3

HEROINES TOOK TO THE SKIES

Sweetwater, Texas, December 7, 1944. The day marked the anniversary of the infamous Japanese attack against the naval base at Pearl Harbor. On that occasion, Commanding General of the Air Force Henry H. Arnold was to deliver a memorable speech. A pioneer airman who had become a four-star general, Arnold addressed the last class of Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), class 44–10: “Frankly, I didn’t know in 1941 whether a slip of a young girl could fight the controls of a B17 in the heavy weather they would naturally encounter in operational flying. Those of us who had been flying for twenty or thirty years knew that flying an airplane was something that you do not learn overnight. But Miss Cochran said that carefully selected young women could be trained to fly our combat-type planes. So, it was only right that we take advantage of every skill that we, as a nation, possessed.”¹ Young American women made aviation history while striving to be accepted in a military framework. Many became pioneers in new fields of wartime service. Too many sacrificed their lives. Only much later did some of them become aware of the outstanding contribution they had made to their country and the world, as is perhaps best expressed by Jewish flight nurse Yetta Moskowitz: “The world should be made aware of what the flight nurses did. We started air evacuation medicine, which helped save thousands of lives.”²

When the war broke out, all branches of the armed forces launched publicity campaigns to encourage women to enlist to “free a man to fight.”³ This chapter explores the challenges, assignments, and achievements of Jewish women pilots among the WASP and of flight nurses. It sheds light on the difficulties encountered because of gender and sometimes religion, drawing on the testimonies of pilots Bernice Falk Haydu, Selma Kantor Cronan, and Elizabeth Haas Pfister. Unlike the flight nurses, whose itineraries are also examined in this chapter, women pilots were not sent overseas during the war, as they had to replace men in non-combat duties. Some nurses sent to the Pacific, however, were in flight for numerous hours and operated close to combat zones, which is why they had to carry a revolver.⁴ Ironically, male combat medics who dodged bullets on the battlefield carried first-aid kits but not weapons. In every unit where Jewish women were accepted, in either the European or Pacific theater of the war, they had to be prepared to confront anti-Jewish attitudes.

JEWISH WOMEN PILOTS: A DOUBLE CHALLENGE

Bernice Falk Haydu, a woman pilot who fought relentlessly and successfully for congressional recognition of the WASP as military personnel, admitted that she was afraid to encounter anti-Jewish prejudice while training as a pilot. This is how she accounted for this pervasive feeling: “I graduated high school in 1938. The job market was extremely difficult. . . . It was not unusual to read, ‘Jews need not apply.’ Usually, when you applied for a job in those days you were asked your religion. In my first job they did not ask but as I was working there I could hear remarks against the Jews. I was only 17 and frankly I did not know how to handle the situation so I would just keep quiet.”⁵

By keeping quiet and working hard, the strong-headed woman worked her way to the top, to the “always blue skies” she dreamed of.⁶ The letters Bernice Falk wrote to her mother in 1944 and 1945 are a treasure trove. They enable us to understand the exceptional character of war experiences and the challenges faced by a young Jewish woman. On December 15, 1920, Bernice Falk was, in her own words, “born into this industrious family where the women were emancipated and enjoyed the freedom to work and help earn money for their families. They were independent and wanted to succeed. They were not constrained by the Victorian idea that women shouldn’t work outside the home or that some occupations were available only to men.”⁷ Della Blum, her mother, was a role model for the future pilot. She exemplified resourcefulness by opening an employment agency in Montclair, New Jersey, and renting out rooms in the large family house. Bernice knew she would not be able to attend college because of the Depression. There would only be enough money for her brother. One of her high school teachers told her parents that given her school results, she could study accountancy in college. Though very disappointed not to be able to study, she finally decided not to indulge in self-pity. She took courses to become a secretary, “one of the few jobs open to women,” she emphasized. In the competitive job market of the Depression, she managed to get jobs as a secretary in two real estate offices. The frustration of not being able to benefit from a higher education prompted her to look for night school courses.⁸

To her surprise, Bernice found courses in aviation. By then, her brother had enlisted in the Army Air Forces, serving in France as a meteorologist during the Allied landings. In 1943, Bernice Falk enrolled in an aviation course at the Newark College of Engineering. Her instructor at the college ran a flight school at Martins Creek, Pennsylvania, some seventy miles away from where she lived in New Jersey. This distance did not alter her zest for flying airplanes, even if she could only find the time to do so on weekends. On Friday nights, she would take a Greyhound bus to Belvedere, where her instructor would pick her and other students up and bring them to Martins Creek. The instructor rented a house on the Delaware River, not far from Martins Creek airport, and Bernice Falk would stay overnight with the other students, mostly young women but also young men. Charlie Grieder, her instructor, only had four planes, but it was in his school that she made her first solo flight on August 1, 1943. It was a milestone for her. Like her brother Lloyd, Bernice Falk was eager to help in the war effort. Together with six other girls who had taken lessons at Martins Creek, she applied for the experimental WASP program and was accepted. One of the requirements was thirty-five hours of flying time. The seven students all qualified to join the WASP class of 44–7. But nothing was easily attained:

After applying we were interviewed by Mrs. Ethel Sheehy, Jacqueline Cochran’s representative. If accepted we had to take and pass the Army Air Force physical for pilots, supply character references and get release forms from our current employers if we had a defense related job. Mine was defense related.

Once approved and assigned a class we traveled to Sweetwater, Texas, the location of the training school, at our own expense. If we failed any part of the seven-month training program we had to return home, again at our own expense.⁹

Bernice passed the physical examination as well as the other tests.

Her letters from February 1944, her first weeks of army life, depict her impressions of the army and the new environment. As a girl born and raised in Montclair, New Jersey, Bernice was awed when she reached the small Texan cowboy town, where men “wear large hats and talk funny,” she pointed out in an interview in 2000.¹⁰ She discovered vast expanses of land she had never seen in New Jersey: “So much sky could be seen all at once.”¹¹

One letter was intended to reassure her mother about the food she got for meals. Bernice Falk did not follow any Jewish dietary laws and was at first satisfied with the meat they were served. Before ending her letter of February 14, 1944, she added: “I hear we are going to be psychoanalyzed this afternoon.”¹² Indeed, being a pilot implied self-control and emotional balance—and this was only the beginning of a training program basically identical to that of male cadets. Marching in a military fashion was one of the drills in this new landscape where girls were transformed into trainees, becoming military material. Unlike the men, they had to wear turbans on their heads to hide their long hair. Indeed, Major Robert Urban, the air force commanding officer at the base, demanded that they cover their heads with what were called “Urban’s turbans.” The inclusion of female cadets was so new that the rules were pragmatic.

The ample male coveralls or “Zoot suits” worn in the cockpit were another aspect of physical metamorphosis. Tailored for male cadets, such suits were popular in the 1940s: “full-legged, tight-cuffed trousers and a long coat with white lapels and heavily padded wide shoulders.”¹³ It was no use complaining about their overlarge features because in the military, you wear what is issued. Bernice Falk Haydu added that most of the tall girls—height was a requirement—found a way to tuck the coveralls in with a large belt to adapt them to their size. Female cadets would have worn anything if it allowed them to fly. One piece of evidence of this dedication is a song entitled “Zoot Suits and Parachutes,” sung by the girls to familiar tunes as they marched, a large part of ground training together with daily physical training. One of the lines goes: “If you have a daughter, teach her how to fly.”¹⁴

Such details show to what extent the identity of a woman pilot was in the making. All the WASP dreamed of flying, and their emotions and expectations depended on the achievement of a dream of freedom, empowerment, and service to their country. In a letter dated March 9, 1944, Bernice Falk addressed her mother’s fear about antisemitism on the base.

Don’t worry about getting on with the girls or liking them. Sure, they are swell, but in a group of over a hundred, you are bound to have one or two who rub you the wrong way. Two of them just happen to be in my bay but there is no outward show of dislike. It is merely that for eating and going out with friends I choose others. Please don’t take it seriously. I wrote most of it to give an idea of the partiality of Texans to Texans.

As for antisemitism (which is what I presume you were hinting at), there seems to be very little. I have not seen any and many of the girls already know my religion. I want them to know. Besides the kids from Martin Creeks are swell and I am sure would stick up for me if trouble arose—and I don’t think this would ever happen. Don’t worry!¹⁵

It is interesting to see how Bernice differentiated between a “dislike” other girls may have nourished for her and antisemitism, which would have led the “kids” (her fellow trainees) of Martin Creeks to defend or “stick up for” her in case of a conflict and hostility. In a postscript to her letter, Bernice Falk added that in her bay of six, “we practiced six different religions and all got along well. Baptist, Christian Science, Jewish, Mormon, Protestant, Seventh Day Adventist. It can be done.”¹⁶ Bays were rooms within the barracks that accommodated eight female cadets at Avenger Field. Both inside and outside the bays, cadets were subject to military discipline. In an interview, Falk Haydu mentioned that the barracks were “very primitive”: “We slept in cots and had lockers.” During the Saturday morning inspection, someone wearing white gloves would come to check if there was any dust in the lockers. If dust was found on top of the lockers and windowsills, cadets could get a demerit; if a female cadet had too many demerits, she could be washed out. But this would more commonly happen when a female cadet did not pass a flight test. Military discipline at Avenger Field implied half a day spent marching, while physical training took place every day. The other half of the day was devoted to flight training.

The next phase of the seven months of training required the use of a device called a Link trainer (now called a flight simulator). Without necessitating leaving the ground, an imitation airplane with illuminated instruments and controls allowed practice of instrument flying, with the pilot in a “black box” simulating the cockpit. In a letter dated April 30, 1944, Bernice detailed to her mother her first impressions and the novel requirements of the new phase of training: “As soon as we finish in the AT-6 we are supposed to go into instrument flying and Link is an aid to that. It is enough to drive you daffy trying to watch all the gadgets at once. We started meteorology in ground school and are still taking navigation and engine maintenance.”¹⁷ It was a “big jump” for Bernice and the female cadets. The transition from a PT-17 with 220 horsepower to a 650-horsepower AT-6 with sophisticated gadgets was difficult, as she explained to her supportive mother: “The cockpit procedure is very long and difficult. We use radios in this ship. Every time we take off or land we have to call the tower for permission.”¹⁸ Elaborating on the fact that she and the young women experiencing this harsh transition were “guinea-pigs,” Falk Haydu emphasized the idea behind the challenge: “if women can do it, then men can do it too.”¹⁹ A postscript added to her letter is explicit: “The class of 44–4 (three classes ahead of us) was the first class of trainees to go directly into the AT-6 advanced trainer from PT-17 primary trainer. Jacqueline Cochran visited Sweetwater to explain that this was the first time the Air Force was taking this step and if it proved successful the male cadets would be trained in this manner.”²⁰

A photograph in Falk Haydu’s book captures her looking very focused in what seems to be a serious conversation with her AT-6 instructor. Bernice started flying an AT-6 aircraft with her instructor on April 27 and was able to fly solo after ten and a half hours with him. She wrote to her mother on May 11, 1944.

Dearest Mom,

With the help of prayers from myself and my five bay mates two nights in a row I managed to at last solo the AT-6 today. Golly, Mom, it sure is hard work to fly this plane. I am going to have to work very hard to get through this phase but if hard work will do, you can be assured I will make it, Mom. This is a picture of the ship. I wish I could take a snapshot of me next to it but we are not allowed to do so.²¹

All this while, she and the other WASP worried about whether or not they would finally be formally militarized after the demanding experimental program, as General H. Arnold hoped.

Thirty-eight young women pilots sacrificed their lives in the service of their country, including Betty Stine in her AT-6. The young woman had to bail out of her aircraft, and her parachute pushed her violently against a cliff in Tucson, causing a fatal head injury.²² For her well-researched book, Jean Hascall Cole, who was in the same class as Betty Stine, interviewed other WASP of the class (44-W-2) in an effort to understand why Stine’s plane failed her. A report mentioned the possibility of sabotaged aircraft. Some mechanics were former cadets who had failed their flying test. Resentment toward women pilots was not unusual. At times, base personnel were lax, and a number of parts could be found loose in a plane. Other instances of sabotage involved repatriated prisoners of war (POWs) from Germany “tested” by the WASP on the base because of the shortage of pilots.

At one time some of the men who had been prisoners of war in Germany came back. We would take them up and check them out because they hadn’t flown for a long time. We rode in the front seat and they rode in the back seat to get the feel of it again. Some of them had been in prison for a long time and they were scary to fly with. They had been instructed by men and they didn’t like being checked out by a woman who was going to decide whether or not they could fly. Sometimes they would swear at us.²³

Another WASP made a relevant comment after Stine’s death: “Those AT-6s—when I think they sent us out on those long flights, over mountains with no mountain experience, and very little AT-6 cross-country time, it makes me mad. Also, we didn’t have what the FAA requires now—a forty-five-minute gas reserve. I mis-figured my course correction and almost ran out of gas, so there was only a short time of extra flying. There was very little room for error.”²⁴ Commenting on the beautiful AT-6s and their dangers, Falk Haydu made it clear that a number of male pilots had voiced complaints about these aircrafts that the WASP were then entitled to fly. In 2000, her interviewer asked why she felt that women pilots were guinea pigs. With a sad smile, she simply answered: “We were expendable.”²⁵

A letter to her mother dated April 30, 1944, clearly expresses the worries of the WASP at a time when their resilience was most needed.

Dear Mom,

We don’t know from one day to the next whether we will be kicked out entirely. I fear the latter. Perhaps a letter from you and some of our friends like Sam, Amelia and those guys to our congressman urging him to vote the WASP into the Army Air Force would help. You might say that men are needed in other branches of service, such as the Infantry where women are absolutely useless so why not let the men go into the Infantry and permit the women to do a job that already has been proven they can do and can do well.²⁶

Like the other WASP, Bernice Falk learned how to plan cross-country flights by preparing charts and calculations of time, speed, distance, and fuel consumption, checking how wind could affect velocity and cloud coverage could impact visibility with the weather briefer before a flight. On July 31, 1944, she wrote her mother that she would have to undergo pressure chamber tests (up to twenty-eight thousand feet) to evaluate reactions to high altitude.²⁷ She also experienced two-hour cross-country night trips on Monday and Tuesday nights. After graduation (September 8, 1944), Bernice’s first assignment was to Pecos Air Force Base in Pecos, Texas. Bernice explicitly detailed this assignment in a letter dated September 24, somewhat concealing the amount of courage or guts it called for.

The job the WASP are doing here is test hopping. When an airplane has been repaired, it must be tested. The airplanes are called UC-78, or AT-17s (the same plane). . . . Saturday I went up as copilot with another WASP. You have to fly fifty hours as copilot before you can be checked out as first pilot. . . . Major Rizzo, our immediate superior is a swell guy. He is going to do all he can to get us qualified dual instruction of some sort. He said he would rather have ten WASP rather than a bunch of lieutenants because the WASP are conscientious, work hard, and try to do all they can instead of doing as little as possible.²⁸

But in a letter to her mother dated October 5, 1944, Bernice recounted the shock she received: the WASP were to be disbanded on December 20. It was a blow, even if they had come to expect it. But instead of indulging in self-pity, she decided to focus on increasing her flying time to get another flying assignment.²⁹

A milestone in Bernice’s life was the obtention of the coveted wings and official diploma from the United States Army Air Force with the citation “Bernice Sarah Falk has satisfactorily completed the course of instruction prescribed for women pilots.” The noting of the date together with the words “our Lord” reminds us of the religious ethos prevalent in the United States: “Sweetwater, Texas, the eighth day of September in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and forty-four.” In her interview for the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the former engineering test pilot and “utility pilot” expanded on the different design of the wings for male and female pilots. She explained that there was a shield on the men’s wings, whereas the women’s wings had a lozenge representing a diamond. She added humorously that “it is not because diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but because diamonds are the Greek symbol of womanhood.”³⁰ It is interesting to note that although women pilots did everything the male cadets did, they were reminded of their womanhood and encouraged to wear lipstick. Was it to make them better match gender stereotypes? Or was it because the two prominent pilots who took the initiative to form the WASP, Nancy Love and Jacqueline Cochran, were elegant, feminine, attractive women pilots, as were most of the tall, young WASP? They still faced gender prejudice while on the ground, in restaurants for instance. In several interviews, Falk Haydu deplored that some did not accept women pilots in slacks—their working clothes—because women were expected to wear a skirt or a dress.

Asked why the WASP program ended abruptly and women pilots had to wait until 1977 to be recognized as military personnel with all due honors, Falk Haydu replied: “They needed more men in the infantry, so the male pilots didn’t want that, they banded together and got adverse publicity against ‘the million dollar glamour girls.’”³¹ Attaining recognition as veterans did not come easily. This recognition came from the resilience of the WASP in the continued struggle to achieve equal status with men and obtain veterans’ benefits, a long battle in which Falk Haydu actively took part. On May 26, 1977, the Stars and Stripes wittingly summed up the issue at stake: “How ‘military’ is military? When is a war time military pilot, Not a wartime military pilot? When she is a woman.”³²

Selma Kantor Cronan’s itinerary as a WASP has been outlined in the two previous chapters. However, it is worthwhile to mention a sentence that reveals her passion for flying: “From the time my mother took me on a two dollar airplane ride in Asbury Park, New Jersey in the 1920s, I fell in love with flying and I knew I was going to be a pilot someday.”³³ Unlike Bernice Falk, Cronan was already a certified pilot in 1943 and had a supportive husband when she enlisted “to do the job,” eager to fight the Nazis. Her enlistment as a pilot followed Jacqueline Cochran’s invitation in 1943 to join the WASP. It was quite an honor to be spotted by the first female aviator to fly for the United States Air Force. However, she confessed having felt excluded from activities while based at Avenger Field on account of being Jewish, as detailed in the previous chapter. Notwithstanding, Cronan achieved recognition as a pioneering American woman pilot. A few words in her interview by the Museum of Jewish Heritage reveal that she was sent to France immediately after the end of the war in Europe to locate French women pilots who had been part of the underground in France. It is inspiring to know she met with celebrated French aviator Maryse Bastié, and both talked about their war experiences. Bastié, a pioneer woman pilot who obtained her license in 1925, shared with her American counterpart personal stories “too long to retell” in her interview with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.³⁴

Selma Cronan, who competed in several all-women transcontinental air races, participated in a meeting with Russian women pilots in 1990.³⁵ During that conference, she seized the opportunity to visit Kiev, which was the capital of Soviet Ukraine when the German forces invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. One hundred sixty thousand Jews had lived in Kiev before a large number of Jewish men, women, and children were systematically murdered by Einsatzgruppen detachments. Shootings in Odessa claimed more than fifty thousand victims. Selma Kantor Cronan placed a wreath at the memorial at Babi Yar in remembrance of the 33,771 Jews executed there in two days. Identifying more with the Jewish people and culture than with Jewish religious practice, she admitted: “This experience strengthened my identity as a Jew as nothing had before.”³⁶

Some thirty former WASP encountered the “Night Witches,” many of whom flew bombers on night raids against the enemy. Pilot Jean Hascall Cole cites another Jewish pilot, Elizabeth Haas Pfister, as having met the intrepid Russian World War II women pilots who downed Nazi planes in the dark of the night.³⁷ These encounters emphasize the identity of American women pilots as one having much in common with women pilots of other Allied nations.

In a March 2006 interview published by Airport Journals, an online magazine that serves the general aviation community, Elizabeth Haas Pfister, reflected on her life path. She was born in July 1921 to a well-to-do family in Great Neck, Long Island. Her mother, Merle Simon Haas, was a housewife, while her father, Robert Haas, was a vice president of Random House Publishing Company in New York City. She was the middle child between her brother, Robert “Bob” Jr., whom she admired and imitated, and her sister, Priscilla. She developed a love of flying after a first ride that cost her five dollars on “an old Waco biplane with an open cockpit.”³⁸ Betty, who studied marine biology at Bennington College in Vermont in 1940, made a deal with her father: if she studied hard and kept her grades up, he would pay for her flying lessons. Motivated by her handsome brother, who attended Yale University and enlisted as a pilot in the navy, she obtained her private license at age twenty: “He was a year older than I was. Really, he was one of the reasons I started flying. I wanted to try everything he did.”³⁹ In the context of the severe shortage of both pilots and airplanes, Betty Haas, like all women pilots who had recorded between 170 and 180 hours of flight time with the Civil Aviation Authority, was contacted by telegram by noted pilot Jacqueline Cochran. Betty’s immediate response was to accept. “It was a wonderful program; I was so lucky. I was at the right age, at the right place and at the right time,” she recalled, adding that she was soon assigned to join class 43-W-4. She “was in the first WASP class held at Sweetwater.” This is probably why there were still male cadets on the base whom they did not have time to meet or “say hello [to] because we were so busy with our own program.”⁴⁰ While Betty Haas was studying and flying, her gifted twenty-one-year-old brother was a naval aviator aboard a baby flattop carrier. One day, she received the news that he had died in a maneuver off the coast of North Africa when the ship’s catapult had failed.⁴¹ “It was a very traumatic experience for me,” she could only say. The following day, she flew home to support her parents. With such a loss, Betty’s enlistment as a WASP became questionable. Her flight assignments involved much danger. Knowing that their daughter would be ferrying planes from one coast to the other and testing old repaired planes that had been damaged in their missions was terrifying for her parents. But her brother’s tragedy only made Betty more determined to accomplish the missions he could no longer undertake. She identified with him so much that she almost lived through him. Respecting their daughter’s will, the family eventually decided that Betty could finish her training. After graduating in September 1943, Betty took on flying duties that included ferrying all types of planes across the country.

In October 1944, she and other WASP were transferred to Williams Field in Mesa, Arizona, where she was to serve as a test pilot along with performing other duties: “The cadets would crack up a plane quite often. Every time they did, a WASP always test-flew it first, before the male cadets. We were considered expendable.”⁴² The distrust and negative attitudes some male pilots harbored against the WASP are demonstrated in interviews that pilot Jean Hascall Cole gathered for her book. Confirming this stance, Pfister added in her interview for Airport Journals that it was “a miracle” if everything went well with the planes they checked. She went so far as to state that some mechanics would sabotage aircraft so as to frighten the WASP out of service for their country.⁴³ In her research drawing on interviews with the members of her class 44-W-2, former WASP and author Hascall Cole also found that although the stories of sabotage seemed unlikely at first, three women pilots were convinced that damage to their aircraft was deliberate. Cole added that many of the WASP “had some frightening and difficult emergencies.”⁴⁴ Pfister noted that sabotage was not done on every base to which she was dispatched; however, there were recurring cases in which “they were putting sugar in the tanks, which would plug the engine up very nicely”—it “was enough to scare the heck out of you.”⁴⁵

Given the hurdles these young women pilots encountered on the road to gaining their peers’ acceptance, one might expect a general feminine solidarity based on the prevailing identity of WASP, acquired through so much effort and pain. Yet the bonds created by the new shared identity depended on military facilities. In Williams Field, Mesa, Elizabeth Haas Pfister and other young WASP found that they were not made to feel unwelcome only by male pilots. She was surprised to find that the other females on the base also received them coldly. Trying to understand this unfriendly attitude, Pfister offered a plausible explanation: “Probably because they had to share their barracks with us.”⁴⁶

When the war program ended on December 20, 1944, Pfister shared with other WASP the feeling that “she had done what she had to do” to serve her country. Like most of the women pilots in the ferrying division who had specialized in this demanding type of flying for a period of eighteen months, she had acquired great efficiency. Thanks to her war experiences, she had accumulated some eight hundred hours of flight. But after the WASP disbanded, she found herself with no flying job, although she wrote to every aviation company. Some of them bluntly refused the services of women pilots while others were less direct when formulating a negative response. She had to accept a few odd jobs, including a position as pilot of nonscheduled cargo planes of livestock bound for South Africa and as a flight attendant for Pan American Airways between 1948 and 1952. She married Arthur Pfister, a veteran also of Jewish origin, and they settled in Aspen, Colorado. Both left a mark on the social and physical landscape of Aspen. The deep trauma of the accidental death of Betty Haas Pfister’s admired pilot brother during World War II triggered in her a lifelong concern with safety. A rated glider pilot, her achievements were numerous and included founding the Pitkin County Air Rescue Group in 1968, which gathered local pilots to search for overdue aircraft in the Aspen area, and supervising the construction of the Aspen Valley Hospital Heliport with safety in mind, as she explained in a video interview.⁴⁷ Serving as an accident prevention specialist, she was a member of the US Nixon’s Women’s Advisory Committee on Aviation from 1969 to 1972. A founder of the Aspen chapter of the women pilot organization the Ninety-Nines in 1981, Betty was also a 1995 inductee to the Aspen Hall of Fame as a helicopter pilot. Like Selma Kantor Cronan, who engaged in air races, Pfister participated in World Helicopter Championships in England in 1973 and in Russia in 1978. She received a Congressional Gold Medal in 2009 together with other surviving WASP, including Bernice Falk Haydu, who was influential in obtaining recognition of the WASP as veterans. Selma Kantor Cronan died in 2002, too early to receive belated recognition, and was interred at Arlington National Cemetery—a noted military distinction, though one that required her body be cremated. These three former WASP also raised children: Cronan adopted twins, and both Bernice Falk Haydu and Betty Haas Pfister had three children. They all had supportive husbands who were World War II veterans and understood their passion for flying. To mention one, Arthur O. Pfister was a pilot during World War II; first stationed on the Brahmaputra River in the Assam Valley, he flew C-46 planes, delivering gasoline from India to China.

JEWISH “WINGED ANGELS” AND EVACUATION MEDICINE

If gasoline was needed to wage the war, medical services were needed to keep the GIs fighting. With the development of air routes, a new program of evacuation medicine turned enlisted flight nurses into pioneering women. The global aspect of World War II led the US Army Air Forces to introduce a revolution in medical care, today called aeromedical evacuation. The urgent need for flight nursing was felt acutely after the Allied invasion of North Africa on November 8, 1942. Operation Torch involved American and British military forces in an amphibious operation against the French-held territories of Algeria and Morocco.⁴⁸ Although the nurses at Bowman Field (near Louisville, Kentucky) had not yet completed their four weeks of basic training at that time, they were sent to North Africa on Christmas Day. The first class of flight nurses graduated on February 18, 1943, at Bowman Field.⁴⁹

Nurses had the lives of soldiers in their hands and therefore had to gather equipment and medicines necessary for a long flight, sometimes up to a week. Evacuation by air of wounded and ill military personnel from the various theaters of war required efficiency, professional skill, and intuition—and, of course, the ability to cope with severe sleep deprivation and permanent stress. Flight nurses who slept on GI cots and under GI blankets during training also received dog tags and silver wings.⁵⁰ As declared in a 1944 film from the American War Department, “above and beyond duty, the nurse gently guides men to the way of life they fought to protect.”⁵¹ The five hundred army flight nurses serving with the Army Air Force as members of more than thirty medical air squadrons in the Pacific and the European theaters evacuated over one million patients by air between January 1943 and May 1945.⁵² Prepared for the unexpected, flight nurses did everything a medical doctor does except perform surgery. They guided GIs back to life and health while encouraging them with a reassuring smile.⁵³

One of these “winged angels” was young curly-haired and light-eyed Yetta Moskowitz (nicknamed “Mosky”), a Jewish flight nurse who enlisted and was sent overseas immediately after graduation. She was one of three nurses on board an American ship attending to seven thousand troops, including a primary contingent of Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and the prime minister of Australia. The courage and resourcefulness of Yetta Moskowitz under fire earned her a promotion to chief nurse of her squadron: the 804th MAES Fifty-Fourth TCC Fifth AF. Yetta (also written Etta) completed her training at the Air Force School of Air Evacuation at Bowman Field in June 1944, where she learned crash procedures and how to prepare for an emergency. This training served her when she faced adversity overseas.⁵⁴ The first line of the “Flight Nurse’s Creed” must have resonated in her mind while the adrenaline did the rest: “I will summon every resource to prevent the triumph of death over life.”⁵⁵ The emergency procedures for flight nurses included carrying thirty-eight-caliber revolvers. In a photograph dated June 1943, First Lieutenant Yetta Moskowitz carries a weapon on her shoulder. An emergency could occur if an aircraft was shot down and the crew needed to bail out into enemy territory. Survival training and physical training were helpful when bailing out onto stretches of land inhabited by wild animals, as in New Guinea, where Yetta Moskowitz was sent. The sky became a new home for flight nurses like her. When First Lieutenant Moskowitz was discharged from the Army Air Force in December 1945, she received an air medal for flying more than a hundred hours above combat zones to evacuate wounded GIs in New Guinea and the Philippines.⁵⁶ Moskowitz was also among the first Americans to enter Manila after the capture of the Philippines. She later flew to Tachikawa, Japan, to evacuate POWs. On her safe return to the United States in December 1945, she was discharged at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Barely a month later, Moskowitz sailed to England to bring back the first group of war brides.⁵⁷

Moskowitz’s best friend died while on a mission. Like sixteen other flight nurses, young Lieutenant Beatrice H. Memler, a Jewish flight nurse nicknamed “Bobby,” was killed in action off Mindanao Island in the Philippines on March 12, 1945.⁵⁸ She, too, had volunteered to dedicate herself to saving American soldiers’ lives. Her aircraft was part of the 804th MAES squadron. Beatrice Memler was declared dead while missing on a medical air evacuation mission from Elmore Airstrip (Mindoro) to Tanuan Airfield (Leyte). No survivors were found; the plane’s crew perished together with twenty-eight wounded.⁵⁹ Her name is commemorated on the funeral tablets of the missing at the Manila American Cemetery in the Philippines. It is also recorded in the book by I. Kaufmann that lists the names of Jewish servicemen and servicewomen from every state of the United States who served in World War II.⁶⁰ Second Lieutenant Beatrice H. Memler, memorialized by the people of New York, was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart.⁶¹ Her husband, Sergeant Julius Memler, enlisted during the war and survived her.

Women who took to the skies included mechanics. A revealing example is Miranda (Randy) Bloch, who defied her parents’ firmly grounded notions that military life was not a proper choice for a Jewish girl. The nineteen-year-old waited until her twenty-first birthday to be able to enlist in the United States Marine Corps on September 30, 1943. Her move was not only defiant—it was impressive. She was sworn in on the steps of the imposing Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The event and its implications were life changing: Miranda Bloch, born in Jerusalem in the Jewish homeland of Palestine on June 26, 1922, stood opposite Major Ruth Cheney Streeter, the first commanding officer of the United States Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. Did the major know that Miranda Bloch’s father had gone to Palestine as an aide to General John J. Pershing in World War I? Patriotism and a feeling of duty toward one’s community must have run in the Bloch family. As with other women pilots and flight nurses who grew up during the Depression years, a sense of adventure may have also spurred this young woman to action.

Fig. 3.1 First Lieutenant Yetta Moskowitz carrying a weapon on her shoulder, June 1943. Courtesy of the National Museum of American Jewish Military History, Washington, DC.

While stationed at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina, for basic training, Miranda Bloch struck her superiors with an unexpected aptitude for mechanics. In the Marine Corps, the need for qualified airplane mechanics had become critical. It was concomitant with the need for women pilots to perform ferrying tasks and for flight nurses as the war progressed. Together with twenty-nine other enlisted servicewomen, Bloch was sent to an experimental aircraft radio class at a base that is today the Marine Corps Air Station at Cherry Point, North Carolina. Once she had successfully completed her training and could repair and install aircraft radio gear, she became one of the few servicewomen authorized to inspect, install, and repair such gear midflight—an admirable achievement. No wonder Miranda Bloch was among the few women Marines considered competent enough to be issued flight orders. At age twenty-one, her accomplishments did not go unnoticed. Could a young Jewish woman encroach on male territory? Over and above gender prejudice, she felt confident enough to fly with pilots bound for combat. Like all flight crew, she wore a standard alpaca-lined flight jacket or Mae West vest. She also carried a parachute in case it became necessary to bail out. Discharged in December 1945, Miranda Bloch, who later served as president of the greater Philadelphia chapter of the Women Marines Association, voiced the meaning of her enlistment: “I am proud that I had the guts and the patriotism to defy my parents and enlist in the service of my country when it needed me.”⁶² Miranda Bloch’s competence and dedication at a time when mechanics were urgently needed could only foster respect on the part of her peers. She challenged prejudice in civil society, the family cell, and the military.

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Young nurses and women pilots encountered multiple hurdles in carrying out their patriotic duties. They were confronted with the fact that airfields rarely had restrooms for female fliers and flight nurses. Female pilots defied the social hierarchy by accomplishing tasks traditionally left to men. Although they went above and beyond the call of duty, the WASP upset the social hierarchy by entering male territory and excelling in the elitist specialization of flying military aircraft. In doing so, Jewish female pilots—like their fellow non-Jewish women pilots—challenged the social and symbolic order of the 1940s. Flight nurses, unlike pilots in the WASP, were immediately inducted as military personnel. They not only ministered to every need but also symbolized the tenderness of a mother or a girlfriend; their maternal quality conjured up evocations of home. Women pilots may have been considered as competitors in the job market by men fliers toward the end of the war, whereas flight nurses were often called “flying angels” by GIs. Considering women’s enlistment, historian William L. O’Neill contends that women who joined the military at the beginning of the war were viewed by some as “sluts” or lesbians. Consequently, if there had been fewer prejudiced Americans, more would have enlisted.⁶³ Let us recall that many Jewish parents told their children that “nice Jewish girls” do not join the military, and the determination of daughters to defy their loving parents in the name of patriotism is noteworthy.

In his memoirs, General Eisenhower admitted his own reluctance toward women’s contributions in Algiers during Operation Torch, launched on November 8, 1942, as well as the skepticism of officers—until servicewomen proved them wrong. The following passage encapsulates both an awareness of “the changing requirements of war” and the evolution of perceptions of women in uniform in the American military.

In December we received our first consignment of Women’s Army corps personnel, then known as Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps. Until my experience in London I had been opposed to the use of women in uniform but in Great Britain I had seen them perform so magnificently in various positions including service in active anti-aircraft batteries, that I had been converted. In Africa, many officers were still doubtful of women’s usefulness in uniform—the older commanders in particular were filled with misgivings and open skepticism. What these men had failed to note was the changing requirements of war. . . . An army of filing clerks, stenographers, office managers, telephone operators, and chauffeurs had become essential and it was scarcely less than criminal to recruit these from needed manpower when great numbers of highly qualified women were available. From the day they first reached us their reputation as an efficient effective corps continued to grow. Toward the end of the war the most stubborn die-hards had become convinced and demanded them in increasing numbers.⁶⁴

General Eisenhower’s last statement apparently applied to WACs, not to women pilots who felt redundant when men came back from war and reclaimed their positions, threatened by the women’s abilities. Nurses were a special category among the WACs because no proof was needed of their necessity alongside a fighting force. Eisenhower sharply noted this point: “From the outset of this war our nurses lived up to traditions tracing back to Florence Nightingale; consequently, it was difficult to understand the initial resistance to the employment of women in other activities.”⁶⁵

It is no coincidence that both former WASP pilots Bernice Falk Haydu and Elizabeth Haas Pfister expressed in their interviews the frustration that, no matter what accomplishments women pilots made during World War II, “they remained expendable.” Selma Kantor Cronan made it clear that she would not have enlisted in the WASP program without the prospect of serving as a military pilot. They stressed the fact that their prevailing identity was that of a woman pilot who could fly military planes. WASP members were not militarized during the war years despite their contribution to the war effort. Some of them, with Bernice Falk Haydu at their lead, fought relentlessly for recognition, which was only obtained in 1977. Immediately after the war, they could not enjoy the military benefits given to their male counterparts. They could not study with funding from the GI Bill. Nevertheless, prejudice against their gender did not tarnish their cherished idea of America. The American values of liberty and justice continued to inspire them. These values instilled in these women, ahead of their time, the desire to continue to make this world a better place through good deeds. That is what Betty Haas Pfister did when she strove to establish a safe airport in Aspen for helicopters to bring patients to the emergency department. In her case, the core of being a Jew was practicing a moral way of life based on decent conduct toward other people. In so doing, she indirectly showed that Jews are not isolated from the rest of humanity by their ancestral faith or cultural belonging. Furthermore, many women who enlisted felt empowered both as women and as American citizens, if not as Jews. Ellen Levitsky Orkin, the daughter of immigrants—who volunteered as a nurse together with her sister Dorothy—confessed: “It strengthened me, there was nothing I was afraid to do.”⁶⁶

While in the military, many GIs noted the recurrence of antisemitic slurs directed not necessarily at Jewish ethics or religion but rather at the negative image of the Jew. How did Jewish GIs respond, when they did, to anti-Jewish hostility? This question is addressed in the next chapter.