Mary Elizabeth Trebing –
Class 43-W-4, was born December 31, 1920, in Royalton, near the coalfields of
Southern Illinois.
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| WASP Mary Elizabeth Trebing |
There are two
different versions of how Mary Trebing crashed and died on November 7, 1943.
About 20 minutes after taking off from
Cimarron Field, near Oklahoma City, in her PT-19, there was trouble. Near Blanchard,
Oklahoma her plane lost power and Mary attempted an emergency landing. She barely
missed crashing into a farmhouse and found herself flying under a power line. The
vertical stabilizer of the plane caught on the line. She nosed in and crashed
in a ball of flame.
Another version,
reported by crash investigators, says that Mary had intentionally buzzed the
farmhouse and unexpectedly found herself flying under electric power lines “and
the vertical fin snagged a wire, shearing off the top of the fin, and tearing
the rudder away.”She crashed
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Two months shy of
her 23rd birthday, Mary Trebing returned to Boulder, Colorado for burial.
RIP
