Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 29, 1993 TAG: 9306290198
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB BLATTNER NEWPORT NEWS DAILY PRESS
DATELINE: NEWPORT NEWS (AP) LENGTH: Long
Then Hollywood remembered the Rockford Peaches, women who played pro baseball while Ted Williams flew fighter planes.
But the women who flew fighters and bombers for the war effort have all but been forgotten. Meet Julie Ledbetter and Ellen Evans, two Newport News residents who piloted bombers during World War II.
It was 1942, and the American armed forces were struggling because there just weren't enough male pilots to go around. Since the nation entered the war in December 1941, the demand for qualified pilots more than tripled, from 30,000 to 100,000.
By assigning women pilots to noncombat missions, such as ferrying planes from factories to air bases and towing targets for gunnery practice, the military freed men for combat.
So the Women Aircraft Service Pilots, a civilian support group serving under military orders and discipline, was formed.
Women volunteered by the thousands - students and teachers, nurses and housewives, doctors and flight attendants - all with some flight experience.
Because of their flying skills, Ledbetter and Evans, both South Carolina natives, were among the first women accepted into the WASP.
"I kind of grew up in an airplane," Ledbetter said. "I would rather be with airplanes than dogs. I spent more time with planes than bicycles."
Evans began flying when one of the boarders at her mother's rooming house offered lessons for the price of the fuel alone.
The two were among about 25,000 hopefuls who applied to the WASP program. Only 1,830 were accepted. Of those, 1,074 graduated. Thirty-eight died.
The WASP pilots never had to combat Japanese Zeros or German Messerschmidts in their service, but there was still bad weather and bad luck, bad planes being ferried on their way back for repairs, even bad shooting.
One of the WASP jobs, for example, was towing targets for gunners on the ground to shoot at in anti-aircraft practice. Occasionally, it was hard for the pilots to tell which plane the rookies were aiming at.
"They'd call down and say, `I'm pulling the plane, not pushing it.' They'd come in with bullet holes through the planes," Evans said.
Despite the danger, there was fun, too. Evans recalls playing tricks on Air Force pilots who ferried the WASP women back to the airplane factories.
She and her friends would dart to the rear of a plane, pitching its nose suddenly skyward and startling the pilot. Then the pilot usually would retaliate by snapping the plane's tail sideways, throwing the women against the inside of the fuselage.
Unlike Ledbetter, who sometimes flew B-17s with all-female crews, Evans always flew with at least one male pilot.
One time, she recalls, the B-25 `bomber she was ferrying didn't break through the cloud cover over Savannah, Ga., until they'd dropped to within 300 feet of the ground.
When they finally touched down safely, the male pilot asked if she had been scared.
"Of course not," said Evans, recalling her answer. "He told me, `You didn't have the sense to be scared.' "
Even the harrowing memories now bring smiles to Ledbetter.
"I remember the first night we went across country solo," she said. "Nothing but girls. It was the worst weather. I remember talking amongst ourselves whether they were going to have to shoot us down."
You had to be tall to reach the controls on the B-17's floor.
"The 17s were for big girls - tall," Evans said. "Your legs wouldn't reach. The 25 was enough reach. And the small girls flew fighters."
Evans remains as fond of the B-25s she ferried from Kansas City to Georgia as Ledbetter is of the B-17s. A scale model B-25 rests on her television set.
As far as the women were concerned, they were full military, Evans recalled. And if they'd been trained for combat, they'd have entered it without second thoughts. So it's not surprising that both women say they're happy for today's women pilots, who have recently been approved by the Pentagon for combat flying.
"I see nothing in the world wrong with flying in combat," Ledbetter said. "An airplane does not know if a man or woman is flying it."
When the program was disbanded in late 1944, Evans returned home to South Carolina and had a couple of friendly farmers make an airfield for her. She bought a Piper Cub and gave flying lessons. And Ledbetter enlisted in the Army.
"To tell you the truth, I just plain missed the camaraderie of the service," she said. It wasn't long, however, before the Army Air Corps became the U.S. Air Force. And the upstart branch, realizing the resource it had in former WASP pilots, offered them officers' commissions.
Too late for those two, however. Evans was married and a mother. Ledbetter was already working her way up through the Army enlisted ranks when the offer was made, and the Pentagon had a rule against jumping services to pick up the commission.
She stayed on for a 26-year career in the Army WAC, finally retiring as a lieutenant colonel. But she never flew for the military again.
"By the time they started letting the gals fly again, I was too old," Ledbetter said.
It took the government 35 years to grant the WASP pilots full military recognition and veteran status.
A half-century may have passed, but those days up in the clouds still brighten Evans' and Ledbetter's lives.
"It's just a closeness you get in terms of working together," Ledbetter said. "It's tense when you can't see anything and you're nearly on the ground. And when you're finished, you talk about it the rest of your life."
by CNB