WASP Mabel Virginia
Rawlinson
Class 43-W-3
(19 March 1917 – 23
August 1943)
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| WASP Mabel Rawlinson |
(Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)
For 26-year-old Mabel Rawlinson the problem was a stubborn
latch that wouldn’t open on her A-24’s canopy. A latch that should have saved
her life in an emergency, but couldn’t, and didn’t.
Born March 19, 1917, to William and Nora Rawlinson, in a
remote section of Delaware, Mabel was 8 years old when the family moved to
Virginia. It was a simple, country life during the Great Depression and Mabel,
the fourth child and third daughter in a family of seven, helped with all the
chores. Her mother taught school to help keep the family going. After
graduating from high school, Mabel left for Michigan, living with an aunt and
attending Western Michigan College in Kalamazoo. She graduated in 1939 with a
Bachelor of Arts degree. After graduation, she worked as
personal secretary to
Kalamazoo’s esteemed Chief Librarian Flora Roberts.
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| Women Airforce Service Pilots - WASP Mabel Rawlinson |
In 1940, she began flying lessons at Western Michigan
College as part of the Civilian Pilot Training program. She soloed on October
31 and as soon as she obtained her pilot’s license joined the local Civil Air
Patrol. She rose to the rank of sergeant with the patrol, accumulating well
over 200 hours in the air before volunteering for Jackie Cochran’s training
detachment in Houston. Mabel was a member of The Lost Platoon, class 43-W-3.
After graduation in July, she was one of the elite women that Jackie personally
chose to send to Camp Davis.
While still in her six-weeks of training, and just 18 days
after she arrived in North Carolina, Mabel was flying her first night mission
with flight instructor, Lieutenant Harvey Robillard, Jr. The 24-year old
lieutenant studied ceramic engineering at LaSalle Institute and Alfred
University in New York, but interrupted his studies in March 1942 to enlist in
the Army Air Corps.
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| WASP Mabel Rawlinson |
It was a moonless night, just past 9 o’clock, and Mabel
Rawlinson was in the front cockpit of an A-24 dive bomber. It was her first
night flight in that type of plane, although she had been flying the A-24 in
daylight. At the end of a normal flight, they were circling at about 2,000
feet, waiting for permission to land. “The tower called and told us to shoot a
landing on Runway 4,” Robillard told government investigators. Mabel entered
the normal landing pattern and at 1,100 feet, reduced power, and let the
airplane’s wheels down. Within seconds, Robillard noticed that Mabel was moving
the throttle back and forth and he realized that the engine was dead. “By that
time we were at 700 feet and were across the runway, and there, turning to the
left,” he said. “I took over and told the student to jump.” Halfway through a
slow turn at low altitude, the A-24 began to stall, its wheels crashing through
pine trees.
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| Mabel Rawlinson's Funeral |
Thrown free of the blaze, Robillard lost consciousness.
Mabel hadn’t jumped. She was still alive—the malfunctioning emergency release
latch trapping her in the blazing cockpit.
Marion Hanrahan, (43-W-3) should have been flying that
ill-fated A-24, but when her time came, she hadn’t eaten supper and Mable
offered to switch places
with her. “We were in the dining room when we heard
the siren that indicated a crash,” Marion said. “When we ran out on the field
we saw the front of her plane engulfed in fire and could hear Mabel screaming.
It was a nightmare.”
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| WASP Marion Hanrahan |
RIP
