Cornelia Fort - Second Womens Airforce Service Pilot to Die on Duty During WWII-

Pilot Cornelia Clark Fort

 WASP (Womens Airforce Service Pilot)

WAFS (Womens Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron)

Second woman to join Nancy Love's WAFS.

Second of  the 38  WASP pilots to die during WWII.

Her BT-13 collides near Merkel, TX.

21 March 1943

(5 February 1919 – 21 March 1943)

(excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP 

 

At dawn on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Cornelia left her apartment across from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and drove to John Rodgers Field for another day of takeoff and landing practice with one of her students. Just after 6:30, up in the air in one of the company’s yellow Interstate Cadets, with her student at the controls and flying in for another touch and go landing, Cornelia looked casually around. “I saw a plane coming closer,” she said. “It was in violation of the air traffic rules.” She waited for the plane to give ground as it was required to do, but when it didn’t, “I jerked the controls away from my student and jammed the throttle wide open to pull above the oncoming plane,” she said. “He passed so close under us that our celluloid windows rattled violently and I looked down to see what kind of plane it was.” With a large red sun along its fuselage and on its wings there was no doubt—Japanese! She

could see smoke rising from the harbor and Cornelia tried to convince herself it was only an exercise—a simple drill. “Then I looked way up and saw the formations of silver bombers riding in,” she said. “Something detached itself from an airplane and came glistening down. My eyes followed it down, down, and even with knowledge pounding in my mind, my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor.”

 Now it was a dash for the relative safety of the ground. A shadow passed over and a burst of bullets spattered around and into her plane’s body. “Suddenly,” she said, “that little wedge of sky above Hickam Field and Pearl Harbor was the busiest, fullest piece of sky I ever saw.” Her student was mystified, and when Cornelia landed, still running across the field toward the hangar with machine gun fire strafing the ground in front of her, the oblivious student asked her when he would ever be able to solo. Her response was curt and to the point. “Not today, brother. NOT TODAY!”