The Women Airforce Service Pilots Was Formed - August 5, 1943

The Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP, was formed on this day in 1943. Learn more in the March 21 and 23, 2016, episodes of Stuff You Missed in History Class.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from how Stuff
Works dot Com and from the desk of Stuff You
Missed in History Class. It's the show where we explore
the past one day at a time with a quick
look at what happened today in history. Welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's August five. The Women

(00:21):
Air Force Service Pilots or WASP was formed on the
state in Okay. So think about some of the things
that a pilot needs to do during a war. Some
of it's obvious, right a pilot needs to fly combat missions,
flying troops and supplies into and out of combat areas,
doing recon. But there's also a lot of work that's

(00:42):
not as obvious if you're not already a pilot or
maybe in the military, like flying the newly built airplanes
from a factory to their departure point, or testing these
new planes to make sure that they are working correctly,
or when a plane has been repaired, making or that
the repairs were done correctly, towing targets for target practice.

(01:04):
That one is actually my favorite. You need a lot
of pilots to do all of this work. And during
World War Two there was a problem. They needed more pilots,
and so the whole idea was that they would recruit
women to do this less obvious non combat work to
free the men up for combat flying. The WASP was
formed when two other previously existing groups combined together. One

(01:29):
of the groups was the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, which
had been organized by Nancy Harkness Love, and the other
was the Women's Flying Training Detachment, which had been arranged
by Jackie Cochrane. When the two merged, Cochrane became the
WASPS director. To be eligible to join the WASP, women
needed to be between the ages of one and thirty five,

(01:49):
and they already needed to have a pilot's license. Flying
was actually kind of a hobby for a lot of people.
At this time. Flying clubs had become really popular. Some
women lived on farms or in other real rural areas
and they had flying experience from flying crop dusters, but
you needed to have more than that to get a
pilot's license, and that meant that a lot of women

(02:11):
were paying for their own training so that they could
join the WASP, And then once they did join them,
they had to get through further training, really intense training
program to be able to do this work. These were
the first women to fly aircraft for the U. S. Military.
They flew virtually every type of aircraft that the military
was using, and more than a thousand women served in

(02:34):
the WASP during World World War Two. Thirty eight of
them died during their service, eleven of them during training,
and twenty seven during missions. Since they weren't considered part
of the military though, even though they were doing work
that was definitely connected to the military, these women, when
they died during service, weren't given any kind of burial coverage.

(02:54):
They weren't giving military honors at their funerals, so when
deaths did happen, usually was their fellow WASP who raised
the money to send their bodies home and to pay
for their funerals. The whole idea at the beginning, though,
had been that the WASP were eventually going to become
part of the military, but on June twenty one, ninety four,
Congress actually voted that idea down. About six weeks later,

(03:17):
it was announced the WASP we're going to be completely disbanded.
When the program ended on December twenty ninety four, The
last class of trainees had just graduated a few weeks
before everyone was sent home, and this is a huge
blow to all the women involved. A big reason for
this disbanding was that it looked like the war was
coming to a close really soon, and a lot of

(03:39):
male pilots were worried about their jobs, so the program
was ended to preserve those jobs for the men who
would be returning from the front. The Wasp, though, to
end on a happier note, were finally granted military status
in nineteen seventy seven, and in two thousand nine, the
Wasp were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, at which point
about three hundred of them were still living and more

(04:00):
than two attend to the ceremony in Washington, d C.
You can learn more about the Wasp in the March
one episodes of Stuff You Missed in History Class. In
those episodes, I interview Dr Catherine Sharp Landic about their history.
Thanks to Tari Harrison for her audio skills. In these episodes.
You can subscribe to This Day in History Class on

(04:21):
Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever else do you get
your podcasts. We'll be back in World War two tomorrow,
although we'll be looking more at the end of the
war