It was an unusually
warm Thanksgiving afternoon in Great Falls, Montana.
With partly cloudy
skies, light winds and temperatures holding in the low 50s, operations at the
nearby Army airfield were running with clockwork precision.
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| Alaska-Siberia Air Route |
Yes, Nov. 23, 1944,
was a holiday, but with a war on, this wasn’t a time for Air Corps pilots to take
a break. Here, at the last U.S. stop on the Alaska-Siberia Air Route, rapid,
nonstop landings and takeoffs continued well into the evening. Pilots were
ferrying brand new aircraft from manufacturers across the country to Montana
and then on to Alaska. From there, Soviet pilots, America’s allies, would fly
them on to the Soviet Union.
In the early
afternoon, the Great Falls tower gave Women Airforce Service Pilot Hazel Ying
Lee Louie permission to land. Because her flight from the Bell Aircraft factory
in Niagara Falls, New York, had been delayed by a snowstorm in North Dakota,
she was anxious to land.
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| WASP Pilot Hazel Ying Lee Louie |
What Hazel didn’t
know was that Lt. Charles Russell, in a much faster airplane, was attempting an
emergency landing from behind without control from the tower. His radio was out
and he didn’t see Hazel below him. When the controller saw the impending
collision, he ordered both pilots to pull up and abort. Russell never heard the
order, but Hazel did, and immediately pulled up and smashed into the belly of Russell’s
descending plane. There was a loud explosion and a huge fireball as both
aircraft fell to the runway.
Hazel was born and
raised in Portland. The 32-year-old’s parents had come from China in 1910 and
opened a grocery and variety store.
In September 1931,
the Japanese Army invaded Manchuria and began bombing civilians.
American-Chinese were outraged and donated money to fund flight training in the
United States for pilots who would fly and fight for China. The newly formed
Chinese Flying Club of Portland began accepting memberships, and, by May 1932,
36 students, including Hazel Lee and one other woman, were in the air over the
Columbia River.
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| WASP Pilot Hazel Ying Lee Louie |
Hazel left for
Shanghai in March 1933, hoping to fight with the Chinese national air force.
She was disappointed to learn that women weren’t allowed to fly combat.
Instead, she flew cargo and passengers, and by the spring of 1935 she was a
flight instructor who occasionally dropped propaganda leaflets over the
countryside. After six years in China, she came home.
She stopped flying
and traveled to New York in an attempt to forget the devastation she’d seen.
There she worked for the Chinese government, supporting the Chinese war effort
by buying necessary war materials. While there, she reunited with Clifford Louie,
now a major in the Chinese air force. They had learned to fly together in
Portland and had left for China together.
After formation of
the WASP in 1942, Hazel joined them as quickly as she could. Two months after
graduation, and barely a year before her Thanksgiving collision in Montana,
Clifford and Hazel married, but they would never see each other again.
Just after 2
o’clock, the flaming airplanes fell to the runway. Lt. Russell managed to get
out and run to safety with minor injuries, but Hazel, knocked unconscious and
trapped in the burning plane, had to be pulled out and rushed to the base
hospital, There, she died a painful death two days later.
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| Hazel's airplane on the Great Fall Army Airfield runway |
Officials at
Portland’s Riverview Cemetery at first opposed Hazel’s burial because she was
Chinese, but they later relented. On Dec. 1, 1944, Hazel Ying Lee Louie’s
parents buried their daughter in a vaulted gravesite overlooking the Willamette
River.
Hazel's brother, Victor, was killed in action just three days later in Europe.
Writer Bill Miller
is the author of “To Live and Die a WASP, 38 Women Pilots Who Died in WWII.”
Reach him at newsmiller@live.com or WilliamMMiller.com.
BY Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune November 19, 2018
