Silver Wings, Santiago Blue Read online

  Throughout 1940 and the first half of 1941, Jacqueline Cochran continued to expound on the idea of establishing a women’s air corps to free male pilots for war duty. After she had lunch with General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, Chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps, and Clayton Knight, who directed the recruiting of pilots in America for the British Air Transport Auxiliary, General Arnold suggested she should ferry bombers for the British and publicize their need for pilots. Knight thought it was a splendid idea.

  But the Air Transport Auxiliary headquarters in Montreal wasn’t as enthusiastic. Their response was, “We’ll call you,” and they didn’t. Undeterred, she got in touch with one of her British friends, Lord Beaverbrook, who just happened to have recently been appointed minister of procurement, formerly called aircraft production. During the second week of June, Montreal did indeed call and ask her to take a flight test—Jacqueline Cochran, the holder of seventeen aviation records, twice recipient of the Harmon Trophy, and the winner of the 1938 Bendix Race.

  After three days of grueling tests that seemed more intent on determining her endurance than her flying skill, Jackie made the mistake of joking that her arm was sore from using the handbrake when she was accustomed to toe brakes. The chief pilot stated in his report that while she was qualified to fly the Hudson bomber, he could not recommend her since he felt she might have a physical incapacity to operate the brakes in an emergency situation.

  His objections were deemed petty and overruled by ATA headquarters, and Jacqueline Cochran received orders to ferry a Lockheed Hudson bomber from Montreal to Prestwick, Scotland, with a copilot/navigator and radio operator as her crew. But her troubles weren’t over. Vigorous protests were made by the ATA male pilots, who threatened to strike. Their objections ranged from concern that ATA would be blamed if the Germans shot down America’s most famous woman pilot to complaint that an unpaid volunteer—and female to boot—flying a bomber across the Atlantic belittled their own jobs. A compromise was ultimately reached whereby Jacqueline Cochran would be pilot-in-command for the Atlantic crossing, but her copilot would make all the takeoffs and landings. On June 18, 1941 Jacqueline Cochran became the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic Ocean.

  On July first, she returned from England. In her Manhattan apartment, with its foyer murals showing man’s early attempt at flight and a small chandelier designed to resemble an observation balloon hanging from the ceiling, she held a news conference and talked about her trip to Britain. After the reporters had gone, Jackie received a phone call inviting her to lunch with President and Mrs. Roosevelt.

  The next day, a police escort drove her to the estate at Crum Elbow, the famous Hyde Park mansion with its majestic columned entrances. She spent two hours with the President. The meeting resulted in a note of introduction to Robert Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air, in which the President stated his desire that Jacqueline Cochran research a plan creating an organization of women pilots for the Army Air Corps.

  Her subsequent interview with the Assistant Secretary early in July resulted in Jackie’s becoming an unpaid “tactical consultant,” with office space for herself and her staff in the Ferry Command section. Using the Civil Aeronautics Administration’s files, she and her researchers found the records of over 2,700 licensed women pilots, 150 of them possessing more than 200 hours of flying experience. When contacted, nearly all were enthusiastic about the possibility of flying for the Army.

  Jacqueline Cochran put forward a proposal to her former luncheon partner, Army Air Corps General “Hap” Arnold, to utilize not just the 150 highly qualified women pilots but to give advanced training to the more than two thousand others. Hers was not the only proposal regarding women pilots the Army received. Nancy Harkness Love, a Vassar graduate and commercial pilot for the aviation company she and her husband owned in Boston called Inter-city Airlines, had also contacted the Ferry Command of the Army Air Corps with a plan to use women pilots to ferry aircraft from the manufacturers to their debarkation points.

  But in July 1941 such drastic measures seemed premature to General Arnold. The United States was not at war, and there was an abundance of male pilots. He wasn’t sure that it ever would be so dire that they would need women.

  Then Pearl Harbor happened. By the spring of 1942, the Army was “combing the woods for pilots,” and the plans of the two women were resurrected. Jacqueline Cochran was in England recruiting women to fly for the British ATA when she learned that Nancy Love was putting together an elite corps of professional women pilots, ranging from barnstormers to flight instructors for the Ferry Command. Jacqueline Cochran raced home to argue with the Army Air Corps commander, General H. H. Arnold, for her training program, offering him more than a few pilots—promising him thousands, and assuring him she’d prove they were every bit as good if not better than men.

  The situation was dire. The Allies were losing the war on all fronts in September 1942. General Arnold agreed to Jacqueline Cochran’s proposal. The following month, she was busy locating a base where she could train her “girls.” Facilities were finally provided for the first two classes of trainees at Howard Hughes Field in Houston, Texas, but it soon became apparent that the Houston base wasn’t big enough to hold her plans.

  Her girls were learning to fly, and they were doing it “the Army way.”

  Part I

  We are Yankee Doodle pilots

  Yankee Doodle do or die.

  Real live nieces of our Uncle Sam

  Born with a yearning to fly.

  Keep in step to all our classes

  March to flight line with our pals

  Yankee Doodle came to Texas

  Just to fly the PTs.

  We are those Yankee Doodle gals.

  Chapter I

  Late January, 1943

  IN HER PARENTS’ Georgetown home, Cappy Hayward sat on the sofa cushion, her shoulders squared, her hands folded properly on her lap, and her long legs discreetly crossed at the ankles. On an end table sat a framed photograph of her father wearing his jodhpurs and polo helmet and standing beside his favorite polo horse. The picture of the proud, handsome man smiling for the camera bore little resemblance to the career military man confronting her now. Her face was without expression, emotions controlled the way Army life had taught her, while she watched her father’s composure disintegrating in direct proportion to his rising anger.

  Dropped ice cubes clattered in the glass on the bar cabinet. The golden leaves on the shoulders of Major Hayward’s brown Army jacket shimmered in the January sunlight spilling through the window. Major Hayward was not accustomed to having his authority questioned, and certainly not by a member of his family.

  “I thought we had discussed all this and it was agreed you were not going to pursue this highly experimental program. It is a damned stupid idea to train women pilots for the Army.” He pulled the stopper out of the whiskey decanter and splashed a liberal shot of liquor into the glass with the ice cubes.

  “You ‘discussed’ it and reached that conclusion,” she corrected him smoothly. Her shoulder-length hair was dark, nearly black, a contrast to the startling blue of her eyes. Her poise was unshakable, giving a presence and authority and an added sense of maturity to this tall, long-legged brunette.

  “Now, don’t go getting smart with me, Cappy.” A warning finger jabbed the air in her direction.

  As a small child, she’d always begged to wear her father’s hat. He’d been a captain then. Subsequently, she had been dubbed his “little captain,” which had become shortened to Cap, and eventually expanded to the nickname Cappy.

  “I’m not,” she said evenly. “I am merely informing you that I have been accepted for this pilot training program and I’m going.”

  “Just like that, I suppose.” Displeasure made his voice harsh. Its lash could be much more painful than any whipping with a belt. “What about your job?”

  Wartime Washington, D.C., paid high wages for moderately skilled typists, but Cappy didn’t conside
r the work to be much of a job. It demanded nothing from her, and provided no challenge at all. There was a war on and she wanted to make some meaningful contribution, no matter how trite it sounded. She wasn’t doing that, typing interoffice memos nobody read, in some dreary “tempo”—one of more than two dozen prefabricated office buildings the government had erected for temporary quarters. After sweltering all summer inside the gray asbestos walls, Cappy couldn’t face an entire winter shivering in them.

  “I’ve already given them my resignation.” She glanced down at her hands, then quickly lifted her chin so her father wouldn’t get the impression she was bowing under the dictatorial force of his arguments. “I’m not going to change my mind, sir.” She slipped into the childhood habit of calling him “sir,” a throwback to the days when a gangly, white-pinafored, pink-ribboned little girl had trailed after her tall, handsome “daddy” and been sternly ordered to call him “sir.”

  With a sharp pivot, he swung away from Cappy to face the meekly silent woman anxiously observing the exchange from the cushion of a wing chair. He lifted the glass and poured half the contents down his throat.

  “This is all your fault, Sue,” he muttered at his wife. “I never should have allowed you to persuade me to let Cappy move into an apartment of her own.”

  “Don’t blame this on Mother,” Cappy flared. “She had nothing to do with it.”

  Not once during her entire life could Cappy recall her mother taking a view opposing her husband. She was always the dutiful Army wife, ready to pack at a moment’s notice and leave behind her friends with never a complaint. With each move to a new post, her mother painted, papered, and fixed up their housing into beautiful quarters, only to leave them for someone else to enjoy when they moved again. She observed all the Army’s protocol, treating the colonel’s and the general’s wives with the utmost kindness and respect, and taking their snubs without a cross word. Her mother was either a saint or a fool, Cappy couldn’t decide which.

  “Women in the cockpits of our military aircraft is positively an absurd idea,” her father ranted. “It will never work. Women are not physically capable of handling them.”

  “That’s what they said about welding and a half dozen other occupations supposedly only men could do. Rosie the Riveter has certainly proved that isn’t so,” Cappy reminded him. “You should be glad about that. If it weren’t for women like Rosie, you wouldn’t have all your war machinery coming off the assembly lines now.”

  Rosie the Riveter’s occupation was the antithesis of what her father saw as suitable for a female. If they had to work, women could be teachers, nurses, secretaries, and typists. In truth, her father wanted her to get married and give him a grandson to make up for the son he’d never had, Cappy being their only child. Dissatisfied with her choices, he’d even picked out a future husband for her—Major Mitch Ryan.

  Cappy hated the Army—the way it submerged personalities in its khaki sea and imposed discipline on almost every facet of her life. As far as her father was concerned, the Army was always right. The Army was right to move them every four years, never allowing attachments to people or places to form, and it was right to discourage socializing between officers’ families and those of enlisted personnel. When she was nine years old, her father had caught her skipping rope with a sergeant’s daughter. Cappy still remembered how much fun Linda was and all the variations she knew. But the Army caste system had been violated, and Cappy had been forbidden to see her little friend again, and had her skip-rope taken away. And her mother had not said a word in her behalf—accepting, always accepting.

  Cappy had been too well trained by Army life to ever openly rebel. But the minute she reached her majority and legally could live apart from her parents, she had moved out. It was a case of serving out her hitch. From now on, she made her own decisions and her own friends. And if they happened to be someone like Rosie the Riveter, she didn’t care even if her father did.

  “Don’t cloud the issue,” he answered contentiously. “Learning manual skills does not mean a woman is capable of the mental and physical coordination required to fly long distances. Why on earth would you even entertain the idea?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have taught me how to fly,” Cappy murmured with a small trace of mockery.

  It was the one time she’d felt close to her father, that summer of her seventeenth year when she’d been going through that awkward, coltish, long-legged period. She and her mother had been watching from the ground while he performed beautiful and exciting aerobatics in the sky. After flying he had always seemed relaxed, more approachable, and less the stern disciplinarian. A few questions from her had led to a ride in the plane.

  Suddenly her childhood god began to look upon her with favor; her father taught her to fly. For a while they’d had something in common, experiences to share and things to talk about—until the novelty had worn off for him. It had been cute to teach his daughter to fly, like teaching a dog a new trick. Later, he hadn’t understood why she wanted to continue such an unfeminine pursuit. Always she’d been a disappointment to him, too tall and striking to ever be the petite, pink-and-white little girl he envisioned for his daughter, and not the son she knew he wanted.

  Typically, he ignored her reminder of his role in her flying as his jaw hardened, his blue eyes turning steel-hard, so similar in color and quality to hers. “Young women on military bases are going to be ogled by every noncom around. How can a daughter of mine subject herself to that kind of leering humiliation?”

  “I was raised on military bases,” she reminded him. “I can’t see that there’s any difference.”

  “There damn well is a difference!” His neck reddened with the explosion of his temper. “You are my daughter. If any man so much as looked at you wrong, they answered to me! A single woman on base is just asking to be rushed by every man jack there.”

  “It doesn’t say very much for the men, does it?” Cappy challenged.

  “Dammit, I want you to be practical,” he argued. “If you’re determined to make some use of your pilot’s license, join the Civil Air Patrol instead of traipsing halfway across the country to attend some fool training in a godforsaken Texas town.”

  “That’s a joke and you know it,” she retorted angrily. “You’ve told me yourself that it’s ridiculous to even suppose there will be an invasion of the East Coast. And the chance of any long-range bomber strike is equally remote.”

  “No daughter of mine is going to take part in any pilot training program for women! I won’t have you getting involved with any quasi-military organization that is going to send unescorted females to male airfields around the country. Why, you’d be regarded as no better than tramps.”

  Outwardly, she showed a steely calm, all those years of disciplining her emotions coming into play and keeping her from giving sway to her anger. “You no longer have any authority over me. You may still have Mother under your thumb, but I’m not there anymore. I came to inform you of my plans. Now that I have”—Cappy picked up her coat and scarf from the chair back—“I see no reason to stay any longer.”

  “Cappy.” Sue Hayward sprang to her feet, dismayed by this open break between father and daughter.

  “Let her go, Sue,” Robert Hayward ordered coldly. “If she has so little respect for her parents that she would deliberately go against our wishes, then I don’t care to see her again.”

  Briefly, Cappy glared at her father for demanding his wife’s undivided loyalty, then she started for the door, knowing well whose side her mother would choose. She caught the silent appeal in the look her mother gave her unrelenting husband before she turned to Cappy, “I’ll walk you to the door.”

  Waiting until they were out of earshot, Cappy said, “I’m not going to apologize, Mother. I’m not sorry for anything I said.”

  “He meant it, you know that.” She kept her voice low as they paused by the front door. “Don’t go into this program just to spite him, Cappy.”

  “It’s w
hat I want to do,” she insisted. “I don’t think you ever understood that. I don’t deliberately do things to upset him. There are things I want to do because they give me pleasure. Haven’t you ever done anything that you wanted to do? Has it always been what he wanted, Momma?”

  “I love him. I want him to be happy.” Every discussion on the subject brought a look of vague confusion to her mother’s face.

  “Haven’t you ever wanted to be happy?” But Cappy didn’t wait for an answer. Her mother was too much a reflection of her husband, even to the extent of reflecting his happiness. “What do you have, Momma? You have no home, no friends—you haven’t seen your family in years.”

  “It hasn’t been possible. The Army—”

  “Yes, the Army.” Cappy struggled with the toe-tapping anger she contained. “It’s no good, Mother. I won’t change. I won’t be like you.” She sensed the faint recoil and realized how her thoughtless remark had hurt. “I’m sorry.”

  “This is what you want?” her mother asked quietly. “To fly?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation while her mother searched Cappy’s face. “Then go do it,” she said.

  The encouragement, however reluctantly given, was totally unexpected. Misty-eyed, Cappy gave her a brief hug. “Thank you,” she said softly, then became knowingly wary. “But I promise you, I’m not going to set foot in this house again until he invites me.”

  From the living room came the harsh, commanding voice, calling, “Sue? Susan!”

  “I’m coming, Robert,” she promised over her shoulder, then exchanged a hug with Cappy.