A Thanksgiving heartbreak - WASP Hazel Ying Lee Louie

A Thanksgiving heartbreak

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by Bill Miller for the Mail Tribune

Monday, November 19th 2018

 

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.

Great Falls Army Airfield, Montana

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.

#WASP Hazel Ling Lee Louie

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.
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.

WASP Hazel Lee Louie's P-63  at Great Falls AAF

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.

Japanese Invasion of Manchuria

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,

WASP Hazel Ling Lee and friend, Portland, Oregon

36 students, including Hazel Lee and one other woman, were in the air over the Columbia River.
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.
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.

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.

To Live and Die a WASP: Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) Marie Robinson Michell

Marie Michell Robinson 44-W-2

Co-pilot on B-25 out of Victorville AAF, CA. Stall, flat spin & crash.

(23 May 1924 – 2 October 1944)

 

     (Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

Marie Michell was born May 23, 1924, in Detroit, Michigan and by 1933 she and her brother Roy lived with their mother and stepfather in Chicago.

 

Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) Marie Robinson Michell

“To Marie, flying was just a natural thing,” said Roy. “She loved it.” Marie’s inspiration for flying was Jack Hayward, a young man who went to school with Roy. “Jack was already a pilot while still in high school,” Roy said. “Marie decided to impress him by becoming a pilot, too.” Marie’s skill as a pilot got her a job in Chicago as a Link flying instructor at the American Airlines Pilot Training School. On September 6, 1943, she began training at Avenger Field. That same month, Jack Hayward, now a Navy pilot, died when his airplane crashed.

After graduation from Avenger in March 1944, Marie reported to the 5th Ferrying Group at Love Field in Dallas. There, Marie met an Army flight surgeon, Captain Hampton Robinson. …
 

Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) Marie Robinson Michell

In late September, Marie transferred to Victorville Army Air Field in the California desert. ... Capt. Robinson was already at his new assignment, Reno Army Airfield. Somehow, the couple found enough time together that they decided to marry. ... In a ceremony kept secret from relatives, Hampton and Marie tied the knot. …

In the afternoon of October 2, 1944, at about 1:15, 20-year-old Marie was taking off as copilot in a B-25 Mitchell bomber. Earlier that morning her roommate, originally scheduled to fly that day, awoke with a toothache and without hesitation Marie agreed to take the roommates place. With her in the plane were the pilot, Lieutenant George Rosado, and the crew chief, Staff Sergeant Gordon Walker.

Less than a half hour after takeoff, the bomber had crashed and Marie and the crew were all dead. The only witness was an Army aviator flying nearby. … 

After the bodies were recovered, WASP Elizabeth MacKethan (44-W-2) was at Cochran Field, in Georgia, waiting to catch a hop on a transport plane to Michigan so she could be at Marie’s funeral. … She began writing a poem.

Elizabeth said the words to her poem came easily; almost as if someone were dictating them to her. When she was done, she had written “Celestial Flight,” a tribute to Marie Robinson.

The poem begins:

“She is not dead

But only flying higher,

Higher than she’s flown before,

And earthly limitations

Will hinder her no more.”

#RIP

 

To Live and Die a WASP: On-duty WASP Who Died in October

On Duty Women Airforce Service Pilots - WASP

Who died in October during WWII

RIP #The38

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

The 4th Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) Kathryn Barbara Lawrence

Kathryn “Kay” Barbara Lawrence Class 43-W-8

The fourth WASP pilot to die while flying on duty

 (3 December 1920 – 4 August 1943)

WASP Pilot
Kathryn “Kay” Barbara Lawrence Class 43-W-8

 

(Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

     Energetic Kathryn was Kay to her friends and family. Born in December 1920 to Frank and Chrissie Lawrence, Kay grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, not far from the Great Northern Railroad Depot. Her father was an engineer on the railroad and shortly after Kay’s older brother, Frank Jr. was born in 1917, the family had moved to North Dakota from Washington state. After graduating from high school, Kay began working toward her Bachelor Degree in education at the University of North Dakota. At 5 feet 4 inches tall, 125 pound Kay didn’t stand out in a crowd, but she still made the most of her college years, especially in athletics. She was a champion swimmer, and as an ice skater for the university, won the trophy for best woman speed skater on campus. As a cheerleader with the all-girl, Nodak Pep Squad, she was at every football and basketball game, making sure there was plenty of noise from the cheering fans.

     As a sophomore, in 1939, she signed up for the Civilian Pilot Training program, the only girl who wanted to fly out of the 100 collegians who had applied at five North Dakota Colleges. It brought her news coverage and her photograph in newspapers. “Cranking an airplane propeller is a woman’s job for Kay Lawrence,” said one headline. …

 

WASP Pilot
Kathryn “Kay” Barbara Lawrence Class 43-W-8

     --- It was just before 5:00 in the evening on August 4, 1943, when Kay’s PT-19 trainer lifted off from the runway at Avenger Field. Hers was the eighth flight made that day in the very same airplane. In the month since she arrived, she had flown nearly 20 hours in this type of plane, but now she was soloing. Fifteen miles and a few minutes northwest of Avenger, something happened, and no one knows exactly what. Whether pilot error or mechanical failure, the plane spun out and crashed into the ground. Kay managed to jump, but her parachute never opened. Investigators believed that she had been too close to the ground when she jumped and didn’t have time to pull her ripcord. The next day, a memorial service held at Sweetwater’s Methodist Church, brought over 100 of her fellow trainees to remember her. She returned to Grand Forks for burial; her grave marked simply as “Kay.”

 RIP