Women Airforce Service Pilots

The Handbook of Texas says Love and Cochran had each proposed using women pilots in 1940 and 1941, but the military turned them down because it had more male pilots than airplanes, and General Arnold doubted that women could fly large aircraft. Trainees split their flying time about equally among PT-17s, BT-13s and AT-6s, and WASPs went on to ferry half of all fighters manufactured. Living under civilian law, they had no government insurance, and hospital care was hard to arrange. In 1944 a bill to militarize them failed in Congress, largely through the lobbying of male civilian pilots.

What the plaque says

Jacqueline Cochran, one to the most famous women pilots of the Twentieth Century, persistently lobbied U.S. Army Airforce General Henry "Hap" Arnold to establish a flight training program for women during World War II. Hard-pressed for pilots by mid-summer of 1942, General Arnold requested that Cochran return from England and put her women airforce pilots (WASP) plan into action. A WASP flight school, opened at Houston's Municipal Airport in late 1942, outgrew its facilities and was relocated to Avenger Field in Sweetwater. The school operated here from February 20, 1943 to December 7, 1944, during which time it became the first and only all-women military flying school in the world. The program successfully trained women to fly every kind of overseas duty. Of the 25,000 women who applied for WASP flight training, only 1,830 were accepted to the program. Of this number 1,074 went on to gain their silver wings and fly over 60 million miles on operational duty; 38 of them lost their lives serving their country. Considered civilian employees during the war, WASP pilots finally gained military benefits after special legislation passed in 1977. (1993)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National WASP WWII Museum — 0.6 mi
  Hangar 1 at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, where the women of the WASP trained to fly every aircraft in the Army's arsenal in World War II, then waited thirty-three years to be called veterans.
• Pioneer Museum — 4.2 mi
  Nolan County's settlement story in a dozen rooms of Judge R. A. Ragland's 1906 house in Sweetwater, a town that started as a dugout store for buffalo hunters and a post office called Blue Goose.
• Heart of West Texas Museum — 23 mi
  Colorado City's museum in a restored downtown house, from a mammoth dug up at Lake Champion in 2001 to an Ice Age bison and the wartime telegrams sent to a local family.
• Lake Colorado City State Park — 28 mi
  A mesquite-plains park on a lake built in 1949 to cool a power plant, southwest of Colorado City, where controlled burns are bringing back the grassland and 300 bird species pass through.

More markers nearby

• W.A.S.P. Training Base: Avenger Field — 0.7 mi
• Roscoe Cemetery — 3.0 mi
• Sweetwater Cemetery — 3.0 mi
• S.D. Myres — 3.8 mi