June 18, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, May 8, 2025, marked 80 years since the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. While the fighting in the Pacific would continue for several more months, many saw it as the end of six long years of war. This is the story of the remarkable American women pilots who helped secure that victory. Becky Aikman, author of Spitfires: The American Women Who Flew in the Face of Danger During World War II, shares their story.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. There are many
significant dates in American history. May eighth marks the anniversary
of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. This is the
story of the remarkable American women pilots who helped secure
that victory.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I'm Becky Aikman and I'm the author of the book Spitfires,
the American women who flew in the face of danger
during World War Two. This is a story about some
young women who were pilots back before World War Two started,
and they very much wanted to serve their country and
(00:53):
help in the war. But the United States military would
not allow women to be pilots. But they heard that
they could go to Great Britain and serve there. The
British were desperate for help. They were in the middle
of being attacked by Germany by the air. They were
(01:13):
being bombed relentlessly, and the United States hadn't entered the
war yet, so the British were really desperate. They could
have lost the war right there. They decided to accept
pilots who were foreigners and pilots who were women to
do one of the most dangerous jobs of the war.
(01:36):
Dorothy Fury was a great beauty, but she came from
a poor background, and she only had an eighth grade education.
I felt that this would be the only justifiable war
in my lifetime, Dorothy later wrote, So I began to
think of ways in which I could be useful. She
settled on the most dramatic role she could imagine, a pilot.
(01:57):
I didn't envision flying combat, she wrote, but thought that
women could be useful in transporting the wounded to hospitals
and in general helping transport planes wherever they were needed.
This was a pipe drain. Well under a thousand women
in the country held pilots licenses at the time. Many
women didn't even drive cars. Besides, the United States wouldn't
(02:19):
enter the war for a few more years, and women
were not permitted to fly for US forces anyway. But
Dorothy wanted to prepare should the chance arise. She drove
out to an airport on Lake Pontchatrain in New Orleans
and spotted a sign Maynard School of Aviation. It wasn't
easy for a woman to talk her way into flying
(02:41):
lessons in that era, let alone a woman who couldn't
afford them, but Dorothy knew well the effect she had
on men and it gave her remarkable self assurance. She
approached the owner with cool reserve and told him she
wanted to learn, but couldn't pay. Is that your car,
he asked, pointing outside to the beat up Ford City
and she had bought with her newspaper salary. Yes, Dorothy said,
(03:04):
and it's free and clear. He gave it a glance. Well,
you give me your car, he said, and I will
teach you to fly. When she went to England, she
decided this was her chance to reinvent herself. She managed
to pass as sort of an American aristocrat by having
an imperious attitude and recycling a single Red Party dress,
(03:29):
and eventually worked her way into the British aristocracy. They
went to England in early nineteen forty two and joined
what was called the Air Transport Auxiliary. This was a
unit that took brand new aircraft from factories and flew
them to frontline airfields of the Royal Air Force. They
(03:52):
also took damaged planes that had been damaged in battle
and flew them back for repair. These were planes had
missing doors, missing windows, bullet holes through them. There was
little understanding of what was wrong with those planes until
they would be high in the air. One reason that
(04:12):
the British had women performing these duties was to keep
the pilots who were trained to fly in the war
free to fly in the war, and to have this
work done by someone else so that it would save
the lives of these pilots who were doing bombing, who
were piloting fighters.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
So it was a.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Very, very dangerous job that took a great deal of
skill because the pilots were expected to fly up to
one hundred and forty seven different models of aircraft with
very little advanced training. They often got to the airfield
and were handed an aircraft that they had never seen before.
They were given a one page list of instructions, and
(04:55):
they had a few minutes to take off and go.
Here's a letter that one of the pilots home during
the war, mother, if you could know how happy I
am when I fly a plane. I never feel so
completely close to God as when I'm up in the blue.
So if you ever get a message that I've been
in a crack up and have been killed, don't grieve
(05:16):
for me any more than you can possibly help. Just
know that I died the way I wanted to as
a result of this and many other dangers of flying
in wartime. One in seven pilots who did this kind
of work were killed and crashes, and almost all of them,
at one point or another, had to make spectacular saves
when engines failed or they flew into a cloud bank
(05:39):
where they had no visibility. One day, Hazel Jane Rains,
who had been a former stunt pilot back in Georgia,
was flying a spitfire Fighter on what should have been
a normal mission. Suddenly, the engine of the spitfire failed
right at the moment that she was hurled into a
(05:59):
cloud bank and lost all visibility. So the aircraft gradually
tipped on its side to the extent that it entered
a vertical spin that was going to drive it straight
into the ground. When she did break out, she was
very low and many people would have been unable to
do anything, but Rains was a stunt pilot and she
had performed spins in air shows and knew how to
(06:22):
get out of one. She worked very hard to break
the spin and get the aircraft parallel to the ground,
but it was still too late. She said to herself,
I've had it right before she crashed into a cottage
in a small town. When people in the town came
to the wreck in hopes of, as they said, digging
(06:44):
the dead man out. They opened the canopy on the spitfire,
and they were shocked when Hazel Rains popped up, blood
streaming down her face, but clearly alive and speaking with
the accent of a woman from the American South. They
drew back in shop, not only that the pilot was alive,
but that the pilot was a woman, an American woman.
(07:08):
It was the kind of impression these pilots made wherever
they went. They were mostly quite young. Some were crop dusters,
some were debutantes who were wealthy and flew for pleasure.
Some were college girls. Some were performers in flying circuses.
One of them performed a mock stripteas in an air
(07:29):
show where she would fly over the field and throw
out items of clothing as the audience cheered below. When
she landed and was fully clothed, they were usually disappointed.
But they were a real mix of backgrounds, rich and whore,
educated and uneducated, mostly young, mostly in their twenties. Couple
in their thirties. Anne Wood was twenty three years old
(07:54):
and a college graduate. She wanted to have a career
in aviation, but she didn't have as much experience as
some of the others. However, she did have the kind
of personality that made her a natural leader. She had
been the president of her college class. When she got
to England, she emerged as the person who spoke up
for the Americans and looked after them after someone was
(08:17):
injured in a crash, and would go to the hospital
and make sure they were taken care of. Anne Wood
was a practicing Catholic. Every Sunday morning, regardless of where
she was, whether in some remote airfield or in London,
she would walk off in long distances to the nearest
Catholic church to attend Mass. She never missed it. She
(08:39):
was based with a lot of men who liked to
carry on hijinks in the air, and one day two
of them said we're taking spitfires to the west coast,
and why don't you come along and follow and do
what we do. So she said, okay. They were going
over a river and suddenly the two in front of
her swooped down very low over the water at a
high speed, heading toward a bridge, and gradually realize they
(09:02):
are going to fly under that bridge. This would be
strictly forbidden behavior. She knew she shouldn't do it, but
it was oh so tempting.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
And you've been listening to Becky Aikman tell the story
of the women pilots of World War Two who in
the end found themselves in England at first.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Because the American military, well, they didn't have a place
for women at the time. Becky Aikman is telling the story.
She's the author of Spitfires, the American Women who flew
in the face of danger during World War II, And
my goodness, Darroth, the Olsen story is just phenomenal. So
too is Anne Woods and this mix of women, as
(09:42):
were the army, civilian and professional alike that fought against
the Nazi war machine and the Japanese Empire. When we
come back more of the remarkable story of the women
who flew in World War Two, here are now American
story and we continue with our American stories and Becky
(10:12):
Aikman sharing the stories of the American women who flew
in the face of danger.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
During World War Two.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
When we last left off, Anne Wood was about to
maybe fly under a bridge with two pilots who brought.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Her along for the ride. Let's find out what happens.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
They were going over a river, and suddenly the two
in front of her swooped down very low over the
water at a high speed, heading toward a bridge, and
gradually realized they are going to fly under that bridge.
This would be strictly forbidden behavior. She knew she shouldn't
do it, but it was oh so tempting. She saw
the first one shoot under it, the second one shot under,
(10:53):
and she said, I'm going for it. She went down
low over the water. She shot under that bridge with
little room to spare. It was quite exhilarating. So the
next time she took a spitfire on that same route,
she said, by myself, I'll do it myself this time.
So she went down low. She was going fast. She
was heading toward the bridge, and suddenly she realized the
(11:14):
river was a tidal river that could go up and
down as much as seventy feet from time to time
of day, and it was at high tide, so the
opening to get under that bridge was really small. It
was too late to change her mind. She concentrated, she
steered very carefully. She got under the bridge. That was
(11:34):
the last time she did that particular maneuver. But she
was quite well known around her aerodrome for being the
person who had the courage to do that, and she
was always kind of proud of it. When they got
to England, the British were pretty skeptical because they found
the Americans to be rather raucous and a little wild.
(11:56):
Most of the British women who flew were aristocrats who
could afford to take flying lessons, and they assumed the
Americans would be similar. But in fact they were a
wilder crowd, and they were enjoying the freedom that they
had being far from home and being in the middle
of a war. They were able to reinvent themselves because
(12:17):
they were far from home and they were living outside
the expectations that people had for women in the nineteen forties.
I found through their diaries and letters very personal accounts
of what it was like to be a woman at
that time doing such extraordinary work. That they were living
in a bubble that ended for many women after the war,
(12:40):
but they took full advantage of it at the time.
When the Americans first arrived at the airbase that was
the headquarters for the transport unit, they had been traveling
for weeks on ships. They had been on trains. They
were really tired and not looking at their best. The
(13:01):
workers at the aerodrome, mostly men, lined up to gawk
at the arriving Americans and made no effort to hide
their disappointment. Hollywood had given them a picture of American womanhood,
and it was all blonde, all glamour, all singing and dancing,
wrote one of the British flyers. The men were expecting
Ginger Rogers or Betty Gable, but got reality instead. Virginia
(13:23):
far remembered quote the walk past the windows filled with
silent male faces, all dropping as they saw the travel
stained girls arriving. You could feel their thoughts, why one's fat,
one's definitely strapping. No glamour, no glamour anywhere. That was
actually not true, because some of the American women were
very attractive and news photographers loved to photograph them next
(13:47):
to the planes. This was just a down moment for
the group. They were ultimately quite celebrated by the British public,
which appreciated everything that these women did, how brave they were.
They were invited to the country homes of lords and ladies.
They on their leave days, went into London and danced
(14:10):
in blackouts. During the blackout in nightclubs that had coverings
over the windows that they wouldn't be subject to bombing,
they lived very fully when they weren't flying. When they
were flying, they made it a very important contribution to
the war. World War II was an aerial war to
(14:30):
the extent that no other previous war had ever been.
The flying, the bombing, the fighter planes that were used
to protect the country, the bombers that were used to
take the battle to the continent and ultimately to Berlin
were a huge phenomenon and unusual in the history of war.
So getting a huge supply of these aircraft where they
(14:53):
needed to go was a crucial element of the struggle.
Themerican women took on a heavy duty before d Day
to get aircraft into place. During the Battle of the Bulge.
They were on twenty four hour notice because it was
a battle late in the war in early nineteen forty five,
(15:16):
when the Germans overran the Allied forces and inflicted terrible
damage and killed many soldiers, and fortunately it happened during
a cold spell and bad weather, so it was very
hard to get aircraft there to support them and soften
up the German forces. So the transport pilots had to
work very long hours and be ready to go out
(15:39):
on a moment's notice to get those much needed aircraft
where they had to be. During the course of my research,
I was struck by how unknown these pilots are today.
They were actually the very first American women to fly
military aircraft, and at the time they were quite celebrated
(16:00):
for this role. But somehow after the war, the busy
world moved on and almost completely forgot about them. When
I first started to do research, it was hard to
find anything. There were very few things in museums or
very few things written about these American pilots who did this.
The first name that I came up with of one
(16:22):
of them was named Mary Zerbel, and I learned that
her papers were at the San Diego Air and Space Museum.
I went there with rather low expectations because the librarian
told me that no one but me had ever asked
to see these files. When I opened them up, she
came alive to me. She was quite famous before the
(16:45):
war as being the youngest woman flying instructor in the
United States at the age of nineteen. She was featured
in many newspaper stories and photographs During the war, she
also was covered around the world as being the bride
in the first wedding of two Americans who were serving
(17:06):
in the war zone before other soldiers got there.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
After the war, she did more daring flying, and she
was so well regarded and her life was so exciting
that Lana Turner starred.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
In a movie about Mary's life. By the time I
got to the end of the file, I found her obituary,
and I saw that it was only three sentences in
a newspaper in Idaho, and it mentioned nothing about her
flying at all. So somehow this story was so forgotten,
(17:43):
and I said to myself, I'm on a mission now
to make sure people know about this. People who served
in the Air Transport Auxiliary, which was kind of a
pedestrian name, made up other names for themselves. Some women
call themselves the always Verified Air Women, but the nickname
they liked best was the Atta Girls. The American Atta
(18:07):
Girls were an independent lot. After the war. They rarely
got together, but when they did, they all agreed flying
in a war in a far away land was the
best thing they ever did. Roberta Sandoz had come up
with the idea for a reunion after she found herself
hailed as a trailblazer at the WASP convention a couple
(18:28):
of years before. Most of them stuck to the old story.
When they answered the call to serve in nineteen forty two,
they did it for themselves and for the free world.
They gave no thought to advancing the status of women.
But thirty seven years later it was clear that, however, inadvertently,
they had opened doors, even if some of them shut again.
(18:50):
We were unique, ROBERTA said. We were aware of our
options when most women were not.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Had a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Angler, and especial thanks to Becky Aikman.
She's the author of Spitfires, the American women who flew
in the face of danger during World War II in
what's known as the Airport Transit auxiliary. Flying into war
in a far away land is the best thing we
(19:17):
ever did, one said, the story of the American women
pilots of World War II.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Here on our American Stories.
And we continue with our American stories. There are many
significant dates in American history. May eighth marks the anniversary
of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. This is the
story of the remarkable American women pilots who helped secure
that victory.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
I'm Becky Aikman and I'm the author of the book Spitfires,
the American women who flew in the face of danger
during World War Two. This is a story about some
young women who were pilots back before World War Two started,
and they very much wanted to serve their country and
(00:53):
help in the war. But the United States military would
not allow women to be pilots. But they heard that
they could go to Great Britain and serve there. The
British were desperate for help. They were in the middle
of being attacked by Germany by the air. They were
(01:13):
being bombed relentlessly, and the United States hadn't entered the
war yet, so the British were really desperate. They could
have lost the war right there. They decided to accept
pilots who were foreigners and pilots who were women to
do one of the most dangerous jobs of the war.
(01:36):
Dorothy Fury was a great beauty, but she came from
a poor background, and she only had an eighth grade education.
I felt that this would be the only justifiable war
in my lifetime, Dorothy later wrote, So I began to
think of ways in which I could be useful. She
settled on the most dramatic role she could imagine, a pilot.
(01:57):
I didn't envision flying combat, she wrote, but thought that
women could be useful in transporting the wounded to hospitals
and in general helping transport planes wherever they were needed.
This was a pipe drain. Well under a thousand women
in the country held pilots licenses at the time. Many
women didn't even drive cars. Besides, the United States wouldn't
(02:19):
enter the war for a few more years, and women
were not permitted to fly for US forces anyway. But
Dorothy wanted to prepare should the chance arise. She drove
out to an airport on Lake Pontchatrain in New Orleans
and spotted a sign Maynard School of Aviation. It wasn't
easy for a woman to talk her way into flying
(02:41):
lessons in that era, let alone a woman who couldn't
afford them, but Dorothy knew well the effect she had
on men and it gave her remarkable self assurance. She
approached the owner with cool reserve and told him she
wanted to learn, but couldn't pay. Is that your car,
he asked, pointing outside to the beat up Ford City
and she had bought with her newspaper salary. Yes, Dorothy said,
(03:04):
and it's free and clear. He gave it a glance. Well,
you give me your car, he said, and I will
teach you to fly. When she went to England, she
decided this was her chance to reinvent herself. She managed
to pass as sort of an American aristocrat by having
an imperious attitude and recycling a single Red Party dress,
(03:29):
and eventually worked her way into the British aristocracy. They
went to England in early nineteen forty two and joined
what was called the Air Transport Auxiliary. This was a
unit that took brand new aircraft from factories and flew
them to frontline airfields of the Royal Air Force. They
(03:52):
also took damaged planes that had been damaged in battle
and flew them back for repair. These were planes had
missing doors, missing windows, bullet holes through them. There was
little understanding of what was wrong with those planes until
they would be high in the air. One reason that
(04:12):
the British had women performing these duties was to keep
the pilots who were trained to fly in the war
free to fly in the war, and to have this
work done by someone else so that it would save
the lives of these pilots who were doing bombing, who
were piloting fighters.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
So it was a.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Very, very dangerous job that took a great deal of
skill because the pilots were expected to fly up to
one hundred and forty seven different models of aircraft with
very little advanced training. They often got to the airfield
and were handed an aircraft that they had never seen before.
They were given a one page list of instructions, and
(04:55):
they had a few minutes to take off and go.
Here's a letter that one of the pilots home during
the war, mother, if you could know how happy I
am when I fly a plane. I never feel so
completely close to God as when I'm up in the blue.
So if you ever get a message that I've been
in a crack up and have been killed, don't grieve
(05:16):
for me any more than you can possibly help. Just
know that I died the way I wanted to as
a result of this and many other dangers of flying
in wartime. One in seven pilots who did this kind
of work were killed and crashes, and almost all of them,
at one point or another, had to make spectacular saves
when engines failed or they flew into a cloud bank
(05:39):
where they had no visibility. One day, Hazel Jane Rains,
who had been a former stunt pilot back in Georgia,
was flying a spitfire Fighter on what should have been
a normal mission. Suddenly, the engine of the spitfire failed
right at the moment that she was hurled into a
(05:59):
cloud bank and lost all visibility. So the aircraft gradually
tipped on its side to the extent that it entered
a vertical spin that was going to drive it straight
into the ground. When she did break out, she was
very low and many people would have been unable to
do anything, but Rains was a stunt pilot and she
had performed spins in air shows and knew how to
(06:22):
get out of one. She worked very hard to break
the spin and get the aircraft parallel to the ground,
but it was still too late. She said to herself,
I've had it right before she crashed into a cottage
in a small town. When people in the town came
to the wreck in hopes of, as they said, digging
(06:44):
the dead man out. They opened the canopy on the spitfire,
and they were shocked when Hazel Rains popped up, blood
streaming down her face, but clearly alive and speaking with
the accent of a woman from the American South. They
drew back in shop, not only that the pilot was alive,
but that the pilot was a woman, an American woman.
(07:08):
It was the kind of impression these pilots made wherever
they went. They were mostly quite young. Some were crop dusters,
some were debutantes who were wealthy and flew for pleasure.
Some were college girls. Some were performers in flying circuses.
One of them performed a mock stripteas in an air
(07:29):
show where she would fly over the field and throw
out items of clothing as the audience cheered below. When
she landed and was fully clothed, they were usually disappointed.
But they were a real mix of backgrounds, rich and whore,
educated and uneducated, mostly young, mostly in their twenties. Couple
in their thirties. Anne Wood was twenty three years old
(07:54):
and a college graduate. She wanted to have a career
in aviation, but she didn't have as much experience as
some of the others. However, she did have the kind
of personality that made her a natural leader. She had
been the president of her college class. When she got
to England, she emerged as the person who spoke up
for the Americans and looked after them after someone was
(08:17):
injured in a crash, and would go to the hospital
and make sure they were taken care of. Anne Wood
was a practicing Catholic. Every Sunday morning, regardless of where
she was, whether in some remote airfield or in London,
she would walk off in long distances to the nearest
Catholic church to attend Mass. She never missed it. She
(08:39):
was based with a lot of men who liked to
carry on hijinks in the air, and one day two
of them said we're taking spitfires to the west coast,
and why don't you come along and follow and do
what we do. So she said, okay. They were going
over a river and suddenly the two in front of
her swooped down very low over the water at a
high speed, heading toward a bridge, and gradually realize they
(09:02):
are going to fly under that bridge. This would be
strictly forbidden behavior. She knew she shouldn't do it, but
it was oh so tempting.
Speaker 4 (09:10):
And you've been listening to Becky Aikman tell the story
of the women pilots of World War Two who in
the end found themselves in England at first.
Speaker 1 (09:21):
Because the American military, well, they didn't have a place
for women at the time. Becky Aikman is telling the story.
She's the author of Spitfires, the American Women who flew
in the face of danger during World War II, And
my goodness, Darroth, the Olsen story is just phenomenal. So
too is Anne Woods and this mix of women, as
(09:42):
were the army, civilian and professional alike that fought against
the Nazi war machine and the Japanese Empire. When we
come back more of the remarkable story of the women
who flew in World War Two, here are now American
story and we continue with our American stories and Becky
(10:12):
Aikman sharing the stories of the American women who flew
in the face of danger.
Speaker 4 (10:17):
During World War Two.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
When we last left off, Anne Wood was about to
maybe fly under a bridge with two pilots who brought.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Her along for the ride. Let's find out what happens.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
They were going over a river, and suddenly the two
in front of her swooped down very low over the
water at a high speed, heading toward a bridge, and
gradually realized they are going to fly under that bridge.
This would be strictly forbidden behavior. She knew she shouldn't
do it, but it was oh so tempting. She saw
the first one shoot under it, the second one shot under,
(10:53):
and she said, I'm going for it. She went down
low over the water. She shot under that bridge with
little room to spare. It was quite exhilarating. So the
next time she took a spitfire on that same route,
she said, by myself, I'll do it myself this time.
So she went down low. She was going fast. She
was heading toward the bridge, and suddenly she realized the
(11:14):
river was a tidal river that could go up and
down as much as seventy feet from time to time
of day, and it was at high tide, so the
opening to get under that bridge was really small. It
was too late to change her mind. She concentrated, she
steered very carefully. She got under the bridge. That was
(11:34):
the last time she did that particular maneuver. But she
was quite well known around her aerodrome for being the
person who had the courage to do that, and she
was always kind of proud of it. When they got
to England, the British were pretty skeptical because they found
the Americans to be rather raucous and a little wild.
(11:56):
Most of the British women who flew were aristocrats who
could afford to take flying lessons, and they assumed the
Americans would be similar. But in fact they were a
wilder crowd, and they were enjoying the freedom that they
had being far from home and being in the middle
of a war. They were able to reinvent themselves because
(12:17):
they were far from home and they were living outside
the expectations that people had for women in the nineteen forties.
I found through their diaries and letters very personal accounts
of what it was like to be a woman at
that time doing such extraordinary work. That they were living
in a bubble that ended for many women after the war,
(12:40):
but they took full advantage of it at the time.
When the Americans first arrived at the airbase that was
the headquarters for the transport unit, they had been traveling
for weeks on ships. They had been on trains. They
were really tired and not looking at their best. The
(13:01):
workers at the aerodrome, mostly men, lined up to gawk
at the arriving Americans and made no effort to hide
their disappointment. Hollywood had given them a picture of American womanhood,
and it was all blonde, all glamour, all singing and dancing,
wrote one of the British flyers. The men were expecting
Ginger Rogers or Betty Gable, but got reality instead. Virginia
(13:23):
far remembered quote the walk past the windows filled with
silent male faces, all dropping as they saw the travel
stained girls arriving. You could feel their thoughts, why one's fat,
one's definitely strapping. No glamour, no glamour anywhere. That was
actually not true, because some of the American women were
very attractive and news photographers loved to photograph them next
(13:47):
to the planes. This was just a down moment for
the group. They were ultimately quite celebrated by the British public,
which appreciated everything that these women did, how brave they were.
They were invited to the country homes of lords and ladies.
They on their leave days, went into London and danced
(14:10):
in blackouts. During the blackout in nightclubs that had coverings
over the windows that they wouldn't be subject to bombing,
they lived very fully when they weren't flying. When they
were flying, they made it a very important contribution to
the war. World War II was an aerial war to
(14:30):
the extent that no other previous war had ever been.
The flying, the bombing, the fighter planes that were used
to protect the country, the bombers that were used to
take the battle to the continent and ultimately to Berlin
were a huge phenomenon and unusual in the history of war.
So getting a huge supply of these aircraft where they
(14:53):
needed to go was a crucial element of the struggle.
Themerican women took on a heavy duty before d Day
to get aircraft into place. During the Battle of the Bulge.
They were on twenty four hour notice because it was
a battle late in the war in early nineteen forty five,
(15:16):
when the Germans overran the Allied forces and inflicted terrible
damage and killed many soldiers, and fortunately it happened during
a cold spell and bad weather, so it was very
hard to get aircraft there to support them and soften
up the German forces. So the transport pilots had to
work very long hours and be ready to go out
(15:39):
on a moment's notice to get those much needed aircraft
where they had to be. During the course of my research,
I was struck by how unknown these pilots are today.
They were actually the very first American women to fly
military aircraft, and at the time they were quite celebrated
(16:00):
for this role. But somehow after the war, the busy
world moved on and almost completely forgot about them. When
I first started to do research, it was hard to
find anything. There were very few things in museums or
very few things written about these American pilots who did this.
The first name that I came up with of one
(16:22):
of them was named Mary Zerbel, and I learned that
her papers were at the San Diego Air and Space Museum.
I went there with rather low expectations because the librarian
told me that no one but me had ever asked
to see these files. When I opened them up, she
came alive to me. She was quite famous before the
(16:45):
war as being the youngest woman flying instructor in the
United States at the age of nineteen. She was featured
in many newspaper stories and photographs During the war, she
also was covered around the world as being the bride
in the first wedding of two Americans who were serving
(17:06):
in the war zone before other soldiers got there.
Speaker 3 (17:10):
After the war, she did more daring flying, and she
was so well regarded and her life was so exciting
that Lana Turner starred.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
In a movie about Mary's life. By the time I
got to the end of the file, I found her obituary,
and I saw that it was only three sentences in
a newspaper in Idaho, and it mentioned nothing about her
flying at all. So somehow this story was so forgotten,
(17:43):
and I said to myself, I'm on a mission now
to make sure people know about this. People who served
in the Air Transport Auxiliary, which was kind of a
pedestrian name, made up other names for themselves. Some women
call themselves the always Verified Air Women, but the nickname
they liked best was the Atta Girls. The American Atta
(18:07):
Girls were an independent lot. After the war. They rarely
got together, but when they did, they all agreed flying
in a war in a far away land was the
best thing they ever did. Roberta Sandoz had come up
with the idea for a reunion after she found herself
hailed as a trailblazer at the WASP convention a couple
(18:28):
of years before. Most of them stuck to the old story.
When they answered the call to serve in nineteen forty two,
they did it for themselves and for the free world.
They gave no thought to advancing the status of women.
But thirty seven years later it was clear that, however, inadvertently,
they had opened doors, even if some of them shut again.
(18:50):
We were unique, ROBERTA said. We were aware of our
options when most women were not.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
Had a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Angler, and especial thanks to Becky Aikman.
She's the author of Spitfires, the American women who flew
in the face of danger during World War II in
what's known as the Airport Transit auxiliary. Flying into war
in a far away land is the best thing we
(19:17):
ever did, one said, the story of the American women
pilots of World War II.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
Here on our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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