Author Topic: West Texas town of Sweetwater remembers WASP role in World War II  (Read 430 times)

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Houston Chronicle by  Joe Holley June 7, 2019

SWEETWATER — During a week when Americans and their allies are pausing to remember brave men who stormed ashore at Normandy 75 years ago, two Georgia schoolteachers, Donna Tumlin and Karla Smedley, journeyed to this small town west of Abilene seeking information about Tumlin’s grandmother, Marion G. Mann, a young woman who also served her country with distinction.

A small-town North Carolina girl in the years before the war, Mann was a proud WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots). She was one of more than 1,700 young women with pilot’s licenses — out of 25,000 applicants — who ferried planes from factories to distant points of embarkation and who also towed targets behind planes while ground and air gunners in training fired live ammunition. They tested engine repairs and tracked radar, among numerous other duties that freed their male counterparts to fly combat missions overseas.

Every WASP went through seven months of basic and flight training at Avenger Field, just west of town, the only all-female military flight-training base in U.S. history. For the past 14 years, a hangar built in 1929 has housed the superb National WASP WWII Museum.

Mann, a 21-year-old single mother when the war broke out, left her 1-year-old daughter with her own mother to become a WASP. The little bit that Tumlin and Smedley know about her WASP service comes from a few family stories and the contents of a cedar chest Tumlin opened when her own mother died in 2007. Inside were Mann’s “wings,” her Avenger Field yearbook and “tons of pictures.” At the museum this week, they learned that she had been stationed at Army bases in Childress; New Castle, Del.; and Fairfax, Kansas.

“I do know she was very feisty and spunky,” Tumlin told me Wednesday morning. “She was 5’1 and weighed 100 pounds.”

“When other male pilots poked fun, which was often,” an aunt wrote in a newspaper article years later, “Marion had an answer. ‘The WASPs are flying P-39s and B-26s, because they still have bugs in them, and some of the men don’t have the guts to fly them. The girls are taking all the chances.” (Some of those same planes likely were flying over France on D-Day.)

WASPs were originally stationed in Houston, at the Howard Hughes Municipal Airport. Famed aviator Jacqueline Cochran, the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic (and later the first woman to break the sound barrier), headed up the program as director of Women Pilots.

In 1943, the program moved to Avenger Field, where facilities were available for the women to live and train together as a cohesive unit. After training, they fanned out to 120 Army Air bases around the country, where they flew 78 different types of aircraft, including B-26s and B-29s.

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/columnists/native-texan/article/West-Texas-town-of-Sweetwater-remembers-WASP-role-13952638.php