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LTC NANCY HARKNESS LOVE
Nancy Harkness was born on February 14, 1914 in Houghton, Michigan, to Alice Chadbourne and Dr. Robert Bruce Harkness, a wealthy physician.
Nancy and her older brother Robert were encouraged to pursue their own interests. Her biggest love was horseback riding, and she especially loved wilderness trips involving overnight camping. Dr. and Mrs. Harkness insisted that their children get a good education, and Nancy went to schools in Houghton and later in Massachusetts. In 1927, she spent a year abroad traveling and studying in Europe and was among the crowds who witnessed Charles Lindbergh’s triumphant landing at Le Bourget after his successful trans-Atlantic solo flight, which ushered in the golden age of aviation.
However, was a pair of intrepid barnstorming pilots who made their way to Houghton in the summer of 1930 who really captured Nancy’s attention. ‘A penny a pound and up you go,’ was their pitch to first-time customers. Gathering up her pennies, Nancy was among those who decided to go for a ride. Something magical happened during that flight. Even before she landed, Nancy was figuring out how to scrape up the cash for another flight and how to convince her parents to let her take flying lessons.
Dr. and Mrs. Harkness were ambivalent about Nancy’s great plan. While Dr. Harkness had always encouraged his children to show spunk and be independent, even he was hesitant. Nancy was determined though, and begged her parents for aviation lessons. Despite her mother’s belief that “nice young ladies don’t do such things,” her parents reluctantly agreed to send her to flying school.
Nancy began taking lessons at age 16 in a decrepit old Fleet. Her instructor, Jimmy Hanson, was only two years older than she was and had very little experience, Nancy was his first student. She stated later, ‘I don’t think he knew what made the plane stay in the air. At least he never told me. My instructions were just to ‘keep up the flying speed.” Nancy was determined to solo before she had to return to school in Massachusetts, but that left only a month to cram in all the necessary lessons. She took to it naturally. She spent 13 hours in the air with her instructor 10 hours in the sky by herself, and she passed one examination. With that, the Aeronautics Branch of the Department of Commerce informed her that she was qualified to be a pilot. For reference, now you have to have 90 hours of flying time before you can do a solo flight.
On November 7, 1930, at age 16 1/2, Nancy Harkness was issued her private pilot’s license. She was ecstatic and promptly set off on her first cross country flying trip. She loaded up two passengers and luggage for a flight from Boston to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in order to visit friends at Vassar College. It ended badly.
“In the first place, the ship was far too large and complicated for my fifteen solo hours,” Harkness recalled. “Once in the air, I realized I had never used an aircraft compass before. I couldn’t read it!…. My two passengers were sitting in the back. They had no idea how inadequate and frightened I suddenly felt.”
“I noticed ugly clouds coming from the west, and they were moving fast,” she remembered. “I couldn’t really see that well. I flew lower and lower in an effort to see out. With that, the oil gauge broke and smeared black stuff all over the windscreen…. I had to hang my head out the open side window. My inflamed imagination convinced me the motor was about to stop.” No one was injured when she made an emergency landing but she landed in a coal yard so small that her plane had to be taken apart to extricate it.
Nancy enrolled in Vassar College in 1931 and became known as the “Flying Freshman” for organizing a collegiate flying club. But her family’s financial reserves during the Great Depression caused her to withdraw from college in January 1934.
By the fall of 1934, Nancy had found a flying job in Boston with a new company called Inter-City Air Service. The company had been founded by Robert Love (with financial help from his sister Margaret) in 1932. Robert Love had attended Princeton University before transferring to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Mass. Love learned to fly at MIT, and he decided to abandon school in favor of starting his own company. He was also a major in the Air Corps Reserve.
Inter-City offered every service from flight instruction to aerial surveying. This included a scheduled passenger service running from East Boston Airport (known today as Logan International Airport) as well as charter flights. Nancy was hired to help sell new airplanes–a new market that Inter-City was trying to enter. It was the oldest gimmick in the book, but women pilots were used not only to persuade reluctant buyers of new aircraft but also to sell the idea of aviation to the nation–after all, the logic went, if a woman can do it then it must not be so difficult.
Sadly, because of the Great Depression the company didn’t fare well. Nancy was recruited by the newly formed Bureau of Air Commerce (BAC), a predecessor of the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), heard of her talents and hired her to serve as a test pilot for the Bureau and as a member of the Air Marking program, whose mission was to aid pilots by placing navigational markers on water towers and other high-reaching structures. Nancy was responsible for placing over 290 markers throughout Massachusetts alone. In the BAC’s workshop facility, she tested the newest aerial technology of the day, tricycle landing gear, which most aircraft manufacturers would later adopt as the industry standard.
In 1936 Nancy and Robert married and flew themselves from the east coast to California for their honeymoon.
The marriage was splashed all over the Boston papers — “BEAUTIFUL AVIATRIX WEDS DASHING AIR CORPS OFFICER” read one headline; “THE ROMANCE OF THE GLAMOROUS YOUNG SOCIETY COUPLE MEETS THE ROMANCE OF THE SKY” announced another. The marriage did more than give Nancy public attention. It placed the already extremely capable pilot in an excellent position to lobby for a women’s flying squadron when WW2 broke out.
In May 1940, soon after World War II broke out in Europe, Nancy wrote to Lt. Col. Robert Olds, then in the Plans Division of Air Corps Headquarters but who a year later would be in charge of establishing the Air Corps Ferrying Command, that she had found 49 excellent women pilots, who each had more than a thousand flying hours and could help transport planes from factories to bases. Olds submitted a plan for integrating civilian female pilots in the Ferrying Command to Gen. Hap Arnold, commanding general of the United States Army Air Forces, who turned it down after Jacqueline Cochran extracted a promise from him not to act on any proposal regarding women pilots that did not make them commissioned officers commanded by women.
In early 1942, her husband Robert Love was called to active duty in the Munitions Building, Washington, D. C. as the deputy chief of staff of the Ferrying Command. Nancy accompanied him to Washington and on March 11 took a civil service position in Baltimore, Maryland with the Operations Office of the Ferrying Command’s Northeast Sector (soon redesignated 2nd Ferrying Group), Domestic Division. The Domestic Division, commanded by Col. William H. Tunner, was designated Ferrying Division, Air Transport Command (ATC) a few months later. She piloted her own airplane on her daily commute from the couple’s home in Washington, D. C. The offices of Major Love and COL Tunner were near each other, and during a conversation between them, her piloting skills caught the attention of COL Tunner, who was scouring the country for skilled pilots to deliver aircraft from factories to fields. Major Love suggested COL Tunner speak to his wife directly.
Nancy convinced COL Tunner that the idea of using experienced women pilots to supplement the existing pilot force was a good one. He then asked her to write up a proposal for a women’s ferrying division. When his recommendation that she (and the other female pilots) be commissioned into the Women’s Army Corps (WAAC) was denied, he appointed her to his staff as Executive of Women’s Pilots. Within a few months, she had recruited 29 experienced female pilots to join the newly created Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). Nancy became their commander. In September 1942, the women pilots began flying from New Castle Army Air Field, Wilmington, Delaware, under the 2nd Ferrying Group.
By June 1943, Nancy Love was commanding four different squadrons of WAFS at Love Field, Texas; New Castle, Delaware; Romulus, Michigan; and Long Beach, California. The WAFS’ number had greatly increased because of the addition of graduates of the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas, an organization championed and headed by Jacqueline Cochran.
On August 5, 1943, the WAFS merged with the WFTD and became a single entity: the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Nancy Love was named the executive for all WASP ferrying operations. Under her command, female pilots flew almost every type military aircraft then in the Army Air Force’s inventory, and their record of achievement proved remarkable.
She was the first woman to be certified to fly the North American P-51 Mustang, C-54, B-25 Mitchell, and along with Betty Gillies, the B-17 Flying Fortress. She was certified in 16 military aircraft, including the Douglas C-47 and the A-36.
In 1944, after the WASPs were disbanded, Nancy set a record of being the first woman in aviation to make a flight around the world. She flew the plane at least half of the time, including crossing over the Himalayas.
At the end of the war, Nancy and her husband had the unique distinction of being decorated simultaneously. He received the Distinguished Service Medal, and she the Air Medal for her “Operational leadership in the successful training and assignment of over 300 qualified women fliers in the flying of advanced military aircraft”.
After the war, Nancy Love had three daughters, but she continued as an aviation industry leader, as well as a champion for recognition as military veterans for the women who had served as WASPs. In 1948, after the creation of the United States Air Force she was designated the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves.
LTC Love died of cancer at the age of 62 in 1976, so she did not live to see the WASPs being accorded military recognition in 1977.
LTC Love was posthumously inducted into the Airlift/Tanker Association in 1996, the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 1997, and the National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio in 2005. A statue dedicated to Nancy Harkness Love is at the New Castle County Airport in Delaware.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/flygirls-nancy-harkness-love/
http://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/alumni/nancy-love.html
CPT Ola Mildred “Millie” Rexroat
Millie was born in Kansas, in 1917 to Ulysses and Clara Rexroat. Her father was a publisher and editor. His job moved the family and an Oglala mother. Native American (Oglala Lakota) from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota,
When Millie was a little girl, she often visited her grandmother on the Pine Ridge Reservation. She graduated from the St. Mary’s Episcopal Indian School in Springfield, South Dakota, in 1932.
Millie attended college in Chadron, Nebraska, to earn a degree in teaching, but she left school to work for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
In 1935 she attended college at the university of New Mexico and graduated in 1939 with a bachelor’s degree in art. After college, she once again worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in this time in Gallup, New Mexico.
At the Start of WW2, Millie, her mother and sister moved to Washington DC and worked for the Army War college. They worked clerical jobs, but Millie wanted to do more. When she learned about the Women Airforce Service Pilots, WASP, she was sold.
Millie did not have flying experience, which was a requirement, but that was not going to stop her. She found a local flight school and learned to fly at a cost of $8 an hour. After 35 hours of flying, and a total of $280, she was now qualified to apply for the WASP program.
She graduated from training in Sweetwater, Texas, in 1944, and became the only Native American woman to serve in the WASPs.
Millie was stationed at Eagle Pass Army Airfield where she took on the dangerous job of towing aerial gunnery targets to help new recruits learn to operate the big machinery.
Even though Millie was trained to fly aircraft, she never learned how to drive a car.
Millie said the one day a superior tossed her the keys to a jeep and instructed her to go drive out and retrieve a target.
Millie commented that it was funny because she didn’t think anyone had ever trusted her with a car before, but she could fly a plane
When asked if she was worried about the dangers of flying or getting shot, Millie replied:
“I never gave it a thought. You couldn’t worry about things like that. … You can’t live forever,” she said. “They checked the target after we came down, and of course, it was to our credit if it had lots of holes in it; that meant we had been maintaining our altitude and heading.”
WASP was disbanded in 1944, as ww2 came to an end. Millie joined the Air Force reserves, and served for ten years as an air traffic controller. She was stationed at Kirkland Air Force Base in New Mexico and served on active duty during the Korean War as well.
After she left the military, she continued to work as an air traffic controller for the Federal Aviation Administration for another 33 years.
After retiring in 1973, she focused on her passion for art, creating original artworks in a variety of media and techniques.
Millie also served two terms as the President of the North American Indian Women’s Association (NAIWA).
In 2007 she was inducted into the South Dakota Aviation Hall of Fame.
Millie died in June 2017 at the age of 99. Before her death she was the last surviving WASP in South Dakota. Of the original 1,074 WASPs she was one of the remaining 275 still alive.
In October 2017, the 28th Bomb Wing dedicated the Airfield Operations Building in honor of her. The Ellsworth Airfield Operations Building was renamed the “Millie Rexroat Building,”.
The WASPs were viewed as civilians during and after their service. It wasn’t until President Carter signed a bill in 1977 that they were able to receive their rights.
These women were not recognized as veterans. When a WASP died in the line of duty, the military did not pay for the funeral or ship their remains home. It was usually the other WASPs that would pitch in and cover the costs.
When the WASPs were disbanded, they were also responsible to pay for their own way home.
After the president signed the bill making WASPS a part of the Air Force, the women were then able to receive military burial rights, (buried with a flag and in a military cemetery) and they also finally had access to the Veterans Affairs Hospitals.
Many of the records that had contained information about the WASP program had ben sealed, so many of these women and their stories were forgotten. It wasn’t until the 1970’s before these stories were available to researchers and that’s also the time that many women started pushing for better recognition.
July 9, 2009, WASPs were awarded the congressional Gold Medal. Sadly, many of the women who had served in the program had passed away.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/180905358/ola-mildred-rexroat-mcdonald
https://prod1.meaningfulfunerals.net/?action=obituaries.obit_view&o_id=4280882&fh_id=13288
https://foundationforwomenwarriors.org/ola-rexroat-captain-u-s-air-force/
https://cafriseabove.org/ola-mildred-rexroat/
https://www.npr.org/2010/03/09/123773525/female-wwii-pilots-the-original-fly-girls
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-111publ40/pdf/PLAW-111publ40.pdf
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