Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II

Chapter 5: War in Europe!

5 War in Europe! G ermany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. World War II had begun in Europe. Gen. Billy Mitchell’s prophecy that the next war would be won in the air was about to be tested. Aviation had grown from its barnstorming adolescence in the 1920s, to a robust young adulthood by the late 1930s as commercial aviation caught hold. Now it was to become a powerful machine of war in its maturity. Pilots became a necessary commodity and, for all the press they had received in the 1930s, there weren’t nearly enough of them for wartime needs. Adventure-seeking U.S. male flyers—drawn by the allure of one-on-one combat in the skies over embattled England in 1940—rushed to fly with the Royal Air Force (RAF). At home, they had the Army Air Corps Reserve. Though it didn’t promise combat in the near future, the Reserve did give young American flyers a place to train, hone their skills, and do their bit for their country. Bob Love already had taken that approach. On July 3, 1937, he accepted an appointment and commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Corps Reserve. He served two weeks of active duty in January 1938, 1939, and 1940, doing mostly 60 War in Europe! 61 experimental flying, which included weather observation flights on government projects at nearby M.I.T.1 Another early advocate of the Reserves was a young Air Corps captain named William H. Tunner, a 1928 West Point graduate who commanded the Memphis (Tennessee) Air Corps Detachment in the late 1930s. Tunner actively recruited local pilots for the Reserve and, in doing so, built a sizeable corps of flying officers who ultimately went to war with him after Pearl Harbor.2      As early as May of 1936, Ninety-Nines member “Teddy” (Mrs. Theodore) Kenyon suggested that women could assist in war by ferrying planes.3 On September 28, 1939, Jacqueline Cochran— founder of Jacqueline Cochran Cosmetics and record-setting aviator —wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt that she felt a plan should be put in place to use American women pilots in a national emergency.4 The two had met April 4, 1938, when Mrs. Roosevelt awarded Cochran her first Harmon Trophy.5 She would receive several.6 “In the field of aviation the real ‘bottle neck’ in the long run is likely to be trained pilots,” Cochran wrote to the First Lady. She suggested that women could be used “in all sorts of helpful back of the lines work” like flying ambulance planes, courier planes, and commercial and transport planes, “thereby releasing male pilots for combat duty.” She continued: “This requires organization and not at the time of emergency but in advance. We have about 650 licensed women pilots in this country. Most of them would be of little use today, but most of them could be of great use a few months hence if properly trained and organized . And if they had some official standing or patriotic objective (rather than just fly around an airport occasionally for fun) there would be thousands more women pilots than there are now.”7 Cochran noted that England, France, Russia, and Germany already were using women pilots in their air forces.8 On January 1, 1940, England set up the first civilian ferry pilots’ pool. Eight women were among those selected. Author Lettice Curtis, a woman pilot who joined the Air Transport 62 Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II Auxiliary (ATA)—a branch of the RAF—in July 1940, writes in The Forgotten Pilots: “Women pilots who at the time were unaware that they had anything more than a faint chance of being accepted for the ATA would have been stunned with unbelief if they had known that they were being considered….”9 In May 1940, with the war in Europe eight months old, Nancy Love saw a way to help her country’s efforts to aid the Allies even though the U.S. wasn’t “in” the war. By then, Love had logged 825 flying hours. She had good instincts and wasn’t afraid to act on them. She contacted her husband’s friend Lt. Col. Robert Olds, Plans Division of the Office of the Chief of the Air Corps, about the possibility of women ferrying airplanes for the U.S. Army Olds had made his name during...