by Janet Dailey
“Yeah, they say bomber pilots need a lot of guts, stamina, and leadership ability, and the fighter pilots are lone wolves—daredevils. I’ve heard that when they check a pilot out in a pursuit, they fail him if he can count to ten because he thinks too hard.” Smiling at her own joke, Marty glanced at a dark-haired woman walking by, dressed in gray-green slacks and a light gray shirt. She nudged Mary Lynn with her elbow and nodded in the direction of the female pilot in the unusual uniform. “Who is she?”
“A WAF, part of Nancy Love’s group before we were all brought under the umbrella of the Women Airforce Service Pilots.” The WAFs were an elite group of experienced female pilots, former aircraft instructors, racing pilots, or barnstormers, who were incorporated almost directly into the Air Transport Command as a separate ferrying squadron at the outset. “They have their own uniforms.”
“I wonder when we’re ever going to get ours,” Marty sighed.
Mary Lynn tipped her head to the side and rubbed at the knotted muscles in her neck. Her glance skipped past the nearest group of pilots, hangar-flying around a table, and fell haphazardly on a man lazing in a corner of the ready room. One leg was stretched across the width of a chair seat while his other foot hooked the side rung to act as a ballast as he rocked his own chair onto its back legs. He was a study of indolence, with his officer’s cap sitting sideways on his head, the bill dipping over one eye.
Something about him—that lazy attitude or the rake of the hat on his head—for a split second reminded Mary Lynn of Beau. But the resemblance ended there. He looked every bit of thirty or older; his face was lined, and his skin was pitted and unnaturally scarred. That hint of a smile on his mouth seemed infected with a hard, cruel humor, and insinuating interest glittered in his dark eyes.
His gaze was boldly traveling the full length of her body and taking note of every curve along the way. She looked away, her heart striking quick, small beats. Amidst all the talking voices and walking footsteps, she heard the sound of the chair coming down on all four legs.
Soon, a drawling male voice said, “What’s a little thing like you doing here?” Mary Lynn didn’t turn when Marty looked around, but she was aware of the slow-moving man drifting toward them. “Don’t tell me you’re flying those big, bad planes out there.”
It was a deliberately condescending remark, designed to elicit a response. “Are you talking to me?” Mary Lynn gave him a falsely blank look.
“No one else,” he said lazily.
Marty’s gaze narrowed on him, conscious that Mary Lynn was the focus of his attention. She took note of the captain’s bars on his uniform. She was almost certain she’d seen him somewhere before.
“Don’t I know you?” Marty frowned.
His dark glance skimmed her once and dismissed her. “No.” His interest centered again on Mary Lynn as he pushed the officer’s cap to the back of his head. Thick, unruly hair, the color of Army coffee, strayed onto his forehead. “What do you say, Little One?”
From the first, something had told Marty this man was trouble in capital letters, and the obvious play he was making for Mary Lynn merely confirmed it. Her dislike of the man was instinctive as Marty observed the stiff and agitated way Mary Lynn avoided the man’s look. Marrying young, and to her childhood sweetheart, it wasn’t likely Mary Lynn had come across many wolves like this one.
“You’re a little off base, Captain,” Marty informed him.
“Walker. Captain Samuel Jamieson Walker.” He introduced himself with a mock bow to Mary Lynn. “But you can just call me Walker.”
“She’s married.” Marty bridled.
“Is that right?” He seemed amused by the discovery rather than put off by it. “I promise I won’t hold that against you over dinner tonight.”
“Dinner?” The word broke from Mary Lynn in surprise.
“I told you she wasn’t interested, Captain,” Marty interposed in a cold and naturally husky voice.
“Does she always do your talking, Little One?” he mocked. “Or don’t you have a tongue? Now, that would be a pity.”
“Please.” Mary Lynn felt hot all over, an anger flashing at his continued impudence. “I am married so I’m not interested.”
“A pretty little wife,” he marveled. Lifting her chin with the tip of his finger, he continued, “Would you just look at all that goodness shining out of her?”
His eyes admired what his tongue mocked. But there was something bitter behind his taunting humor, and Mary Lynn jerked away from his touch, hurt and bewildered by his behavior. Marty was instantly at her side, aggressively shielding her.
“Why don’t you pick on somebody your own size, Captain,” she challenged.
Those hard, laughing eyes skimmed Marty, testing, probing, measuring; then he was shrugging. “It isn’t as much fun,” he said, backing away while Marty glared at him. She had the feeling he was just biding his time until he saw another opening.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here,” she said under her breath to Mary Lynn and both of them headed out of the ready room.
Still dressed in his full military regalia, medals and ribbons pinned to his jacket breast, the AAF Commanding General “Hap” Arnold sat behind his big wooden desk, pushed back in his large chair. The meeting with the House Committee on Military Affairs on Capitol Hill had not gone as smoothly as he had expected.
March was on its way out, but it was an irritated lion who was rumbling over the opposition he’d encountered from the congressional committee over the proposed bill to militarize the WASPs, as had been done with the WACs, and the WAVES the year before. The bill had been presented to Congress in February. In the past, anything the Commanding General had wanted for the war effort had been routinely approved.
“They didn’t ask me a half-dozen questions about the WASPs,” the general snorted. “Typical Congress, there were only two things they were concerned about—whether the women were paid and if they flew in combat situations. I explained again that they were not being used in war zones—that they were replacing men in domestic operations to free them for combat roles. That was all they needed to hear, they said. Then they started asking me questions about the shutdown of all the primary cadet flying schools we closed in January.”
In quick, sharp taps, Mitch Ryan hit his cigarette on the hard surface of the chair arm, tamping the tobacco and releasing some of his held-in anger at the subject matter under discussion. Women pilots were a sore topic with him, heart-sensitive as he was to anything that reminded him of Cappy.
Two weeks ago, one of the staff personnel from that department had called him aside and advised him that Cappy had put in a request for a transfer. It would have been a simple matter to block it, as he had maneuvered other things in the past. This time he hadn’t stepped in, leaving it to be granted or turned down by someone else. With a certain fatalism, he felt whichever way the cards fell would be a sign, an indication of whether things could ever be worked out between them or not.
When Mitch had learned the request had gone through, he had gritted his teeth so no one would know how much it mattered. But it ground at him, turning him bitter and angry.
“We all knew there’d be some heat from those civilian pilots,” he replied in response to the general’s previous statement. Roughly fourteen thousand men, instructors and trainees, had lost their jobs and their draft-deferred status. They were being called to active duty and assigned ground jobs.
“Yes. And those that qualify are being signed up as pilots. But I’ll be damned if I’ll lower the physical and intellectual standards of our pilots for them. It seems strange to me that now that these pilots have lost their safe, noncombat instructor’s jobs, they are suddenly clamoring for the more dangerous assignments the WASPs have undertaken—like towing targets and testing planes coming out of the repair depots.” The general did not think much of these grousing Johnny-come-latelies, and it showed. “Look at the morale problems we had with the male pilots over the B-26. They were half scared to fly
the damned ‘Flying Prostitute’ until the women climbed into the cockpits and showed them how it was done. Hell, my own son’s unit would never have qualified for an overseas assignment if a WASP hadn’t willingly towed targets for the rough-terrain practice. The male pilots at Camp Irwin refused to do it.”
“Yes, sir. I know,” Mitch responded dutifully.
Rough-terrain maneuvers required armored vehicles, called half-tracks, to tear across open country at forty miles an hour while the gunners operating the fifty-caliber guns mounted on its back shot at an aerial target. With all the bumps, dips and gulleys it was invariably a wild ride, and the shooting was often equally wild until the gunners got the hang of it.
“Dammit, those girls are entitled to the same privileges and benefits the Army pilots receive,” General Arnold insisted impatiently. “The committee says it’s going to recommend passage, but we haven’t heard the last of those pilots, I’m afraid.”
“I doubt that we have.” He rolled the burning tip of the cigarette around the inside rim of an ashtray, watching the paper-thin flakes of gray ash fall off.
“The whole complexion of the war is changing.” The chair creaked under the movement of his solid weight as General Arnold shifted to sit with shoulders squared. “We’re on the move. Those boys are off the Anzio beachhead and pounding their way to Rome. Our air raids have crippled their aircraft industry and we can start concentrating on the Germans’ transportation and oil refineries. And the airfields in France. Britain is bulging with troops for Ike’s Overlord operation. We not only have to soften the bastards up, but we’ve got to give air cover for our guys when they go in.”
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that, sir.” Mitch crushed out his cigarette and grimly faced his general. “With the big push on … I want to be part of it. I want to be there when it happens, not … tucked away in some damned office. I want a transfer, sir.”
“The hell you do.” The challenging response was flattened by a kind of offhandedness. “I doubt if you’re alone in that.”
“You’re going to need good pilots, qualified men to make these strikes. I’ve seen some of the estimates of losses for these planned raids on the oil refineries in Rumania, Hamburg, and the Ruhr,” Mitch argued.
“A soldier serves his country best where he’s needed. And you are needed here. Transfer denied,” the general snapped impatiently. “You surprise me, Mitch. I never expected you to stoop to such unprofessional heroics. You know damned well you’ve got a job to do here—a damned important one. I’ll be the first to admit there isn’t much glory in pushing papers around, but it has to be done.”
“Yes, sir.” Mitch grudgingly gave in, not liking it and not trying to hide it.
“I don’t want to hear any more talk about transfers.” The general picked up a sheaf of papers on his desk and began glancing through them, muttering his displeasure under his breath. “Grandstand play. Anybody’d think some gal singed your feelings.” He stopped to peer at Mitch. “Haven’t seen that Hay ward girl with you in a while.”
“No, sir,” he admitted. “It seems she doesn’t like the Army.”
“It’s probably just as well.” “Hap” Arnold looked back at the papers. “After today, I’m afraid it’s going to be a fight to get her … and the rest of the women pilots … into the Army Air Force.”
Mary Lynn’s orders instructed her to deliver the spanking new P-47 Thunderbolt to the Embarkation Center in Newark, but such flights in planes fresh off the assembly lines were seldom routine. There always seemed to be a few bugs in them somewhere and Mary Lynn found a problem in the flaps’ hydraulic system which forced her to land in Tulsa.
While the Thunderbolt went to the hangar for repairs, Mary Lynn was given a new set of orders to deliver a P-39 Aircobra to Great Falls, Montana, a staging base for planes bound for Alaska, Russian lend-lease fighters. From Great Falls it was a PT-19 to Nevada, and a hop over the Sierra Mountains in a P-51 Mustang. In all, her two-day trip turned into four, ferrying four planes and covering approximately three thousand miles.
She had barely set foot inside the WASPs’ barracks at Long Beach when Eden grabbed her. “Come on. I’ve got something to show you.”
“What did you buy this time?” Mary Lynn assumed she had indulged in another one of her wild shopping sprees, almost a regular event since they’d been stationed in Los Angeles.
But Eden merely laughed and pushed Mary Lynn into her room, where she told her to sit on the cot. Then Eden darted to the door of her own room, an impishly gleeful light in her dark eyes. A tired smile lifted the corners of her mouth as Mary Lynn shook her head and leaned against the wall to wait for the expected fashion parade.
The door opened and Eden’s voice began intoning, “And here is Cappy Hayward.” Mary Lynn’s heavy-lidded glance went to the doorway as Cappy came into view. Her eyes immediately widened in stunned surprise. “You will notice she is wearing a belted jacket of wool serge and a matching skirt in fashion’s latest color, Santiago blue. The outfit is completed with the deep blue color repeated in the tam she wears. The snowy white blouse provides a contrast to the suit, adorned with silver wings and a gold WASP insignia.”
“What are you doing here? And in our new uniform?” Mary Lynn released a bewildered breath at the sight of Cappy modeling the uniform suit, slowy turning with arms shifting and posing in mock stances.
“Miss van Valkenburg, you will see, is wearing”—Eden continued her mock recital as she swirled into the room, crowding the small floor space—“slacks and the Eisenhower jacket, a sure choice for high fashion, in Santiago blue.”
The pseudo fashion show fell apart as Mary Lynn scooted off the cot. “You look gorgeous, Cappy. When did you get here? Did you fly someone here?”
Eden jumped in with the explanation. “She’s been transferred here. Isn’t that wonderful? She’s been assigned to the Sixth Ferrying Group, too.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It’s true,” Cappy assured the disbelieving Mary Lynn. “I’m going to be flying the C-47 Skytrains from the McDonnell Douglas factory to various bases around the country.”
“We’re all going to be flying together again,” she marveled. “Marty said she saw you in Washington so you know she’s going to be joining us. She’s in Palm Springs right now, finishing the last two weeks of the pursuit course.”
“Yes, I know.” Cappy nodded, but carefully said nothing more.
“I can’t believe it.” Mary Lynn shook her head again. “You’re here … and our uniforms.”
“Wait until you see the flying suits,” Eden declared and dragged out her regulation jumpsuit, in that same deep blue color that was to become their trademark.
“Did I get mine, too?” Mary Lynn wondered belatedly.
“We picked it up for you,” Eden assured her, then cautioned, “Don’t get too excited though. In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve been issued winter uniforms. Wool … in sunny, southern California.” The absurdity of it was obvious. “Supposedly the summer uniforms are on their way.”
But winter uniforms were better than none at all. For Mary Lynn, just the thought of wearing an outfit measured to fit her small frame was a special bonus. All three of them piled into Mary Lynn’s room while she tried on the Army issue of two jackets, a skirt, slacks and flight suits. She had saved one of her shoe ration stamps just for the new uniforms when they came.
Standing in front of the mirror, Mary Lynn studied her reflection, the cut of the deeply blue uniform on her petite frame and the set of the English-style tarn on her raven hair. She reached up to touch the silver wings on her lapel, smaller than the regulation pilot wings, and traced the satin-finished silver lozenge in the center that had replaced the shield in the new regulation wings.
“I think I’m going to miss my old wings. They were special,” she said, not really needing to explain to Eden and Cappy. “They’re the ones we started with.”
“I know,” Cappy said with an agreeing look
of regret. “I heard the lozenge is supposed to represent the shield of the Amazons.”
“What does that make us?” Eden retorted. “Mythical female warriors?”
“I suppose.” Cappy smiled faintly.
Mary Lynn swung away from the mirror. “Why don’t we go celebrate tonight?”
At the Officers’ Club that evening they made an occasion of it, dining on the best steaks and ordering wine. No French brands were available so Eden decided they would sample a burgundy from one of the California wineries. Three unescorted females in the male-dominated club created a stir of interest and countless invitations to provide them with male company. But they kept the dinner strictly among the three of them.
“When I was in Great Falls—” Mary Lynn paused to sip cautiously at the after-dinner drink Eden had ordered for her. “—a WASP from the Romulus Base in Michigan was telling me why we aren’t allowed to fly the ferry route from Great Falls to Fairbanks, Alaska, and only men can.”
“I always thought they were worried one of us might go down in those frozen wastes and maybe die from exposure.” A perplexed frown drew lines in Cappy’s forehead as she eyed Mary Lynn, suddenly suspecting that wasn’t the reason.
“So did I,” Mary Lynn agreed. “But it seems some of the men have been stationed in Alaska for almost two years. They aren’t afraid we might get killed flying there. They are worried about what might happen to us … on a base with all those men who haven’t seen a woman in months.”
Eden laughed. “It certainly doesn’t speak very well of the men stationed there.”
“When I was flying out of Washington,” Cappy inserted, “I landed at some bases that didn’t have nurses’ quarters and I stayed in the BOQ with men sleeping in the next bed and only a screen between us.” She shook her head in faint disgust. “Half the time the Army doesn’t make any sense.”
