The Women with Silver Wings by Katherine Sharp Landdeck

Author:Katherine Sharp Landdeck [Landdeck, Katherine Sharp]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

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By the end of August 1944, it seemed the entire world was shifting on its axis. On August 25 the Allies liberated Paris. Most Americans, including military leaders, believed Hitler, who had survived a late July assassination attempt, was on the run. While the war was far from over, the United States was making clear progress on the Pacific front against Japan as well. As the Allies pushed Germany back toward its own borders in the summer of 1944, a group of American B-29s—the same plane Dora and Didi had demonstrated—carried out the first bombing raid on Japan since the daring Doolittle raid in the spring of 1942. American carrier-based planes shot down over two hundred Japanese planes, losing only twenty of their own, in what came to be known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” Shortly thereafter, U.S. Marines invaded Guam and Tinian. One of the WASP, Caro Bayley, stationed at Biggs Field in El Paso, Texas, realized that, with the failed bill and the shift in the war, things were changing. She wrote home that “there’s an awfully big chance of them disbanding the WASP” and wondered if resigning would be the patriotic thing to do, “because it seems we’re taking a job away from a man.”

At the end of August, Nancy’s husband, Bob, who had been lobbying hard to live closer to his wife again, finally achieved his goal. He was appointed deputy commander of the Ferrying Division and posted to Cincinnati, where Nancy had been stationed for nearly a year. Bob and Nancy were reunited. But for Nancy it must have felt as if she was under pressure from all sides: from her husband, who was proud of her but did not seem to want her to take a military commission; from her core ferry pilots, who wanted to be militarized but separately from Jackie; from the Ferrying Division, who wanted the women to stop agitating and do their work; and from Jackie herself, who had determined that the women should be militarized or the program should end altogether.

Despite the cooperative visits and phone calls of the past year, Nancy was now actively avoiding Jackie. The longer the bill sat in the Senate, the less likely it seemed any action would be taken to bring the women into the military. Jackie’s report had dismissed the special work the ferry pilots were doing, declaring that the job of all the women was “to do the routine, the dishwashing flying jobs of the AAF,” and suggesting that if some of the women were no longer needed, then all of them should go home. This was the last straw for Nancy. She had cooperated for the most part, initially talking with those in the AAF and Congress about alternatives to combining her program with Jackie’s, but in the end putting on the blue uniform and the WASP wings believing that Jackie had enough clout to make militarization happen. Now it all seemed to be falling apart, and Nancy blamed Jackie.

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