The Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs, were a group of civilian contractors who served the Army during WWII.
John Moseley is manager of the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Southport, and has extensively studied the history of these women. He explained, "they were civilian contractors. They were not military, though they dressed in military uniforms. They did a military job, but they didn't get the benefits that everybody else did.”
The WASPs were founded in 1943 by pilot Jackie Cochran. She had a vision for an elite group of pilots who would never say no to an assignment, Moseley said. “25,000 women will apply for this job. Only 1800 will be accepted, and of that, less than 1100 will pass.”
Women who were accepted already had 200 hours of flight time, meaning they were generally wealthy enough to pursue the career without the military’s help. And nearly all of them were white: Cochran knew most of the bases they would operate out of were in the South. The armed services weren't integrated until 1948, so black women were barred from joining, although two Asian American, one Native American, and two Hispanic American women served.
Moseley said the third class of WASPs graduated on July 3, 1943. Twenty-five of them went to the newly minted Pentagon to get their orders from Air Force Commander Hap Arnold. "And Hap Arnold said, 'We're going to take you from here in Washington, DC, and we're going to send you to this little North Carolina coastal town of Camp Davis, and you are going to be learning how to fly airplanes for target practice.'”
These civilian women were asked to tow targets behind their planes for target practice, so the men posted at Fort Fisher, Topsail Island, and Figure 8 Island could learn to shoot down aircraft.
"Every day they went up, they came back with holes in their aircraft," Moseley said.
Moseley has one of the WASP patches framed in his office at the museum in Southport. It depicts a cartoon owl in flight with a piece of canvas strung behind it, getting its tail feathers shot off. The servicemen were using live ammunition, and were sometimes so eager to hit the canvas target, they’d shoot as soon as they caught sight of it coming out of the plane’s hatch.

“These women are flying under combat conditions without any benefit to it. This is their job, and they all signed up for it. They willingly did this. This was their one thing that they could do for their country, and that's what they wanted to do.”
In their 16-months of operations, nearly 3% of the WASPs would die in service to their country. 38 women pilots died during WWII, Mosely said, but not because of anti-aircraft training. "100% of it was all equipment failure. It wasn't the women's fault. There were two deaths. Mabel Rawlinson of Kalamazoo, Michigan, and Betty Taylor Wood of Auburn, California, were killed at Camp Davis.”
The planes they used were Jalopies, Mosely said, "these old A-24 banshees that were cast offs from the South Pacific Theater, from the army, which is what they were using in this area. So these women were told, you don't say no, you accept everything, including the risks.”
The WASPs were decommissioned in 1944, just 16 months after they’d begun service, as male pilots returned from the war and took up their jobs. And they went back to civilian life, raising families, starting businesses, or operating flight schools.

It took decades for the WASPs to receive veteran benefits and be recognized as members of the military: 1977 is when they were added to the GI Bill.
Their legacy lives on in the modern Air Force, though: their stylish blue uniforms became the Air Force Blue. "Jacqueline Cochran had all the connections in the fashion industry," Moseley explained. "And so Jackie Cochran took that and made a uniform for the Wasp using a what they called Santiago blue uniform with a little beret. Looks adorable! And it became the standard uniform for the Wasp in late '43 and into '44."
WASPs in the Cape Fear also helped with the first American military drone program. They were Culver PQ-8s and Culver PQ-14s, tiny, remote-controlled aircraft that were controlled by radio waves. As they were being developed, the military needed pilots in the seats to make sure the planes would actually land correctly, Moseley said. "Fifteen women volunteered with the Camp Davis women to learn how to do this. And then they were so successful, they were broken up into five teams, and they went around the nation to all these anti-aircraft schools to show how this could help. And they were so well received, that it really started a drone program for the United States Army."
Moseley says some of the WASPs also helped save the B-29 program, which was floundering in May of 1944. Dora Dougherty as pilot and Doretha Moorman as co-pilot managed a tricky landing in Tampa, FL, and impressed Colonel Paul Tibbets, who was in charge of the B-29 program for the US Government. "This billion-dollar program to create this super high-flying aircraft," Moseley said. "He's having problems because all the men who are learning how to fly the B-29 are so used to flying B-17s or B-24s, where you actually rev up the engines before you take off. And the engines are exploding on these B-29s because that's not the way they need to be flying. But the men won't listen to Paul Tibbets."
The B-29 Superfortress Bomber program was in danger, but Tibbets asked the two WASPs to learn how to fly his planes. They spent three weeks learning how to fly the revolutionary planes, and then held a big reveal.
"So Paul Tibbetts is standing on the tarmac, brings out all of his pilots as engineers, and says, 'Okay, since you guys won't listen to me, I'm going to show you how we're going to do this,'" Moseley said. "And at that point, the B-29 goes flying around the airport, and it's making these loops and turns, and then it comes down and it lands. And he says, 'I want you to meet your new trainers.' And out these two women pop, and the men, their jaws fall to the ground."
Moseley said the men were ashamed that they'd been outflown by these women. "They realize these guys have been doing it wrong all along. They have to unlearn how to fly an aircraft to learn how to fly the B-29 and these women embarrassed the heck out of these men so that they can teach them how to do this, and that saved the B-29 program."
Many of the WASPs stuck around in military life after the war, becoming reservists, and some retired with Lieutenant Colonel and Colonel ranks in the 1970s. In 2010, they were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award a civilian can earn. They're the only group in history that's had a Congressional Gold Medal designated for them.
