying a little bit with that situation. At any rate, the boys finally left, and we just inherited their instructors. So we took the same basic training that they all had taken, exactly the same thing.
HT: And I’ve read somewhere that the early instructors were Canadian, is that correct?
SB: Early instructors?
HT: The early instructors were Canadian?
SB: Some of them may have been. The ones, I don’t think, in our group were, when I got there. I was, of course, later on. I mean, it was November of ’43 when I first went in. There may have been some Canadians there. I’m not actually positive about that.
I know the Americans were teaching the Royal Canadian Air Force themselves as instructors as well. So they just stayed on. Most of them did. Some of them may have run away. It was kind of scary, I guess, to see a bunch of women come in, say, “My word, do I have to teach that?” But most of them were understanding, and they really did try very hard. I have to give them credit for that.
Anyway, we got the men out of the way. It was a wild time. Most of us had been fairly genteelly brought up, we thought. Well, I’m getting ahead of my story. I don’t know whether you want me to tell this chronologically or just whatever pops in my mind.
HT: Well, we should go back for just a minute. I think you mentioned earlier, when we were talking about—you had seen an advertisement in the newspaper.
SB: Oh, yes, when I was in Houston.
HT: In Houston, right, and that you wanted to learn how to fly because you had never flown before.
SB: No. I’d never flown before.
HT: So what really sparked your interest in flying?8
SB: Well, it just looked like it would be an interesting thing to do. At that point, they really did need women pilots. I mean, they were desperate for them because they wanted the guys to go on over. It seemed that was something I could do.
I got to learn to fly. You had to buy thirty-five flying hours before they would even interrogate you, let alone select you. So I didn’t have very much money, like eighty dollars a month, which we lived on, but I couldn’t join any flying clubs with that amount of money. So I called my dad and asked him if he would send me twenty-five dollars, please, so that I could join this air force thing.
That didn’t sit too well with him, but he thought, “Well, I’ll humor the little lady. She’ll probably decide that she doesn’t really want to fly.” He was embarrassed about having to call me back and I had to stop college anyway. But he just goes ahead and sends me the money. Then for ten dollars an hour you could take instruction. For five dollars an hour, you could fly solo.
HT: What type of planes were these?
SB: These were Aroncas and Piper Cubs. That was mostly it, little, teeny, very small airplanes, and no stability to them, but they weren’t so dangerous because you could land them on a dime. If you had to force land, you could put them down in any field that you saw. They just weren’t that hot of a plane. I can’t remember what the horsepower—something like seventy-five horsepower, maybe even less than that.
HT: Do you recall what it was like to fly for the first time by yourself, or even with an instructor?
SB: Oh, yes. I had five instructors before I got the eight hours to solo. Out of that five, each one of them thought probably the other one had told me about the good old windsock. This was in Houston, where the wind in Texas changes every five minutes in direction. I hadn’t been told to watch for the windsock. If I were told, it went over the top of my head, as things sometimes do, even now.
Anyway, my instructor stepped out. “Okay. Take it up. It’s yours. Go around the field, and come back and land.”
So that’s what I did. I went around the field, and I came back to land. I couldn’t get the thing on the ground. It just wouldn’t stop. So I thought, “Well, the only thing to do is to take it up.” There were no radios or anything in the plane. You just go around by the seat of your pants, as they say. So I went around the airfield again and came back and tried to touch down, and it would not sit down. It just picked right on up again and off I went [unclear].
Finally, I looked down, and all these people were standing around. They were waving, and they were carrying on and everything. I thought, “Oh, how nice. They’re so excited at how I’m going to solo. It’s nice of them to go out there and greet me.” Well, they finally started doing some bad-looking stuff, and I thought, “Well, I have to do something.”
Then all of a sudden I realized. Then they started pointing, of course, up to the windsock. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I guess, I had heard about it, and I saw I 9
was absolutely going down wind. Those little old light planes, there’s no way they could stay on the ground, just wouldn’t. So I turned around and went the other way and came back and landed. That was my first solo. They didn’t seem to hold it against me later on. [laughter]
I bought my thirty-five flying hours there and ate a little bit less so that I could pay for the lessons, and that was fine. I got through that. Then I can’t remember, in all honesty, whether I went to Dallas or Houston. Somewhere I went to be interviewed, as did 25,000 other women, all told. Anyway, I had no idea I’d be selected.
Of course, I’d spent all that money—it was a lot of money to me in those days—on the flying, and I really did want to fly. I thought maybe that I really could. I was interviewed, and to my great delight and surprise, I was selected.
HT: Did they give you a written test?
SB: No. It was just an interview. They just asked me, like you’re doing now, about my past and a few things, to see, I guess, if there would be maybe enough determination to stay. They didn’t want to waste their time on somebody that wouldn’t even care. That’s why you had to buy thirty-five flying hours, to see whether we got sick at our stomach, I guess, in the air or something, because we certainly didn’t learn a whole lot in those little Piper Cubs. Of course, we did when we got to Sweetwater.
HT: When did you have to go to Sweetwater?
SB: It was in November of ’43. I would be graduating in the following May, in ’44, if I got through, as half of us didn’t.
HT: How long was training, about six months?
SB: Yes.
HT: Six months’ training?
SB: It was a little bit over, about—let’s see. Yes, it was six months, just about six months. I had to count on my fingers.
HT: What was training like? What was a typical day like?
SB: Well, it was pretty rough. We didn’t know anything about the military way of life, of course, and coming in right behind guys who did know about it, we were expected to do the proper thing. We had to go to the flight line in uniform and formation. They tried to epitomize the same thing that the guys were doing so that we could come and actually take their places and not spend all our time putting on lipstick and combing our hair and stuff. They wanted us to really learn how to fly “the army way,” they kept saying, “Fly the army way. You may can flit around the air as a civilian, but you’ve got to learn to fly the army way.” I got so tired of hearing that.10
Our barracks were made up of six people. We had a little cot, and we had a little locker thing, I guess you’d say, to put your clothes in. It didn’t hold very much, so you couldn’t put very many clothes in there. Then we had a latrine between the two bays. Our flight was Flight 2 and the other was Flight 1, and then we had the little latrine in between. I think there were two showers and maybe two commodes in there and a couple of washbasins, period.
Well, most of us were kind of used to getting up in the morning and primping a little bit, you know, putting our lipstick on and combing our hair properly and everything, but you couldn’t do it then. You had to get up at the crack of dawn, and you had to be in and out and in and out very quickly so somebody else could go right in behind you. You had to be in formation in time to get to breakfast on time. That was very important.
We had to wear these—what did we call them?—Urban’s turbans, we called them, because we had to keep our hair up off of our collar. Our commander, head of the field, whatever you call him, I can’t remember what you call him, anyway, he was Major Urban. So we called them Urban’s turbans. Anything to get a laugh in those days.
It was kind of grim when we first started. We didn’t know what we were in for, and we didn’t know if we could make it. Of course, we were scared to death every minute we were going to wash out, as fifty percent of us did most of the time. Maybe it wasn’t that many. Maybe it was about thirty-five or forty percent, something like that.
HT: Did you have uniforms by that time?
SB: No, no, no. We had zoot suits, we called them, which were the old army discarded coverall-type things. Unfortunately, I was not very tall. I was just five-three, and my last name began with a W. I was a Winston. Everything in the army is alphabetical, A, B, C, D, E—W. By the time they got to W, I weighed 115 pounds and five-three. So the suits came out—I’m gesturing to you, but you had to roll them up, and these things—to put your hands on the cockpit, you had to find some way—
HT: A bit too large.
SB: Just a bit too large. Everything seemed to be a size forty-four extra large. Some of them even had the back thing for the gentlemen and this kind of thing. But they were their suits, and we had to have something to wear.
HT: And you wore your civilian clothes underneath that, I guess.
SB: No. No, you just wore that.
HT: That was it.
SB: That’s what you wore. Later on, we had just kind of beige slacks and a white shirt. That was our dress uniform. Our main uniforms hadn’t come out yet. They hadn’t even been designed yet. So that was our uniform at the time.11
We were so strict about everything. If you went into town, you were supposed to wear a dress. We were supposed to look like little ladies but yet learn the army way and do everything like little gentlemen did. It was kind of a controversial type thing, to know whether we were supposed to look cute and feminine and all this kind of—or you were supposed to be hard core and get right down to it, one, two, three, click. We had to go out on the field and do all the calisthenics.
LaRue, who was our physical instructor, he had a real hard time snapping us into line. We didn’t know how to march correctly, and we couldn’t do pushups. I almost flunked out because I couldn’t chin. I could do all the pushups and everything else, but I had the hardest time chinning. I finally struggled myself up there one time.
He said, “All right. Don’t try. I don’t want to look at you anymore. You pass.”
But we had to learn to do all this physical stuff just in case something happened. We really had to be in good physical shape. He taught us how to march correctly and how to do this, “To the left, here, rear,” or, “To the rear march,” or something like that.
HT: It sounds very much like my basic training.
SB: It was. That’s what it was, except we were in the air force, and they were trying to epitomize every single thing or copy every single thing that the guys had done.
HT: So you not only had physical education, but I imagine you had a probably classroom instruction.
SB: Oh, yes. I can’t remember how many hours. I think we had to have like 400 hours of ground school. Really, most of us girls, had not been brought up on motorcycles and wheels and stuff like that, and we really didn’t know very much about mechanics.
HT: So you had to learn all about motors.
SB: So we had to learn all that stuff, and pistons and everything. It was just totally—almost out of our reach. So we studied, sometimes, all night long, and then had to get up the next morning and fly.
HT: So what was a typical day? How many hours a day did you study and train? I mean, it sounds like it was actually from the crack of dawn until—
SB: It was all day. It was all day long and into the evening, and then you started studying. But we had the two flights, and my class, Flight 1 and Flight 2. Flight 1 would go to ground school while Flight 2 flew, and then we’d switch. That’s how we got through that.
You had to have, I think it’s something like 210 flying hours in the air, part solo, part night flying, part instrument, part PT, you know, primary trainer, and then the wonderful famous six. When we got in that six, we thought we were the hottest pilots that ever hit the universe. We were so pleased. I think 650 horsepower or something like that.
It was an exciting time and very scary, and there was no time for fooling around. My friend and I were talking about this this last weekend, but they were talking about all 12
the things that they did and the places that they went, and we thought, “How in the world did they do that?” We didn’t have any time. I think we had Saturday, Saturday afternoon, and Sunday off. Sunday we went to church, and then we came home and studied. Maybe some of them were smarter than we were and didn’t have to study as hard. [laughs] But it was there, and you could get it or not.
HT: Do you recall how many women were in your class while you were there?
SB: You know, I don’t have that off the top of my head. [ninety-four entered, fifty-two graduated and got wings.]
HT: That’s all right. We can find that later on.
SB: Yes. Something I brought. I know just about half of them got through. I know that much about it. I know there’s something I wanted to make a copy of. A lot of this stuff I just had totally forgotten after almost sixty years.
HT: That’s fine. We can do that later on. Did you have any kind of leave during basic training? Did you have to go home?
SB: One Christmas, the girls that lived close enough, I think maybe we had two days.
HT: That’s right, because you went in in November. Was that before Thanksgiving?
SB: So Christmas did come, yes. November the first. We didn’t have any leave on Thanksgiving. They did cook us a good turkey, and we got by pretty well. Then when Christmas came, the ones that could get home and back in two or three days could go, but there were very few that could do that.
HT: Of course, you had women from all over the country.
SB: Oh, yes, everywhere. Yes. And there weren’t very many planes then that weren’t tied up in the military some way or other. So most of us stayed on the base there. It was an experience.
HT: Did your family ever visit you during that time?
SB: My mother came one time. I think she came for graduation. I’m sure that she did.
They didn’t encourage us to read too much of the newspaper and what was happening in Germany, because this was all pretty well classified anyway. So we didn’t really know what all was going on. They encouraged that because they didn’t want us to get cold feet. They didn’t want us to be scared to death. They wanted us to be able to not worry. So many of the girls had husbands overseas.
HT: Oh, so they did accept married women?13
SB: Yes, they accepted married women. They weren’t excited about your getting married afterwards. Well, you couldn’t get married in training. Some of the girls did marry after they graduated and went out, and most of them, of course, married pilots.
HT: I meant to ask you earlier, how did your family react when they found out that this was what you wanted to do? I mean, your mother and father, what did they think about your wanting to fly?
SB: Well, when they realized I was really serious about it, they accepted it. They accepted everything else in my life that I was determined to do. I guess maybe, in a way, they were halfway proud. Once I was in, they hoped I would get through because they knew how disappointed I’d be if I didn’t.
HT: What about your brothers and sisters?
SB: I just had the one brother. He was not in physical condition so he did not serve, but he did other things. He couldn’t serve in the service. I think he thought I was nuts, his little sister going into flying these airplanes, but he was nice about it. He’d already married and started a family, too.
HT: What about your co-workers and your friends? What did they think about your joining a quasi-military outfit?
SB: Well, nobody knew anything about the WASP at that time. It just wasn’t known, because Jackie Cochran was trying to keep it as hush-hush as she could until she got us militarized. She was just positive. Hap Arnold kept telling her, “It won’t be long now before they’re going to accept you and you’ll be militarized. Then you can get your benefits.” We didn’t have any benefits. We didn’t have anything. [laughs]
HT: Do you recall what your pay was?
SB: Yes. We made a hundred and fifty dollars a month while we were in training and three-hundred dollars, I think, when we got out. Some of the other classes made two-hundred dollars, but I think by the time I graduated, I think [unclear].
HT: So that was a little bit more than people were making in the secretarial pools.
SB: Oh, yes, without any question. Yes. It was a whole lot more. I saved it, and thank goodness I did, because I married just before we were deactivated, and I needed the money.
That’s one reason I didn’t buy my uniform. We were issued, finally, these beautiful uniforms, but we had to buy them back when we left. What they did with them? I understand from some of the things I’ve read, they threw them in the trash can, which I thought was a terrible infraction of decency.14
HT: So you not only had to pay for your initial training to get in, you had to pay for uniforms as well once you were in?
SB: Well, we were issued the uniforms, but after we were deactivated, if we wanted to keep them, then we had to buy them. I think Neiman-Marcus was the one that tailored them for us. Class 44-W-1 was the first class that got the uniforms, and they were so proud. The thing was, they didn’t have time to put them together properly, so none of them fit. Two of the WASP mothers came in a little bit early, and they got out their sewing machines or by hand, they tucked here and tucked there, and these gals graduated and looked fairly decent in them. Then later on, they sent some real seamstresses down and fitted the rest of us very well, good fits, good job. We were very, very proud of our uniforms.
Of course, we had to go exactly by the army rules as far as uniforms were concerned. Everything had to be worn just precisely in the right spot. Shoes had to be tied and pocketbooks on a certain shoulder and your hats just down a certain way. Most of the girls by then had to cut their hair because it couldn’t touch the shoulder of the uniform, the collar of the uniform. So we all had short hair or you pigtailed it up on top or something. [Laughs] We were so few, and people just didn’t recognize what we were. One girl was almost picked up, not only picked up by a guy, but I mean, I can’t remember details on it, but it was an official of some kind. He thought she was impersonating an officer because they did look like officers’ uniforms, and he didn’t know enough about it anyway. He was giving her a hard time about it.
HT: So you had no ranking, is that correct?
SB: Oh, none whatsoever. We were about the lowest thing on the totem pole, except that we were high in the air. We were low in the scheme of the air force for sure. I’m sure there was a little, maybe, bit of jealousy as far as the guys were concerned. I could understand that, because a lot of them—for instance, we’d take a plane somewhere, and most of the guys that gassed up our planes or took care of us had all wanted to go into flying, and some of them just couldn’t make it. I’m sure they were equally qualified because we washed out so many, too, and by the same number of washouts. But most of them were very, very nice to us.
Every once in a while, I would see a girl come in, if I were taking a plane maybe to the same place she was, and I’d see a little bit of arrogance in her associations, so they’d gas my plane first before they did hers. I thought, “That’s so stupid. Why don’t you just be nice?” I mean, these poor guys, their esteem was down to rock bottom anyway when they see a slip of a girl come flying in with this hotshot helmet on and everything and they had washed out. It was a terrible situation for them, and they felt lost about it. But they were very nice. I didn’t have any trouble with them.
HT: After you graduated in May of 1944, where were you stationed? Were you still in Texas?
SB: Yes. I was sent to Love Field, which was a ferrying base, a big ferrying base. That’s where a whole lot of us were sent.15
HT: Where is that?
SB: In Dallas. Being a Texan, I suppose everybody knows where Love Field is. I’m sorry.
HT: That’s where the airport is now, isn’t it? Isn’t that called Love Field?
SB: Yes. Yes. That’s still Love Field. Of course, it’s small now in comparison to the big airports. There were so many people coming in and out of there that the traffic was bad, and it was hard to get in and out.
I didn’t have anything like the experiences of some of the girls who started so much earlier and had so much more flying time than I did. They were put on the pursuits and in the real hot planes. We just hadn’t had enough training, our class, when we were sent there originally.
HT: So what type of planes did you ferry?
SB: We flew like the PT-19s, the primary trainers.
HT: And to where?
SB: Well, this may be a good time to tell you about this one particular thing. A friend and I were to take planes to Newark, New Jersey, to send to China ultimately. Of course, we’d been on a lot of cross-countries. That was part of our training.
There were no radios on the PT-19, so we had no way of contacting anybody. You had to just wait to get the green light somewhere to come in to make a landing. You couldn’t talk to the tower or anything. You had to kind of look out for yourself and follow the railroads and hope you got to the right spot.
Maybe I said before, the weather in Texas is a little bit unruly. You don’t ever know what’s going to happen from one minute to the next. We started out from Dallas, and it was just nice and clear as it could be. I think our first place to land and re-gas was Shreveport, Louisiana. But before we got there, the wind had changed. It was pouring down rain, and of course, we were in an open cockpit, and we didn’t have any protection whatsoever.
My friend and I, we were kind of cold. We weren’t flying in exact formation, but we were close enough to where we could see each other. We were going like this. We needed to do something. So I just kind of pointed down. I thought we ought to get out of the plane. I didn’t want to, of course, crash. I didn’t want to bail out or anything. So we just pulled a forced landing in this rice field in Louisiana.
A couple of the farmers came over there. They saw these two planes, and they didn’t know even what to think about it. They got a little bit closer to the plane, and the closer they got to us, they finally, “My lord, what is that?” I think they thought we were somebody from Mars. She’s small like myself, and we get out of the plane, and, “Look at that. Would you look at that.”
Anyway, they took us into their homes, and they were so nice to us. Their wives made us some pies and all that good stuff. Of course, we had to call in to our base and tell 16
them that somebody had better come get us because we couldn’t fly these planes. We couldn’t get out of there. Anyway, they came and got us and took us back to Shreveport. The next morning, they had to bring us back again and get the planes. Then we took off for parts unknown.
But these guys were so funny. They called all their friends, and all these farmers came. Of course, there are lots of stories like that, but it happened to me, and it was kind of interesting, I thought.
Anyway, we got on in, and something happened to my tail wheel. I don’t know. It wouldn’t swivel the right way, or it would swivel the wrong way, or something.
So I had to put in at Wilmington, Delaware, which was one of the hottest places in the world. That’s where so many of the original pilots were flying out of, the original WASPs, or WAFS they called them then, the ones with all these thousands of hours. I mean, just like that, here comes this little old PT with a bad tail thing. So I had to wait and get that fixed.
I’d never been to New York City in my life. I was a little country girl, sort of. So I had to get in because Betty, my companion, had already landed and was on her way back to Dallas. The minute you hit the ground, you had to find a way to get back to your base, the quickest way. If you didn’t, you were washed out completely.
HT: That was a rule?
SB: Absolutely.
HT: Would you just commandeer a plane?
SB: Any way we could get back. If we could get back quicker on a train, which was never the case, or any kind of a plane, a passenger plane, or anybody that you could find that would take you back. If somebody else was flying a plane back and you could find out about that, you had to get back the quickest you could. You might get up the next morning and take a plane out again. But you had to do that.
HT: And you had to do that on your own?
SB: Yes.
HT: There was no central person?
SB: No. We had to do it ourselves. I did pretty well. I didn’t get too lost in New York. I was better in the air than I was when I got on the ground. Anyway, I got my little plane fixed, and I guess they got them to China. Then we went on back to the airfield.
It wasn’t very long after that until we were asked—I guess I should mention this one thing, if you haven’t gleaned it already, whoever’s listening. We were totally expendable. I mean, some of the girls did bear arms to protect some of the stuff they were flying, but most of the time we were just nothing. I mean, they used us to fly planes that 17
nobody else would fly. They certainly didn’t want to waste a man, a pilot, to put in a tacky old aircraft that was unflyable, so the women did it.
I’m not taking any bouquets about it. That’s just the way it was. We signed up for it, and we did it. A bunch of us were selected, I guess commanded, to go to Tinker Field in Oklahoma City and move some planes out of there so that some newer planes could be brought in. These planes were absolutely inoperable. They were the worst things you’ve ever seen. I can’t remember what they were, but they were some little tacky planes.
[Begin Tape 1, Side B]
SB: —to a time. I’d flown several planes to that little landing strip and got by okay. See, an engineer would sign the plane off and say it’s okay to fly. Well, they were so bad that no engineer wanted the responsibility of signing them off and saying, “This is okay to fly.” The first pilot could always do that. So that’s what we had to do because they were so terrible.
But this little plane, I got in, went around the little airport, and tried to get him in. He wouldn’t stop. He wouldn’t stop. They didn’t have a very big runway, so you had to put him down practically on a dime and then put your brakes on and your flaps and everything, and that would stop it. Come to find out, I did not have any brakes and I did not have any flaps. I mean, the flaps were there, but they just weren’t working.
Of course, we looked over the planes before we got in them, and I guess I could have said, “This is a terrible plane. I’m not going to fly it.” But we were always trying so hard to do what they wanted us to do. The planes had to be moved, and we were the logical ones to move them.
Anyway, around and around I went, worse than my landing down on my first solo. Instead of being able to stop the plane with my flaps and my brakes, I just couldn’t. So there was this barbed-wire fence over there waiting to pick me up at the end of the plane, so I’d go around again. I’d try it one more time. I’d start down at the very tip end of the running field—it wasn’t a runway—and try to get it down.
I said, “Well, it’s got to stop. I’ve got to put it in. I’m running out of fuel.” There was kind of a mud puddle over here on the side. I said, “I know how to stop the plane now.” So I went straight down the runway and just skipped it over on its nose, and there I was, sitting straight up in the air like this.
Well, they were just furious, the powers-that-be. “Why in the world did you do that?”
The plane was gone anyway. It was nothing but a bunch of scrap, but I really got in trouble about that. They didn’t do anything to me, but they dressed me down pretty bad. [laughter]
As I said, I wasn’t in long enough to do a whole lot of stuff. They moved us around from spot to spot. They had these hot pilot WAFS, even earlier WASPs that had had so many more hours. Well, depending on where this particular field—what he wanted in his particular situation was how they transferred us all over the country, from one field to the other.18
So they sent me up to Garden City, Kansas, I believe it was. Yes. That’s another dust area. Up there, our job was to test hop these BT-13s and 15s that the boys were studying instruments on as students. So if something happens to a plane, like I said, an engineer signs it off, but a first pilot has to get up and fly it after it’s had some damage done to it and say, “Well, it’s flyable. It’s okay.” Then we take it down. So that was my job there. That’s what they call—I guess it was test hopping or something like that.
HT: And this was Garden City?
SB: Garden City, Kansas, yes.
HT: And how long were you there?
SB: I guess about a month. Then, all of a sudden, they decided, here I am five feet three and always wanted to fly pursuits, would give my life to have flown a P51 or a P47. There were a lot of girls doing this, and I thought, “Well, gee, my height and everything, they’ll surely put me in a 51 pretty soon.” But I got orders to go down to Laredo, Texas, flying B-26s.
Of course, at my height, I couldn’t even reach the pedals, couldn’t get in the plane without getting somebody, because you had come up under the belly. Somebody had to give me a boost, and then I’d get up there, and then I’d have to call for pillows because I couldn’t reach any of the controls. We flew co-pilot on these things, too, towing targets.
The boys, the gunners, were flying in B-17s, the fortress. We were making this little pattern, this little square pattern, coming around and back again, around and around and around this little square. The boys were shooting at our targets.
HT: That must have been a lot of fun.
SB: That was fun. We wondered when they were going to miss the target and hit us, but each one had a different color on his [unclear] so that the instructors could tell how many had hit the right target and how close they were to it.
HT: This was live ammunition?
SB: Yes. And some of the planes did get a few little holes in them here and there, but I was fortunate enough not to have—the biggest thing that happened to me was on my first flight, the targets caught on fire in the plane. We had just taken off and were on the way out of the pattern, and it caught on fire. That was just a lot of hustle and bustle to that, but they got it put out.
HT: When you say target, what was the target made of? Was it like a dummy plane or something?
SB: It was like an old sheet, a pretty wide old sheet, tied on with a—it looked like a string, I’m sure, and they wound it in, rounded in on it with a—19
HT: So how far was the target from your plane?
SB: You know, I don’t know that exactly. I used to have it on the tip of my tongue. It’s somewhere.
HT: I think I read somewhere it was at least a couple thousand feet, maybe. Or was it closer than that?
SB: And that’s what I can’t say. I just don’t know. I never did worry about that too much, though, because I thought, “This really is a worthy thing to be doing.” These guys had to learn how to shoot, and that’s what we were there for.
HT: Were they shooting at you from the ground or from other airplanes?
SB: From other airplanes, the B-17s. See, we were in the middle, and they were going around the edge. But the bad thing was that—I think I have this right, that’s what we were told, anyway, that their cruising speed was about the same as our stalling speed. So for us to fly slow enough—see, the B-26 was a pretty hot plane, and the 17s were wonderful planes and very stable, but they didn’t fly as fast as the 26s did. So we were supposed to keep it exactly the same speed so that the gunners could “pow-pow-pow” at us.
All these four-letter words again came across the field. “Listen, you WASP, can’t you keep that thing steady and straight?” and blah, blah, blah. Because even nobody but just co-pilots, we did most of the flying because they wanted to train us, and that was part of it. We never did get our—or I didn’t. Maybe some of the girls were more qualified to fly and be the first pilot. I didn’t get that far because they moved me somewhere else, but it was an experience, and I loved the plane. It was really good.
HT: What was the name of the field at Laredo, do you recall?
SB: Laredo Airport.
HT: And at Garden City, it was—
SB: Garden City.
HT: Garden City Airfield or something like that?
SB: Garden City Air Force Base, Airfield, something like that.
Oh, I wanted to tell you something, back to training. I don’t know whether I should tell this, but I’m going to.
HT: Oh, please do.20
SB: Please do. [laughs] Okay. I’d gotten through primary training, and I was on the AT-6. Maybe I didn’t mention this sooner. We went from a Steerman aircraft, this little bi-winged plane, and they’re very stable. They’re harder to land than the PT-19, which some of the girls before us had started out flying, but they brought the Steerman for us to fly, the little bi-wing, and it was stable, a good airplane.
The air force had decided that they were washing out too many, all kinds of pilots, men as well as women, when they got to advanced training. That was costing money. So what they should do is put the advanced training right next to, right behind, the primary training. So we went from the Steerman to an AT-6. It was extremely hot for us, who had never flown anything like that before, but a beautiful, beautiful plane.
We did all of our acrobatics in this plane. We flew some formation, not a whole lot, but we learned all our acrobatics and learned how to do formation flying. We did our pylon 8s around the telephone pole. You’re supposed to be the exact same distance on the up leg as you are on the down leg and hit that pole right in the center when you came through it at the same speed and all this exacting stuff, and it was good.
Anyway, I’ll show you a picture of this particular pilot who gave me such a hard time. I’m sure he must have washed out because he was so angry all the time at all the WASP, but he was a good pilot, and he was a good teacher. As I said a while ago, we were sort of gently brought up, you might say, and I wasn’t used to all the four-letter words in my family. That just wasn’t part of my upbringing.
Anyway, we got up there, and I’m not blaming him, because they’d had the guys before us, and apparently that’s the way they talked to each other at that time. Of course, they don’t anymore, but all this stuff kept coming over at me, “You—,” blah, blah, blank, blank, four-letter, blah, blah, “Why can’t you get this straight? Why can’t you keep this straight? Why is that left wing down so low? You’re not looking at the horizon. [unclear]” and on and on and on and on. He needed to do that, but he could have done it without the expletives, in my opinion.
Well, I got tired of listening to him. I shouldn’t have done this, and I know I shouldn’t have, but I turned him from the intercom onto the air. So all these things went out so all the other planes could have heard it, see. That was a bad thing to do, and it’s a wonder he didn’t wash me out right then, but he caught it pretty soon. So then [unclear] was there to expose him.
I was so sick of listening to all these terrible things I was supposed to be, and all I wanted to do was learn how to fly the airplane. Anyway, I got through that all right. Then one day—this is the worst part of it—after he got through totally berating me over that incident, “Don’t you ever do that to me again.” That’s the worst thing anybody’s ever done to him in all of his experience. I was only to turn the intercom on when I was speaking directly to him and never to turn him on the air again when he was telling me what to do and how to do it and blah, blah.
“Okay. I never will do that again.”
So then one day, I guess maybe about a week later, we were down on the flight line waiting to go up, take another plane up and solo, whatever we were to do that particular day. The biggest fear of all of us was that army check ride. We had to have check rides from the civilians, and we kind of felt like that was okay and we could maybe 21
get through that one. Then if we passed the civilian check ride, then the army would come, or the air force.
HT: Would you let us know what an army check ride is?
SB: What it is? Well, the army pilot would go up with you, and he’d take the back seat and you’d take the front seat. He’d pull the throttle back and say, “Make a forced landing,” and you had to find a place to put the plane down, or he’d say, “Bank it over here to the right forty-five degrees,” and all this stuff that we’re supposed to have learned, “Do the pylon 8 correctly, and don’t get up too high, don’t get too low,” “Do a spin, a fast or slow roll,” or what they call the fast things. I can’t remember all these words that we had to learn, how to do where you dive down, brought the plane up, and then turned it up on the top side, [unclear] or something like that.
Anyway, so he had already told me that he was going to get even with me. I thought, “Oh, what’s he going to do now?” We were down on the flight line, just waiting to take our next flight. All of a sudden, I saw him coming over with Major Urban, who was the commandant of the whole field. I mean, my lord, we were all scared to death of him. Just one word from him and we were gone, period. He was the last straw.
Anyway, he came over to me, and he said, “Well, Major Urban’s come down here to do a check ride. He wants to see how you girls are flying.” He said, “I’ve selected you to go up with him.”
I said, “You’re kidding.”
He said, “No.”
He thought he would wash me out this way. I guess that was the reason. I’d like to think maybe I was a good pilot and he wanted me to get checked, but I can’t think that. I think he was just getting even with me.
Anyway, up I go with the major. We’re flying around, and he’s doing all this stuff. He’s cut the throttle and, do this, that, and the other. The worst was that I thought I was doing my pylons pretty good, and I thought I was doing this and the turns and everything and executing it fairly well, and I was halfway proud of myself. All of a sudden, he cut the throttle and said, “Forced landing.”
Well, when they do that to you, you’re supposed to select a field instantly, just like that, and then you’re supposed to simulate a landing and come down fairly close to the ground and assure whoever’s riding with you that you could have gotten the plane in if it were actually a forced landing, like I had in Louisiana.
I selected this field, and there didn’t seem to be too many. Sometimes you were up there, and they’d do a check ride, and you’d see five or six or seven fields, but this time I didn’t see anything but just a little tiny spot. I thought, “Well, I’ve got to get it in there.” So I pulled around. Well, in all honesty, I overshot the field a whole lot. I would never have gotten the plane in there to save my life.
He yelled back, “You overshot the field. You know you can’t do that.” Blah, blah, check ride, check ride, no way can you make it.
I thought, “I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to think real, real fast here to get out of this one,” because admittedly I had overshot. There was no question. I said, “Sir, if 22
you’ll let me go around one more time, I’ll get you down so close it will look like this field had been mowed with a lawnmower.”
He said, “What? What?”
I said, “Well, of course, had you not been in the plane, I would have put my flaps on and I would have slipped in,” you know, put your one wing up and slip in kind of sideways, “and I could have gotten in easily.”
He said, “Well, you know, you really could have.”
I thought, “Oh, I did it.” I was so thrilled.
HT: Why did that make a difference?
SB: Because if I had overshot the field, I flunked out and I’m sent home.
HT: No. No. I’m saying you had mentioned something earlier about if he had been there, you would have done something different.
SB: Oh, I told him that the reason I didn’t put my flaps on and I didn’t slip it in was because he was in the plane and I didn’t want to take any chance with his life in case I did mess up.
HT: Oh, I see. I see. Okay.
SB: So, I mean, in deference to him and who he was, you know, and all this garbage. Anyway, it worked, thank goodness.
HT: That was fast thinking.
SB: I had to. I’d overshot that stinking field. [laughs] We got through that all right, and I did graduate. I just had forgotten to mention that silly little incident.
We’ve had fun over that through the years, talking about me and this major, because we were all scared of him. He was very different and very—
HT: So it sounds like you had all men instructors. There were no women instructors?
SB: There were two. And one, this book that I brought you, she was an instructor for the class behind me, 44-W-3—no, 5, I guess it was. Anyway, there were two, and one of them was a real little gal. What was here name? This gal’s name is Swain, Dottie Swain. I think there had been some before our class got in, but these were the only two that I remember that were there.
HT: And you were the class of what?
SB: 44-W-4, meaning we were the fourth class in the year ’44 to graduate. She was a really good pilot, and she went back through and took all the training, went back and became a WASP herself. She was stationed with me in Laredo towing targets.23
HT: And speaking of Laredo, how long were you down at Laredo doing the targets?
SB: Let’s see. We got there in September, I believe. Just about a month. They didn’t leave us anywhere very long.
HT: I was going to say, they moved you around quite a bit.
SB: Oh, gosh, yes. From there, they sent me back. Let’s see, this was September. Incidentally, if it’s of interest to anybody, that’s where I met my husband.
HT: In Laredo?
SB: In Laredo.
HT: And I think you said he was in the army?
SB: He was in the air force. He had had a bad experience. He was in cadets and had some kind of something. The strange thing was that some of the things that the women could do better than others were like putting a little peg in the right spot real fast and doing all that, dexterity type things. Women seemed to excel in that. He thinks that’s what got him, was that part of it, because I’m sure he could have flown a plane. No question he could have done it. But just the least little thing.
Then, too, it depended on that particular class of men, how many pilots they needed at that particular time. They could only take so many. I’ve spoken to several of the male pilots since then that said half the class washed out because they didn’t need them at that time and they needed more bombardiers.
HT: So once a person washed out, either a male or female, I’m sure the females were probably sent home, is that correct?
SB: Absolutely, on your own. You’d get out of that place in twenty-four hours. You’re gone. The men were—because they were locked in. They were military. So they went to bombardier school, or they went to navigation school or engineering school, or they became gunners.
My husband was to have been a gunner, but this was not his forte at all. So somehow or other, he finagled his way into OCS. But the funny part I started to tell you was he hadn’t been in that long. Of course, you started out as a buck private.
Well, one of the things which we never could understand, because we were nothing, absolutely, totally nothing, but we could not date an enlisted man. I mean, that was just taboo. Well, too bad. I met this guy, and I could slip out in civilian clothes, and we did that for about a month.
Then we were all called in, and all this, a big bunch of us. There was a pretty good bunch down there by this time. We were called in and given all this down-the-road business. I was the only one dating a civilian—I mean, not a civilian but a noncom 24
personnel. We had all this stuff about absolutely cannot. This is one thing that will send you home quicker than anything in the world. You cannot date an enlisted man. So I married one. [laughter]
HT: How was that received by the—
SB: Well, I didn’t marry him at that point. I mean, I was not supposed to date him. But see, I’d just known him that one month, and then I was shipped out, back up to Kansas again. I did a little more test hopping up there.
By then, it was October. By then, they knew they were going to disband the program. Guess what they did then to spend a few more million dollars? They took a bunch of us WASP who already had our green cards, which is the instrument rating—in other words, we could fly in the overcast stuff, on instruments. We already had that rating from Sweetwater originally, but they decided, knowing that we were going to be disbanded, and they sent a bunch of us back to Sweetwater for intensive instrument training, which was wonderful for us. I mean, we got all this extra training, but stupid, wasn’t it?
They knew we were going to be disbanded. They already had the word. I guess they had to do something with us until December. I think Hap Arnold said, “The girls have to go.” They had so much flak in Congress, and Congress wouldn’t pass this. They wanted to get rid of the women.
And the men, a lot of the instructors—I don’t believe I mentioned this before, but a lot of our instructors, they were in the army. Most of them were just civilians, but they were deferred from the infantry because they were skilled in the piloting field so they didn’t have to worry about going into the infantry.
HT: I was going to ask you, the instructors, they were all military personnel, is that correct?
SB: No. I said that wrong. Mostly they were civilians. But they had a lot of hours, and they had taught these other people, the RCAF, just before they got us, before they inherited us, you might say.
HT: But you mentioned a Major Urban earlier. So there was a military command.
SB: Oh, yes. Well, he was in charge of the whole field.
HT: On the field. Right.
SB: Yes. There were a lot of military men on the field. The doctor was a military flight physician. What did we call them then?
HT: Flight surgeon.25
SB: Flight surgeon, yes. He was there, and I don’t how many check pilots they had, different phases of military, and a lot of personnel were there. They hated it because it was kind of demeaning to be in charge of a bunch of women when they could be in a better place.
HT: So Sweetwater, I think the actual field name was Avenger Field, is that right?
SB: Yes, that’s the name of the field.
HT: And Sweetwater’s the name of the little small town that’s close by, right?
SB: Yes, that we were in.
HT: So Avenger Field was set aside purely for training WASP, is that correct? Or were there men there as well?
SB: No. This first class graduated—this last class of men graduated. Then it was all for women, absolutely all for women. The joke is that when first the girls were there, there were I can’t remember how many forced landings that the guys made when they realized that there was a women’s field down there full of women. So they were always forced landing. Finally, word got out that there were no military personnel allowed on that field at all.
They called it—what was it?—“Cochran’s convent.” Instead of Avenger Field, we always called it her convent.
HT: Was she headquartered there?
SB: No. No. She was in Washington fighting the battle there to try to get some clout up there so that they would militarize us. That was her big job then. They were still interrogating women and still sending some of them home and trying to decide which ones to—because they had so many that they couldn’t get them all in. So they just had to be very selective about who got in the program.
When they disbanded it, they wanted to go ahead and graduate. Hap Arnold said, “Let’s graduate this last contingent.” I think it was 44-W-10, I believe it was. I was just reading this the other evening. I had not known this, but of course, they couldn’t be sent anywhere because they were going to be disbanded. They graduated on something like the seventh, eighth, something like that. I believe it was the seventh.
HT: Of December?
SB: Of December. That’s right. It was Pearl Harbor birthday, because Hap Arnold had a heart attack, I think, the day after. Bless his heart. No wonder, all he went through.
Anyway, the girls that graduated, since they couldn’t go to another field, then the commandant, somebody there, said, “Well, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do something for these girls. These airplanes have to leave the field and be taken somewhere else. So all you girls in this class, get in these planes and fly them.” He took 26
his bus down and picked them all up and brought them back to the field. Then they had the ceremony.
No. That was between the time that they graduated on the seventh and the twentieth, because he had to do something with them. There was nowhere to send them. It would be silly to send them to a base. All the other girls were coming back to Sweetwater.
HT: Speaking of being sent to other bases, when you were sent down to Laredo and Garden City, Kansas, did you live in barracks or hotels? What kind of accommodations did you have?
SB: No, we didn’t. Whatever we could find. The only stipulation was we could not—
HT: You had to find your own accommodations?
SB: No, they found them for you, but in Laredo, when we first got there—and I can’t remember what this establishment was, some kind of an old, old Civil War place a lot of us had to stay in because they didn’t have anywhere for us to stay.
They were building barracks for us, little cabin-like things where we had about five or six—just about what we had in Sweetwater. In the meantime, we had to stay in this, some kind or another, old, old army facility. They had to send for us to come to the field to fly from there and then take us back until they got our barracks finished.
When I was in Love Field in Dallas, I must have been—of course, being Winston, I was the last one being assigned to anything, and all the little bay things were taken up. I think I stayed with the nurses in the nurses’ quarters. We could stay in the nurses’ quarters. We just couldn’t stay with the WACs [Women’s Army Corps], for some reason. We could have stayed with the WAC officers, but we couldn’t stay with the—there would have been plenty of places for us to stay there, but this old rap about the noncoms and the—
HT: The rankings.
SB: —the rankings thing over and over and over again.
HT: I was reading something about some negative gossip in Sweetwater about girl pilots and June of 1943. Did you ever hear anything about that? I know, in the regular—there was a slander campaign against the WACs in ’43. I don’t know if this was part of it or not. I guess it was—didn’t you mention earlier some jealousy going on?
SB: Oh, there was a lot of jealousy.
HT: From—27
SB: I’m sure there was some flak there. Dealing with, obviously, that many women, there are going to be some that don’t quite add up. They were very careful to weed them out if anything at all ever came up about it. I suppose you’re talking about a relationship?
HT: I’m not assuming so. It just mentions a slander campaign or something like that. I’m sure perhaps some people looked on women who joined the military as kind of being loose and [unclear].
SB: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. You were fair play if you walked down the street in uniform, but you had to because that was their regulation. You didn’t have any bars on your shoulder so you had no rank, no cap, no anything. So it was assumed that we were fair play. You know how to handle that if you’re a woman. You have to know how to handle that. I’m sure there were some discrepancies in there. I don’t offhand know of any personally.
HT: That sort of leads into my next question. Were you ever discriminated against because you were a woman when you were flying into a field? It seems like I’ve read somewhere that some of the women had to wait extra long to get gassed up and get their planes serviced and that sort of thing.
SB: We did in certain fields. Camp Davis in North Carolina was notorious for that. Camp Davis hated women.
HT: You never were stationed there?
SB: No, I never was stationed there. I was even in Texas—
HT: I think Betty Carter had written, had said that she’d read somewhere that some women had found sugar in their gas.
SB: Cochran found that, when she came down to investigate because we had three women killed very close to each other.
HT: Right.
SB: She went down to investigate, and she did not publicize it because she didn’t want it out. She didn’t want it to hurt the field. She didn’t want to hurt the women. She was distressed to death, of course, about the accidents, but they checked it out.
They started really clamping down then, the field did, because, of course, the big guys, the big echelon, they certainly didn’t advocate it, but the jealous—I think maybe some of the lower ranking guys that actually put the gas in the planes maybe—that’s what we think may have happened.
HT: So you think it was probably jealousy, as opposed to sabotage? The reason I was asking is I interviewed a lady recently who was in intelligence from World War II. She was 28
undercover the entire time. She was stationed in, I think, Illinois. There was a lot of sabotage going on, because apparently the planes and a lot of equipment was being manufactured in that area and being shipped to the East Coast and then shipped over to Europe.
She said that she personally caught three Italian-Americans committing sabotage, putting sugar in tanks, not tightening the—what do you call those things?—the tie downs, the cargo, and that sort of thing so when the plane went up, the cargo would shift and crash and that sort of thing, and doing things to the parachutes and things like that. She said there was lots of that going on by Americans. I didn’t know if that same thing was going on—
SB: I never was faced with any of it personally, but there were an awful lot of accidents that they thought later were certainly not pilot error. There was something wrong with the plane. It hadn’t been checked out as well as it should have been.
HT: I wonder why this happened at Camp Davis. Did it happen just there or at other places?
SB: There was another field. What was the name of it? Was it Romulus? No, that’s not quite it. Anyway, it’ll be in some of my literature. They also hated the WASP.
Now, some of the fields, really, they were so gracious to us, and they needed us really badly. Not throwing bouquets at ourselves, but we needed to fly the planes, to get them out of there. Lockheed would make some 51s or whatever it was, and they needed to go instantly so that they could make some more and get them out. They were desperately needed overseas.
It was just hard for us to understand—of course, Cochran kept a lot of this stuff from us, and I can understand why she did. She didn’t want to scare us to death for one thing. She didn’t want to have to admit that anybody could do such a thing as that, to cause an absolute accident—
HT: And kill someone.
SB: Yes, and kill somebody. I mean, that was a terrible thing. But a lot of times, if the commander of this particular field didn’t like the WASP, they didn’t want them on this field but they were assigned there, he had to upset them. I don’t think they had too much choice in a lot of places. What they would do was just put them in for more training.
Some of these girls that had all these hundreds and hundreds of hours, and it was just wasted—some of it was a waste of time, just to get rid of them, get them out of the way. But the guys didn’t want to do all these minuscule jobs that we were doing. They didn’t want to fly this stupid thing like I flew up in at Tinker Field. I mean, they probably wouldn’t have even written it off. So it didn’t make, really, very good sense.
But most of the people, I was saying, most of them that I ran into were understanding. They knew we were—see, Drew Pearson—well, I shouldn’t call names, I guess, but anyway—
HT: I was going to mention that Drew Pearson apparently had a—29
SB: Oh, he just hated us.
HT: Do you know why?
SB: No. I do not know why, because he didn’t know anything about it to begin with. Of course, he was a gossip columnist anyway.
HT: Oh, right.
SB: And this was a dramatic thing that was coming up. He referred to us as these “hotshot glamour girls” and all sorts of stuff like that, which was not correct at all. It’s one of these films, if you have time to ever look at it, it specifically says it was not such a glamorous job. I mean, we got up early in the morning, and we might fly all day long. When you got down, you certainly didn’t look like the lady looked in that movie that they had in Hollywood where she came out all beautied up, you know, and she’d just flown this little PT19 thing which would tear your hair to pieces. That sort of thing was unreal. Of course, it just doesn’t make any sense.
The thing was that, I think, after the men started coming back and talking about the deactivation situation, you can sort of see it from both sides. I can understand, when a pilot’s been flying overseas and he’s been through combat and he’s done all this stuff and he comes back, there’s no, I don’t think, WASP alive that would not have wanted him to take her place. But we resented the fact that Veterans Administration and—I can’t think of the name of it, but some of the really strong organizations—just didn’t want us in there at all. They wanted us totally deactivated out of there. They didn’t want us to fly a plane that a man could fly. It didn’t matter that the men had had no experience flying a lot of the planes that we could fly. They never thought about that. They just thought, “Here’s a skirt flying a plane. A man could do that. Get that skirt home and let her get back in the kitchen where she belongs.” That was a thing with a lot of these people.
A lot of younger pilots, civilian pilots, they didn’t see it as that much of a problem, but the older, going back to the generations where the men, of course, wore the pants in the family and this sort of thing completely, and they saw no excuse for us. I mean, we were just there as a hobby, as just a fun thing and a glamorous thing, show ourselves off, take-the-spotlight-type thing, which we didn’t think we were doing at all, but we got that reputation some way.
All these civilian pilots banded together, and they lobbied, and they went down there, and they presented to Congress all these stories about—some of them had flown with us, I’m sure, and there’s no telling what all they told them. But they brought it down.
We resented it. I can’t help but say we resented it, because we didn’t even get a—when we had to RON overnight somewhere and we had—some of the guys were maybe going to the same outfit, taking planes in, they got a whole lot more the night than we did. We [unclear]. The hotels were the same for them as they were for us. We had to spend the night. That didn’t make any sense at all to us.
Continues in Part Two.