Unsung heroes of World War II finally get their due

Women's Airforce Service Pilot Elizabeth L. Gardner
prepares for takeoff at a Texas airfield.


Jane Tedeschi when she was in the Women's
Airforce Service Pilot program.

Unsung heroes of World War II finally get their due

By Kevin Bohn
CNN Senior Producer

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- From the time she was about 8 years old, Jane Tedeschi wanted to fly.

"(Charles) Lindbergh was flying across the Atlantic, and a lot of other people were flying air races and things like that. It was very romantic," she said.

Flight was still relatively new in the 1920s and 1930s, and female pilots were few.

But Tedeschi was determined.

In 1941, she found a childhood friend who taught flying and started taking lessons. After the friend was sent off to war and the airport near her home in Bethesda, Maryland, was closed to private flying, she traveled about 40 miles to Frederick and spent nights on the floor of a farmhouse to continue her lessons.

Around the same time, Deanie Parrish was working in a bank in Avon Park, Florida, and kept seeing aviation students who were attending a flying school there.

"I asked an instructor 'Why can't I learn to fly,' and he didn't have an answer...so I decided to find out for myself."

She found an instructor and started taking lessons.

These two women were not only fulfilling a personal dream. Along with 1,100 other women, they would become an instrumental part of the war effort during World War II, becoming the first women to fly U.S. military aircraft.

The Women's Airforce Service Pilots was born in 1942 to create a corps of female pilots able to fill all types of flying jobs at home to free male military pilots to travel to the front.

In the days after the outbreak of the war, Jacqueline Cochran, one of the country's leading female pilots at the time, went to a key general to argue that women would be just as capable pilots as

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/22/woman.pilots/index.html

About 40 miles west of my home town of Abilene. The old timers out that way in Sweetwater still
talk about how good those "women pilots" were at their jobs. It's about time their service and
sacrifices were acknowledged.