The Horrifying Deaths of Two WASP and Their Instructor

Margaret Seip

   (24 Jun 1916 - 30 Aug 1943)

Helen Jo Severson

   (2 Nov 1918 – 30 Aug 1943)

& Instructor: Lt. Calvin Atwood

  (16 Feb 1921 - 30 Aug 1943)

( Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP )

 Temperatures had reached 100º just north of Big Spring, Texas, and visibility was good, under partly cloudy skies. Helen Severson was at 2,000 feet, “flying under the hood,” a training device that made sure she couldn’t see anything but the flight instruments directly in front of her. The technique prepared a pilot to fly in the clouds or in conditions where it wasn’t possible to see the surrounding countryside. To Helen’s right was Peggy Seip who, with their instructor, Calvin Atwood, kept watch to be sure no other aircraft were in the area. They had left Sweetwater that afternoon in an UC-78 on a cross-country training flight around Big Spring with a planned return by 2 o’clock. It was the last anyone on the ground saw of them.

UC-78- "The Bamboo Bomber"

When they hadn’t returned by 5 o’clock, Avenger Field officials knew something must be wrong. They called to all of the nearby airfields to say they had a missing plane. A call came back from Big Spring Air Base that said a farmer had reported what looked like a crash in one of his fields.

…  When they arrived on the crash scene at 2:00 the next morning, they were stunned. There had been no fire. The plane had nosed in vertically with the left aileron laying a couple of hundred feet away from the main wreck and the right engine another couple of hundred feet away in the opposite direction. In between there were no marks on the ground. The plane had apparently just fallen apart in the sky. The bodies were horribly mangled, the coroner’s gruesome description of their cause of death exactly the same

WASP Helen Severson

for all three individuals. Identification of the victims would have been impossible without papers found in their clothing.

Helen Josephine Severson died just three days before the first anniversary of her marriage to Robert Severson. Robert and Helen likely met while both were studying at South Dakota State College in Brookings, but the couple married at Ft. Benning, Georgia, where Robert was finishing his Air

Corps training.

WASP Margaret Seip

Margaret June Seip was the second child and only daughter of Harry and Elizabeth Seip. She was born June 24, 1916, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While most of her friends knew her as Peggy, her younger brother called her Maggie. She had been a member of the Ninety-Nines, the Civil Air Patrol, and was a former Link Trainer instructor.

WASP Anna Frankman and husband Calvin Atwood

Twenty-two-year old Calvin Atwood, their instructor, died 190 miles

southwest of his home in Bryson, Texas. . In July 1941, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. After training, he came first to Houston and then Avenger Field as a flight instructor. Not long before he died, he married WASP Anna Frankman, a member of The Lost Platoon, 43-W-3.

On the evening of the tragedy, even before discovery of the bodies, Avenger Field classmates gathered outside the barracks, offering prayers in the flower garden that Maggie and Helen had planted. The zinnias, petunias, and nasturtiums were in bloom, and the morning glories that Maggie had first planted when she arrived in Sweetwater, were beginning to climb the trellis on the barracks wall.

 RIP