WWII female pilots finally get recognition

Muriel Martin spent four years helping train fighter pilots as a Women's Airforce Service Pilot, or WASP, during WWII.

Muriel Martin struggles these days to remember the years she spent as a World War II U.S. Army Air Force pilot.

The dates have run together in her mind and the details of her training and experience long ago faded into the background of a life filled with child rearing and community service.

But some days, the memories push through and she finds herself back in her 20s and in the cockpit again.

“I was flying to Dallas earlier this year and looking out the plane window at clouds just like they were back then,” she said. “It brought back so many memories.”

Martin, now 87, blames her fading recollections on age and the full life she has led since leaving the service.

When it comes to the rest of the country, though, she and the 300 other surviving members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots corps question how America could have largely forgotten what they describe as the “best-kept secret of the war effort.”

For years, the group has fought for recognition of their contribution. Between 1941 and 1944, more than 1,000 women from across the country were trained as military pilots and dispatched to bases such as Mission’s Moore Air Field.

They ferried weapons cross-country, delivered planes from manufacturing plants and towed targets during anti-aircraft gunnery practice, freeing up the men who traditionally held those jobs for combat on the European and Pacific fronts. All told, they piloted 78 different types of military aircraft and logged more than 60 million flight miles.

But when the Army disbanded the corps in 1944, the women went back to their pre-war lives without any of the honors or benefits their male counterparts received.

Just this year, President Barack Obama signed legislation awarding the WASPs the Congressional Gold Medal — one of the nation’s highest civilian honors.

And for Dorothy Lucas — an 86-year-old former WASP at Moore Field who now resides in San Antonio — the tribute couldn’t have come soon enough.

“I hoped it would happen soon,” she said. “I’m not getting any younger.”

In August 1943, the Germans had just withdrawn from North Africa, U.S. Gen. George S. Patton had completed a successful invasion of Sicily, and Lucas was a 20-year-old secretary working at the Pentagon.

“Everyone was in uniform,” she said. “And everyone wanted to do their part.”

A friend mentioned that the Army was recruiting female pilots for domestic training and Lucas knew she had stumbled on a way to satisfy her recently acquired flight bug.

“My older brother, who I adored, was in the Army Air Corps then,” she said. “I just sort of got into it somehow and just loved it.”

More than 25,000 women volunteered for the newly formed WASPs but fewer than 4 percent made the cut. Because the Army required each candidate to have logged several flight hours and to maintain an active pilot’s license, many of the young women that made it came from affluent backgrounds and families that could afford flight lessons.

Muriel Martin — then Muriel Kiester — had grown up on a sprawling patch of land in La Feria and had access to her family’s private aircraft. She learned to fly with her grandfather’s backing in 1944.

“Doesn’t everyone want to fly?” she said. “Growing up in La Feria, I just wanted to get way far away. I wanted to see the world.”

But upon arriving in the Abilene suburb of Sweetwater — where all the WASPs received their training — the women were introduced to others from around the country and a form of military discipline they had never encountered before.

“We came from everything — schoolteachers, mothers, secretaries,” said former WASP Ann Hazzard. “One had even worked as a prostitute, but she didn’t last long.”

Hazzard, now 88 and co-owner of the Holiday Village Mobile Home & RV Park in Pharr, realized right from the start that her gender would be a constant issue during her time in the service — if not always a problem.

When she arrived for her first Army physical in Fort Wayne, Ind., male soldiers weren’t quite sure what to do with a bunch of women in undergarments waiting for a doctor.

“They looked at us like we were oddities,” she said. “They brought out some towels and made us wrap up in them until we could get to another room.”

Other members of the female corps were ordered to report their menstrual cycles to their training sergeants amid ill-founded fears that menstruation affected a woman’s stability and ability to pilot an aircraft.

And while many former WASPs reported stories of strained relations with their male students and counterparts, most said that the men treated them with respect despite their gender difference.

It was a distinction that Jacqueline Cochran — the most famous female pilot of her day and eventual leader of the WASPs — took pains to emphasize.

When she pitched the idea for a women’s pilot corps to Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, she won one battle for women’s equality. But she emphasized among all of her fledgling pilots the importance of feminine dress and deportment while serving on a military base.

Cochran herself is said to have never left the cockpit of an airplane without reapplying her lipstick and fixing her hair.

Lucas, the San Antonio WASP, said the emphasis on appearance definitely drew attention from the male pilots but also gave the women plenty of opportunity to surprise them — such as a flight she took from Mission to St. Louis with a male officer in 1943.

“I could tell he was very nervous flying with a girl,” she said. “But he was so happy we didn’t crash, he asked me out to dinner at the officer’s club that night.”

The service did have its risks. Thirty-eight members of the corps lost their lives in the line of duty — some brought down by gunfire in training missions, others by faulty plane mechanics.

Those deaths provided the women with their first glimpse at how the rest of the country viewed their efforts. Because they were members of a civilian auxiliary corps — and were not considered actual military service members — the bodies of those who died were sent home in plain pine boxes at their family’s expense.

The next hurtful indication came in 1944 — when Congress decided to disband the group amid pressure from male pilots who had begun to return home in the final days of the war. All records of the WASPs were ordered classified and sealed for nearly 35 years.

“There was a knock on the door one day, and an officer was there,” said Hazzard. “He said, ‘OK, kids, you can get dressed, get packed, and go home.’

Many — like Lucas — went back to their former lives searching for something that would recapture their war-year adventures only to be squeezed back into their old jobs and routines that now seemed hopelessly dull.

“I was very disappointed,” she said. “I was young, cute and thin. And suddenly, I had to pay my way back to my old life.”

Others — like Hazzard — only got into a cockpit once or twice more before giving up flying for good.

It was not until 1977 that President Jimmy Carter signed a bill recognizing their efforts and awarding the women status as veterans — which entitled them to health care benefits and GI Bill education opportunities.

For Republican U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, that recognition came about 30 years too late for the women — many of whom were then in their 50s.

She helped author the bill this year that awarded the women their congressional medals and is currently planning a ceremony to honor them in Washington, D.C.

“The valor and service of the WASP is only one part of their legacy,” she said in a March statement. “Their success in the line of duty paved the way for armed forces to lift the ban on women attending military flight training in the 1970s, and their efforts eventually led to women being fully integrated as military pilots.”

But as Martin stands in her La Feria bedroom a good 60 years after her first military flight, she says she has never felt much like a pioneer.

Despite the pilot’s wings encased on her wall, the painting of the T-6D plane she used to fly and the medal she was given upon her induction to the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame, she has always looked on her wartime experience as just another adventure.

“I don’t know,” she says, rubbing her hands in modesty. “I had never been thrown off a horse before. I figured I wouldn’t get thrown off a plane, either.”

The point is when everyone is a “hero” then no one is a hero.

When we give gold stars to everyone for routine, everyday service, then what do we save for people like Roy Benavidez?

“With out orders, Benavidez volunteered so quickly that he didn’t even bring his M-16 when he dashed for the helicopter preparing for a rescue attempt. The sole weapon he carried was a bowie knife on his belt.”I’m coming with you,” he told the three crew members.

Airborne, they spotted the soldiers in a tight circle. A few hundred enemy troops surrounded them in the jungle, some within 25 yards of the Americans’ position. The chopper dropped low, ran into withering fire and quickly retreated. Spotting a small clearing 75 yards away, Benavidez told the pilot, “Over there, over there.”

The helicopter reached the clearing and hovered 10 feet off the ground. Benavidez made the sign of the cross, jumped out carrying a medic bag and began running the 75 yards towards the trapped men. Almost immediately, Benavidez was hit by an AK-47 slug in his right leg. He stumbled and fell, but got back up convincing himself that he’d only snagged a thorn bush and kept running to the brush pile where Wright’s men lay. An exploding hand grenade knocked him down and ripped his face with shrapnel. He shouted prayers, got up again and staggered to the men.

Four of the soldiers were dead, the other eight wounded and pinned down in two groups. Benavidez bound their wounds, injected morphine and, ignoring NVA bullets and grenades, passed around ammunition that he had taken from several bodies and armed himself with an AK. Then Benavidez directed air strikes and called for the Huey helicopter to a landing near one group. While calling in support he was shot again in the right thigh, his second gunshot wound. He dragged the dead and wounded aboard. The chopper lifted a few feet off the ground and moved toward the second group, with Benavidez running beneath it, firing a rifle he had picked up. He spotted the body of the team leader Sergeant First Class Wright. Ordering the other soldiers to crawl toward the chopper, he retrieved a pouch dangling from the dead man’s neck; in the pouch were classified papers with radio codes and call signs. As he shoved the papers into his shirt, a bullet struck his stomach and a grenade shattered his back. The helicopter, barely off the ground, suddenly crashed, its pilot shot dead.

Coughing blood, Benavidez made his way to the Huey and pulled the wounded from the wreckage, forming a small perimeter. As he passed out ammunition taken from the dead, the air support he had earlier radioed for arrived. Jets and helicopter gunships strafed threatening enemy soldiers while Benavidez tended the wounded. “Are you hurt bad, Sarge?” one soldier asked. “Hell, no,” said Benavidez, about to collapse from blood loss. “I’ve been hit so many times I don’t give a damn no more.”

While mortar shells burst everywhere, Benavidez called in Phantoms “danger close”. Enemy fire raked the perimeter. Several of the wounded were hit again, including Benavidez. By this time he had blood streaming down his face, blinding him. Still he called in air strikes, adjusting their targets by sound. Several times, pilots thought he was dead, but then his voice would come back on the radio, calling for closer strikes. Throughout the fighting, Benavidez, a devout Catholic, made the sign of the cross so many times, his arms were “were going like an airplane prop”. But he never gave into fear.

Finally, a helicopter landed. “Pray and move out,” Benavidez told the men as he helped each one aboard. As he carried a seriously wounded Frenchie Mousseau over his shoulder a fallen NVA soldier stood up, swung his rifle and clubbed Benavidez in the head. Benavidez fell, rolled over and got up just as the soldier lunged forward with his bayonet. Benavidez grabbed it, slashing his right hand, and pulled his attacker toward him. With his left hand, he drew his own bowie knife and stabbed the NVA but not before the bayonet poked completely through his left forearm. As Benavidez dragged Mousseau to the chopper, he saw two more NVA materialize out of the jungle. He snatched a fallen AK-47 rifle and shot both. Benavidez made one more trip to the clearing and came back with a Vietnamese interpreter. Only then did the sergeant let the others pull him aboard the helicopter.

Blood dripped from the door as the chopper lumbered into the air. Benavidez was holding in his intestines with his hand. Bleeding almost into unconsciousness, Benavidez lay against the badly wounded Mousseau and held his hand. Just before they landed at the Medevac hospital, “I felt his fingers dig into my palm,” Benavidez recalled, “his arm twitching and jumping as if electric current was pouring through his body into mine” At Loc Ninh, Benavidez was so immobile they placed him with the dead. Even after he spit in the doctor’s face and was taken from the body bag, Benavidez was considered a goner.

Benavidez spent almost a year in hospitals to recover from his injuries. He had seven major gunshot wounds, twenty-eight shrapnel holes and both arms had been slashed by a bayonet. Benavidez had shrapnel in his head, scalp, shoulder, buttocks, feet, and legs. His right lung was destroyed. He had injuries to his mouth and back of his head from being clubbed with a rifle butt. One of the AK-47 bullets had entered his back exiting just beneath his heart. He had won the battle and lived. When told his one man battle was awesome and extraordinary, Benavidez replied: “No, that’s duty.”

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