“For 35 years, people had no idea what we had done or that we even existed,” Betty Jane Williams, a WASP said. “I look at women flying in combat now, and realize we blazed that tr…
For 35 years, they were a hidden footnote in World War II history, when they should have been in a Memorial Day parade.
On paper, the WASPs assignments were to ferry military aircraft from factories to 120 military bases across the country, but it wasn’t long before their jobs got much more dangerous than that. In all, 27 WASPs were killed on active duty missions, and others had their feet shot as bullets from errant target practice ripped through the undercarriage of their planes. Eleven more women died in crashes during training.
“Girls just didn’t do those kinds of things,” Williams said. “But the 1940s had arrived, and so had war. Everything changed.” Both Williams and Wood lived long enough to see women flying combat missions, and both had absolutely no doubt the WASPs of World War II could have done the same. By December, 1944, male pilots were returning home to reclaim their jobs, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots were disbanded. Wood went back to UCLA to finish her degree, going on to teach in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 41 years — and she continued to fly.
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