Trapped! WASP Edith Clayton Keene- The Nineteenth WASP to Die

Edith “Edy” Clayton Keene 44-W-1

Trapped as a passenger in an AT-6 Texan when a wing tore off and the plane crashed near Mission, Texas.

(19 December 1920 – 25 April 1944)

Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) Edith Clayton Keene

UCLA Graduate and Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) Edith Clayton Keene

Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP

After 23-year-old Edith Keene (44-W-1) graduated from Sweetwater in February 1944, she quickly moved from her first assignment at Hondo Army Air Field, in Hondo Texas to just north of the Mexican border at the Mission, Texas Army Air Base. Edith had learned to fly in the Pomona Junior College Civilian Pilot Training program, given at Brackett Field, an airfield located between the cities of La Verne and Pomona, California.

Around Moore Field, on the Mission Army Air Base, the thermometer was climbing its way to 90º on April 25, 1944. There had been a trace of rain early in the morning, but the afternoon had cleared to a partly cloudy sky with an occasional light southeast breeze from the Gulf of Mexico. Edith was flying an AT-6 Texan with Robert Kuenstler Jr., who had enlisted in the Army a year earlier and had graduated from advanced flight training at Moore Field. Edith was helping Kuenstler with his navigation and instrument flight training. She had traded places with another WASP for the afternoon flight.

Kuenstler was at the stick of the AT-6, while Edith observed from the back seat. Just after 2:30, flying about 12 miles northwest of the field, Kuenstler was going through the usual dips, turns, and rolls before dropping into a dive. As he pulled back on the stick to recover, they both could hear the straining scrape of metal as one of the wings separated and fell away. The aircraft began to fall and Kuenstler quickly unfastened his harness and jumped to safety, but Edith could not. Perhaps struck by the wing, her canopy would not open and she went down to her death with the plane.

RIP

To Live and Die a WASP: Collision at Avenger Field

16 April 1944 

Collision and Death of Two Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP)

The 38

Jayne Elizabeth Erickson 44-6

(14 Apr 1921)

&

Mary Holmes Howson 44-4

 (Feb 16, 1919)

Women Airforce Service Pilots Jayne Erickson & Mary Howson

Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP:

At Avenger Field on April 16, 1944, Elizabeth Erickson (44-W-6), with 111 days still left before graduation, was almost half way through her training.

 

Twenty-five-year-old Mary Howson (44-W-4) was in the homestretch, with just 38 days to go. It was a warm Sunday afternoon with a light, southeasterly breeze—a good day for flying.

 

Mary, flying solo, was the last of her classmates to approach for a landing.They were completing a 530-mile roundtrip training flight around San Antonio.

 

Elizabeth was practicing touch and go landings. Previously, she had made three of these practice landings with her instructor, but now, she was alone in the cockpit and lining up for another landing.

 

Both women were flying AT-6 Texan trainers. For some reason, the ground controller didn’t notice that the women were both at 800 feet and descending from opposite directions. Both were on their next to the last turn, in preparation for their final approach to the runway. Elizabeth and Mary were on a collision course. …

Women Airforce Service Pilots Jayne Erickson & Mary Howson

Just after 1:20 p.m., Mary Howson and Elizabeth Erickson’s AT-6s slammed into each other. As the planes began tumbling, Mary managed to unfasten her harness, climb out of the cockpit, and jump, but she was too low and her parachute never completely opened. Elizabeth had no chance at all. She was trapped in her cockpit and unable to jump. Both women died instantly just a few yards apart.

The following evening, all of the trainees and training staff attended a memorial service for both women in the Avenger Field gymnasium. Classmates took up a collection to send both friends home.

Mickie Carmichael (44-W-4) accompanied Mary home for her funeral and burial in the Washington Memorial Chapel Churchyard, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

Elinor Fairchild (44-W-6), Elizabeth’s friend, accompanied Elizabeth to her burial in Seattle’s Lake View Cemetery.

RIP     

To Live and Die a WASP: Womens Airforce Service Pilot Margaret Sanford Oldenburg

WASP trainee Margaret Sanford Oldenburg

First of #The38 to die.

(29 July 1909 – 7 Mar 1943)

(Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

SISTERS BEGIN TO FALL

It had been a relatively quiet Sunday afternoon. A few of the women had taken advantage of the improved weather to fly some training flights. Margy Oldenburg had talked to her husband in California by phone at noon and then checked out a parachute and met Norris Morgan, her civilian instructor, on the flight line. They would fly a Fairchild PT-19, a basic trainer airplane used to introduce pilots to military aircraft before moving them up to more demanding planes.

Margy Oldenburg began her training in Houston, February 16, 1943, just 19 days earlier. At 33 she was one of the older student pilots, and at first, a bit shy. But soon she was entertaining small groups of trainees by singing the Hawaiian songs she had learned while visiting friends on the

WASP Margaret Sanford Oldenburg

islands. “She had a smile for everyone,” one student said. Born Margaret Burrows Sanford near Cleveland, Ohio in 1909, the youngest daughter of Percy and Mary Sanford, her family had moved to New York by 1915. … She married Jacob Oldenburg in late 1940. Jack, as he preferred to be called, was a salesman for a metal works company and had left his home in Ohio just a few years before. He was a member of the United States Naval Reserve.

Norris Morgan, Margy’s instructor, had been flying since 1933. Born and raised in Galva, Illinois, Morgan was a graduate of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with a degree in agricultural engineering. After graduation, he worked with his uncles in Illinois’ first hybrid seed company, known simply as Morgan Brothers. … In late 1942, 41-year-old Norris Morgan

volunteered for wartime duty as a civilian flight instructor. …

Just about 6 in the evening, March 7, 1942, the base siren in Houston began to wail an emergency call. Because it was a Sunday, many of the women trainees had already left the Houston base for home. Those who remained had never heard the siren sound that way before, because now it was announcing an accident, and there hadn’t been an accident at Houston since classes began the previous November. An unexplained spin had suddenly sent Margy’s PT-19 hurling straight down into a pasture seven miles southeast of the Houston Airport. She and Norris smashed into the ground at such speed that both of them died instantly….

The women of the 319th were still in shock. Margy Oldenburg was the first of their sisters to die. They had known the dangers before they signed up, and yet, they never really believed there would ever be any trouble. Now they would try to remember to fly carefully. They would exude confidence in their flying abilities to family and to everyone on the outside. They were sure that this need not happen again, but inside, in their deepest thoughts, they hoped that they’d never make a mistake.

 #RIP 

 

To Live and Die a WASP: The Tragedy of Betty Stine

WASP Betty Pauline Stine 44-W-2

(13 September 1921 - 25 February 1944)

#The38

(Quote from To Live and Die a WASP)

Betty Stine, WASP Class 44-W-2 prepared to leave on her final cross-country flight before graduation. …

Betty graduated from Santa Barbara High School in June 1939 with dreams of becoming an airline

WASP Pilot Betty Stine

stewardess. Her father, Jake, was born in the oil fields of Oklahoma, but when his mother died when Jake was eight years old in 1909, his father sent him to live with Jake’s grandparents, in Castleberry, Texas, near Fort Worth. … There, in late 1920, Jake married Mary Allen.

Betty, their only child, was born the following September. Because Jakes uncle was humorist Will Rogers, he named Betty after Will’s wife, Betty Blake. For his daughter’s middle name he chose Pauline, after Pauline McSpadden, a daughter of one of Will Rogers’ sisters. …

On February 24, 1944, Betty, along with 12 of her classmates, were returning to Avenger Field from their final cross-country training flight. Graduation

was 16 days away. She had just taken off in an AT-6 Texan from Blythe Army Airfield in southeastern California, and had crossed over the Colorado River into Arizona. A little after 4:00 in the afternoon, officials believe an exhaust spark set fire to the fabric-covered portion of the Texan’s tail assembly. With the tail on fire and about to separate from the plane, Betty bailed out over the mountains surrounding Quartzite, Arizona; less than 25 miles from Blythe.

Lewis Aplington, owner of mines around Quartzite, saw the burning plane and Betty’s parachute dropping to the ground. It took over 45 minutes for Aplington and two other miners, riding in a truck, to find her in the rugged terrain. Betty was unconscious, but still alive. The high winds had dragged her chute over sharp rocks and

Plomosa Mountains, Quartzite, Arizona

boulders and her body was beaten, broken, and bloodied. …

Returned to a nearby Army base hospital, she died within hours. The 22-year-old’s body was sent home for burial in the Santa Barbara Cemetery.

 

WASP Betty Stine and Her Instructor

If only Betty Stine had known how to control her parachute on the ground in strong winds, she never would have died. Officers at Avenger Field hadn’t anticipated the need for advanced training in parachute jumps and landings, but Betty’s death had changed all of that almost immediately. …

RIP

Next to last WASP (Women Airforce Service) pilot to die in WWII

WASP Katherine Applegate Keeler Dussaq. Class 44-W-1.

(1905 – 26 November 1944)

 (Excerpt from To Live and Die a WASP)

WASP Katherine Keeler Dussaq

The day after WASP Hazel Lee Louie died (25 November 1944); 39-year-old Kay Dussaq (Class 44-W-1) was in trouble over Western Ohio. Perhaps it was the freezing rain, the fog, or ice, but at about 8:45 in the evening Kay’s AT-6 was going down near New Carlisle, Ohio. For some reason, Kay was not wearing her safety harness, and when the plane crashed, she struck her head on the control stick and died instantly.

Katherine Applegate was born in Dayton, Washington, March 14, 1905. Hers was an Oregon pioneer family. In 1846, her great uncle,

WASP Katherine Keeler Dussaq

Jesse Applegate, had blazed the Applegate Trail into the Oregon Territory. Her Father, Arthur McClellan Applegate, had risen from laboring in a flourmill to manager of several flour mills in Oregon and Washington. He had married Kay’s mother, Clare Moritz, in November 1898. Kay was their third daughter and grew up in Dayton with her three sisters and two brothers. After graduation from Harrington High School, she

attended Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, and then the State College of Washington in Pullman. In 1924, she was one of 70 students out of 700 applicants accepted by Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California. She graduated in 1927 with a degree in Psychology.

In 1929, she and one of her friends from Stanford, Leonarde Keeler, went to Chicago and began working at Northwestern University in the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory. Kay and Leonarde married, August 14, 1930.

They divorced in May 1941 and the following December Kay married Rene Dussaq. Dussaq was a popular lecturer. Within days of their marriage, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and in March 1942, Dussaq enlisted. Kay closed her consulting business and went to work for the Piper Aircraft Cooperation in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania.

Kay applied to the WASPs and began training at Avenger Field, August 9, 1943. By graduation the following February, she had raised her total flying time to over 400 hours. Her assignment was Sioux Falls Army Base in South Dakota, but soon she transferred to Randolph Field, near San Antonio, Texas.

WASP Katherine Applegate Keeler Dussaq

Because of her flying hours, and the recognition she had attained during her decade of scientific crime fighting, at age 39, Kay moved quickly from staff pilot to Coordinator of WASP activities. Just before her fatal flight, Kay had received another promotion. She moved to Training Command Headquarters in Houston as WASP Executive for all three training commands.

After her crash Kay was returned home for burial in the Dayton, Washington City Cemetery.

RIP

A Thanksgiving heartbreak - WASP Hazel Ying Lee Louie

A Thanksgiving heartbreak

---

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.

The Fall of WASP Pilot Mary Elizabeth Trebing

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.

 

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

WASP Pilot Mary Trebing

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. …

  Two months shy of her 23^rd birthday, Mary Trebing returned to Boulder, Colorado for her burial.

RIP