“Women in uniform ferried planes, towed targets, fixed and maintained aircraft, manned control towers, trained men to fly, reported on weather conditions, and much more.”

By Lena Andrews

GENERAL Henry ‘Hap’ Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, is rightly remembered as one of America’s great pioneering military leaders of the 20th century. Not only did he oversee the dramatic growth of the USAAF during the war—alongside the adoption and implementation of new air power doctrine—but he was also an essential player in making the operational case that the air forces should be granted independence from the Army.

But even with his deserved reputation as one the most visionary American military commanders of his generation, Arnold was not infallible—and, in 1941, he was suffering from an uncharacteristic lack of vision.

In that year, Arnold was staring down a mammoth undertaking. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, President Roosevelt had personally tasked Arnold to create a force that would meet and exceed the capabilities of the more advanced German Luftwaffe. To that end, the White House had authorized an extraordinary expansion of resources to build a fleet of planes and train a stable of pilots, culminating in FDR’s proclamation in 1940 that the United States would soon produce 50,000 planes a year. It was an unprecedented undertaking.

This unparalleled growth both delighted and overwhelmed USAAF leadership. It was one thing to say that the U.S. would exponentially increase its production of aircraft, but it was the USAAF that would be responsible for making this promise a reality. But the Army Air Forces met the moment: by 1941, the U.S. had already outpaced German plane production by over 8,000 airframes and that number would only grow as the war went on.

As Arnold oversaw the exponential increase in this fleet, he also kept a close eye on the number of trained pilots available to fly the aircraft now coming off the manufacturing lines. Before Pearl Harbor, his careful accounting of pilots and planes left him feeling confident that he would have enough men to employ them in combat around the world.  

Given his assured view of the USAAF’s ability to meet its growing personnel requirements, it was little surprise when Arnold responded to the first suggestions of using women pilots with derision.

But Arnold’s confidence in the personnel picture was not the only reason for his skepticism of women pilots. Truth be told, Arnold also harbored considerable doubts about the capabilities of the thousands of female pilots available to fly aircraft. “I didn’t know…whether a slip of a young girl could fight the controls of a B-17 in the heavy weather they would encounter in operational flying,” he would later admit, according to historian Molly Merryman. Women, in his view, would be both unnecessary and unqualified. Based on this logic, Arnold confidently declared in August 1941 that “the use of women pilots serves no military purpose.”

By his own admission, however, Arnold would soon discover that his views on the subject were deeply and unequivocally wrong.

Women in the Air

As early as 1942, the exploding demands on the USAAF had overwhelmed the resources of the organization. In that year alone, the United States produced close to 50,000 planes, swamping USAAF with aircraft—and leaving the air forces with barely enough men to fly them.

In areas like Air Transport Command (ATC), responsible for airlifting equipment and personnel into the field and ferrying military aircraft from manufacturing plants to bases around the country, the pilot shortages were especially acute. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, ATC had hired over 3,500 civilian pilots to fill the growing gap, but they still struggled to keep up; only a year later, ATC reported needing more pilots than even existed in the Army Air Forces.

This left Arnold considerably less confident in his personnel situation. Not only did he need more pilots, but he also needed a flock of support staff ranging from mechanics to stenographers to meet the demands of its rapidly growing fleet. The main bottleneck suddenly facing the USAAF was not technological or doctrinal—it was personnel.

Fortunately for Arnold and the USAAF more broadly, however, there were two women who were watching the dramatic growth of the Army Air Forces very closely, and quietly calculating how women pilots could help the air forces keep up with the ballooning demands of the battlefield: Jacqueline Cochran and Nancy Love.

Both Cochran and Love were well-known qualities in the aviation world, having proven themselves to be exceptional pilots in the elite community of competitive fliers in the 1930s. Moreover, both women had further made a name for themselves with their business acumen —Love led a well-known aviation company with her husband, and Cochran was the head of a major cosmetics company. Together, their flying and business prowess made them two of the most well-respected and influential aviation enthusiasts in the country.

As the war spread to farther-flung corners of the globe, both Cochran and Love were aware that airpower was only growing in importance. They watched closely as the Army, recognizing airpower’s importance in Europe and the Pacific, elevated the air corps to a semi-autonomous organization within its ranks. Both women had also heard the pleas from politicians and military commanders for increased aviation resources, including Roosevelt’s public demands for more planes. They had watched male pilots sign up to serve, noting that they often received a direct assignment to the Army Air Forces, their flying skills at a premium. They’d seen many of the remaining men enroll as instructors and civilian ferrying pilots, contracted with the Army to move the surge of planes from manufacturing facilities to bases and, eventually, to the field. They had even heard rumors about the Army developing plans to integrate women into their ranks and had seen drafts of the early legislation moving through Congress. And they both wondered, to themselves and to their high-placed friends, could they find a way for women to fly too?

As a successful businesswoman and minor flying celebrity—who also happened to be married to one of the richest men in the country—Cochran used her connections in the Roosevelt administration to secure an audience with Arnold. Over the course of several months, she repeatedly entreated him to consider integrating women into the USAAF ranks. Each time, Arnold rebuffed her requests to begin setting up a women’s flying corps, instead insisting on his misplaced belief that manpower and training rates would be sufficient to meet the military’s needs.

As Cochran worked the upper echelons of the American flying establishment, Love insinuated her way into the ATC. Within weeks of her introduction to the command’s senior leaders, Love had convinced ATC commander Brigadier General Harold George that women pilots could help ease the burden of transporting aircraft around the country, freeing up men for other duties. Overwhelmed by the sudden swell of aircraft and the limited number of pilots qualified to move them around the country, George jumped at the idea.

By the end of 1942, Cochran and Love’s early lobbying with USAAF leaders had proved incredibly prescient, as Arnold and others began to acknowledge that the personnel shortfalls they faced were outpacing the traditional remedies available to them. The general and his senior advisors concluded, finally, that the USAAF would need women pilots.  

Fortunately, Cochran and Love’s informal discussions about establishing a group of women pilots had already been progressing steadily on parallel tracks for several months. By the fall of 1942, both of their efforts paid off, when two programs were approved that integrated women into the USAAF.

The first, the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS), was directed by Love, and responsible for helping ATC move aircraft around the country, while the second program, the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD), headed by Cochran took on a wider array of stateside flying duties, including tow target flying and other training missions.

Soon after, the programs were combined under Cochran into the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) and deployed over one thousand women as pilots. By the end of the war, WASP pilots had accumulated over 60 million miles in the air for the USAAF, on some of the most advanced Army Air Force bomber and combat aircraft.

Women on the Ground

By 1943, however, women were not just flying planes for the USAAF, they were also involved in almost every element of the critical work done on the ground to keep those planes in the air.

To meet the demand for capable ground crews and support units, Arnold looked to the newly formed Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), where women had already signed up for military service in droves. Seeing the WAACs’ exceptional skill in combat support tasks, the USAAF began siphoning off thousands of WAACs and directing them to airfields around the country.

The enthusiasm for “Air WAACs,” as they were sometimes called, was instantly obvious. According to one official USAAF memo stored in the National Archives,  the commanding officer Houlton Air Force Base in Maine requested 450 WAACs to serve as “clerks, typists, telephone operators, office machine operators, and mess attendants,” attributing the high demand to the “extreme difficulty in obtaining qualified civilian personnel” in its remote location.

At Camp Pinedale, a Signal Corps training school, the immediate need was equally apparent, as explained in another memo: “Fourth Air Force cannot furnish trained clerical enlisted personnel at this time, and the need for such personnel at Camp Pinedale is urgent.”

USAAF requests ballooned. By June 1943, the USAAF reported it was planning to request over 77,000 women and, by January 1944, expected that number to grow to over 185,000.

“The Army Air Forces would have to be assigned almost every WAAC recruited between now and the end of May, 1943,” stated another USAAF memo, adding, “WAAC recruiting will need to be tremendously accelerated if the Army Air Forces are to receive 185,000 WAAC personnel during the year 1943 with the proper basic and specialized training.”

Contrary to Arnold’s prediction two years earlier, women were needed by the USAAF—urgently and in great numbers.

Recognition

In the end, thousands of American women would help the USAAF meet its wartime needs, both in the WASP and in the WAAC (later renamed the Women’s Army Corps) in a wide array of support roles that underwrote Allied strategy. Women in uniform ferried planes, towed targets, fixed and maintained aircraft, manned control towers, trained men to fly, reported on weather conditions, and much more. Directly contradicting Arnold’s initial assessment that women could serve no military purpose for the USAAF, women in uniform served as part of the backbone of USAAF operations.

To his credit, Arnold’s failure to fully realize that women could serve as a stopgap in the crushing manpower challenges that bore down on the US military was not unusual in the early days of the war. Most senior American commanders—including some of the finest military leaders in recent memory, like General George Marshall, General Dwight Eisenhower, and Admiral Ernest King—were equally skeptical of women’s ability to meaningfully contribute to effectively solving the personnel crisis they faced in the early part of the war.

Like Arnold, they, too, eventually saw the wisdom of integrating women into the armed forces. In each case, senior military leaders were helped along by the vision and insistence of a handful of American women, who saw the utility of women’s military service long before the men in charge did. While Cochran and Love pushed Arnold, Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers and Oveta Culp Hobby nudged Marshall, and Virginia Gildersleeve and Margaret Chung prodded the Department of the Navy into action. These women, and many others, refused to concede that American women should be kept on the sidelines during the most consequential American military conflict of the 20th century, and, in doing so, helped our military leaders maintain their reputations for innovation, vision, and effectiveness.

Arnold and his colleagues were grateful for the help. “[Women] have ably and loyally supplemented our activities during a time when a pilot shortage would have impaired the Air Forces’ performance of its mission,” Arnold said in 1944, adding in a personal note to Jackie Cochran: “I wish to express my appreciation to you for your resourceful, imaginative, and tireless work.”

Like Arnold, we all owe a great debt to the visionary women who helped him see his way out a crisis—and we can begin paying that debt by knowing their stories.

Lena Andrews is the author of Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II—from which portions of this essay are adapted—and a military analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, she received her Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has spent more than a decade in foreign policy, having previously worked at the RAND Corporation and United States Institute of Peace.