The Women with Silver Wings -The Inspiring True Story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II - Katherine Sharp Landdeck

Prologue

In the quiet early morning of December 7, 1941, Cornelia Fort was teaching takeoffs and landings. Cornelia was a flight instructor at the civilian John Rodgers Field next to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. She and her regular Sunday morning student, a defense worker named Ernest Suomala, liked to fly the little two-seater plane at dawn, when the air was calm and the beauty of Oahu revealed itself below them. Cornelia was twenty-two years old and had been flying for nearly two years. A former debutante from Nashville, Tennessee, she had recently escaped from polite society to follow her dream of flying professionally, moving to Hawaii, where she had been living for the past few months.

That morning, when Cornelia first noticed another aircraft flying in her direction, she wasn’t immediately worried. Sundays were a busy day for pilots, as they flew students and sightseers alike, and it was not uncommon to see other airplanes nearby. Then she realized the plane was making straight for them, and fast. Cornelia acted quickly, jerking the controls away from Ernest and jamming the throttle open, willing their own plane upward. As she later remembered, their little blue and yellow Interstate Cadet narrowly missed colliding with the other plane, which “passed so close under us that our celluloid windows rattled violently.” Cornelia looked down to see whose airplane had come so close to hitting them. She was stunned to see the red circles of the Japanese flag painted on the tops of the wings.

Then she looked back at the harbor. Thick black smoke was billowing below, a sight that sent shivers down Cornelia’s spine. When she looked up again, she could see dozens of planes in formation ahead, their silver fuselages glinting in the morning sun. The skies over Pearl Harbor were now thick with enemy aircraft. “Something detached itself from an airplane and came glistening down,” Cornelia later wrote. “My eyes followed it down, and even with the knowledge pounding in my mind, my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor.”

Quickly recognizing they were in danger, Cornelia hurried to land the tiny plane as the shadow of the Japanese Zero went over and bullets splattered off the ground all around them. She and her student leapt out of their cockpit and ran to the hangar as enemy planes dove toward them, strafing the airfield with bullets. They spent the rest of the morning huddled in the hangar, watching helplessly and anxiously counting as other planes from the airfield came in to land. “Two never came back,” Cornelia remembered. “They were washed ashore weeks later on the windward side of the island, bullet-riddled. Not a pretty way for the brave little yellow Cubs and their pilots to go down to death.” By midday the American fleet in the Pacific lay in ruins, and more than 2,400 Americans were dead.

The next day Cornelia’s friend Betty Guild came to see her at the airfield. Betty was a pilot, too, and had been home sleeping when the attack began. She’d woken to her brother’s screams: “It’s the real thing! It’s the real thing!” Betty dashed to the balcony as the sound of dozens of airplane engines bombarded her ears. From there she could see the dense clouds of black smoke obscuring the harbor. Betty’s boyfriend was a Navy officer who had slept in the guest room after getting her home from a late party the night before, and her father offered to drive him down to his ship, which was already burning. Betty wanted to go with them, but the two men snuck away while she ran upstairs to get her purse, not wanting her to be exposed to strafing Japanese planes overhead. Betty’s boyfriend survived that day, but many of their pilot friends did not.

At the airfield with Cornelia, Betty was still in a daze, her friend’s close call only adding to her sense of dismay. The two women went to look over Cornelia’s little blue and yellow plane, realizing that the bullets from the Japanese fighter had only just missed the gas tank or the plane would have certainly exploded.

After their experiences at Pearl Harbor, Betty and Cornelia were inspired to do whatever they could to help their nation in a time of war. The next year, when both women were invited to fly as civilians for the U.S. Army Air Forces, or AAF, they jumped at the chance. Cornelia Fort became part of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, a