Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II

Chapter 10: Killed in Service of Her Country

10 Killed in Service of Her Country T he blackest days Nancy Love faced during World War II were March 21-27, 1943. On March 21, one of her original WAFS, Cornelia Fort, died in a mid-air collision near Merkel, Texas. Fort had been with Love from the beginning, arriving in Wilmington only a day after Betty Gillies.      On Sunday, March 21, 1943, Fort and six male Long Beach ferry pilots took off to deliver BT-13s to Dallas. Stories of what happened vary. Fort’s biographer, Rob Simbeck, writes in Daughter of the Air that Fort agreed, if somewhat reluctantly, to practice formation flying over sparsely inhabited West Texas between Midland and their destination, which was Dallas. The WAFS’ instructions were to stay 500 feet away from any other airplane. But, according to Simbeck’s sources, apparently Fort chose to ignore the order.1 The official Army accident report reads: “On March 21 at approximately 15:30 CWT (Central War Time) seven ships 116 Killed in Service of Her Country 117 were proceeding East in formation, in the vicinity of Merkel, Texas. Of these seven ships, one BT-13A flown by Civilian Pilot Cornelia Fort and [a] BT-13A flown by F/O Frank E. Stamme, Jr., were involved in a mid-air collision.” The report continues to say that the landing gear of Stamme’s aircraft apparently struck the left wing of Fort’s aircraft, causing part of it to break off. The left wingtip of Fort’s airplane was wood, and the right wingtip was metal. Stamme’s aircraft did not go out of control but Fort’s rolled and went into an inverted dive. There was apparently no attempt to recover or to use the parachute. The emergency latch on the hatch release was found to be locked. Judging from the condition of the propeller blades, power was completely retarded after control was lost. 2 Stories circulated that the young male flyers were horsing around and harassing Fort, who may have had more flying experience than they did but did not have the formation flying or advanced aerobatic training they had. However, Barbara Erickson , Fort’s squadron commander at Long Beach, says: “They were in two or three airplanes out there in the middle of nowhere trying to fly formation. I don’t think there was anything malicious about it. I think it was a plain accident.”3 Whatever the cause, Cornelia Fort, one of Nancy Love’s first recruits, was dead. Word spread quickly through the WAFS’ ranks. Cornelia was well-liked and, though she was quiet and kept to herself, all her fellow WAFS knew she was a solid flyer and an extraordinary person. From the beginning, Fort had planned to write the history of the WAFS. She had kept diaries of her entire aviation career and already was preparing to commit those jottings to a memoir about the squadron and its exploits, once the war was over. Fort had witnessed, first-hand, and already written about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. A flight instructor at Honolulu ’s John Rodgers Airport, she was flying with a student on the morning of December 7, 1941. They were shot at by a Zero but managed to land safely in a hail of bullets.4 Love, though she had faced the loss of her brother ten years earlier, had never been affected quite so deeply by death. Intel- 118 Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II lectually she knew that Cornelia, like all of her WAFS, had come of her own free will. But suddenly Love had been thrown into a new, unfamiliar role, that of a wartime commander who had just lost a trusted lieutenant. Years later, Nancy Batson said that she thought Nancy Love never truly recovered from Cornelia’s death. The WAFS, the original squadron, was her creation. She had hand-picked her pilots. Now she had lost one of them. And she would have to endure the deaths of two more. Nancy Love would not attend those two funerals. She would send another of the Originals to represent her. Nancy Batson was one of those who would later take a fellow Original home for the last time.5 But Nancy Love did attend Cornelia’s funeral. She and B.J. Erickson flew a C-47 from Long Beach to Nashville, March 25. Maj. Samuel Dunlap—the...