WASP Mary Elizabeth Trebing 43-W-4
(31 December 1920 - 7 November 1943)
(excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)
Mary Trebing (43-W-4) was at Love Field getting ready for
her train trip north to Cimarron Field, just west of Oklahoma City, where she
and two other WASPs from the 5th Ferrying Group would begin ferrying Fairchild
PT-19’s trainers back to Dallas.
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| WASP Pilot Mary Trebing |
Mary was born December 31, 1920, in Royalton, near the
coalfields of Southern Illinois. …
Not long after 1935, the family moved to Gowen, Oklahoma,
where a relative who had an interest in a coal mining company was able to get
Mary’s father a job. …
Here, in the southeastern Oklahoma coal district, Mary
finished high school and in 1941 entered Eastern Oklahoma A&M College as a
mathematics major. When not in class she worked as a stenographer for the
district attorney’s office and in her free time she took flying lessons. At the
end of 1942, she left to join the WASPs. …
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, there was trouble. Her brother William said he heard
that, “her plane ran into difficulties somewhere in the vicinity of Blanchard,
Oklahoma. At the time, this was a
heavily forested area with only an auxiliary
field where there might have been a chance to crash land a plane.” With a dead
engine, Mary had barely missed crashing into a farmhouse and found herself
flying under a power line. “The vertical stabilizer of the plane caught on the
high lines,” William said, “and nosed her down into the ground. …
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| WASP Pilot Mary Trebing |
Two months shy of her 23rd birthday, Mary Trebing returned to
Boulder, Colorado for her burial.
RIP
