And You Will Find Love

When one WASP sat at a table in an officer's mess hall, a colonel called a waiter and ordered him to have her move to another table. After she left, the colonel told his comrades, "It's unmilitary to have a woman sit at my table!"

Another WASP, after ferrying a plane to an airfield in Georgia, was arrested for wearing slacks in the town where she waited for a bus to take her back to her home base. It wasn't until two o'clock in the morning that she was allowed to make a phone call. She called Nancy Love who explained to the desk sergeant that the woman was a pilot for the Air Force and the slacks were part of her uniform.

But it was not the danger of being a test pilot or the harassment of being a woman pilot that began to make Barbara think of changing occupations. She loved being a WASP, but as rumors began to spread in the early spring of 1944 that the US and British were planning a major offensive in Europe, she wondered if she would ever get to fly a bomber in combat.

This long-held dream of Barbara's began to seem less likely to be realized as her friend Jackie Cochran stepped up efforts to make her own dream come true. She was still trying to get Congress to approve her plan to make the WASPS an official military arm of the Air Force, just as the WACS were for the Army and WAVES were for the Navy.

In February, when there were 2,500 WASPS ferrying planes for the Air Force in the United States, and women such as Barbara were risking their lives as test pilots, a bill was introduced in Congress to militarize the WASPS. Cochran not only wanted the recognition due her pilots, they could then serve in all theaters of the war except for ferrying planes into combat zones. They also could get more equal pay with male pilots, as well as military insurance and hospitalization.

The bill, introduced in Congress with major support from General Hap Arnold, met with instant, volatile, and almost universal opposition from Air Force pilots and brass, Congressmen, the American Legion, and others. Even Washington's top newspaper columnist, Drew Pearson, lambasted the idea that women should be recognized as Air Force pilots, even though they were already piloting Air Force planes including fighters and B-17 bombers.

The excuse given for the opposition was "Flying in combat zones would be too dangerous for women." But beneath the rhetoric, WASPS read, "It would lower the morale of male pilots."