Just before 8 a.m. Dec. 7, 1941, a headstrong 22-year-old flight instructor from Nashville, Tenn.’s country club set was giving a lesson over Honolulu. Just 18 months earlier, Cornelia Fort had taken her first plane ride, deciding then and there to leave behind her family’s 365-acre estate for a life in the air.
The sky was dotted with lazy fair-weather clouds as Fort and her student practiced takeoffs and landings at John Rodgers Airport, later renamed Honolulu International Airport. As she scanned the sky, Fort saw what appeared to be a military plane in the distance. She instructed her student to begin turning the single-engine Interstate Cadet toward the runway and after a moment looked again for the military plane. It was bearing down on them.
"I remember a distinct feeling of annoyance that the Army plane had disrupted our traffic pattern and violated our safety zone," she wrote in a 1943 article in Woman’s Home Companion. "He passed so close under us that our celluloid windows rattled violently, and I looked down to see what kind of plane it was.
"The painted red balls on the tops of the wings shone brightly in the sun. I looked again with complete and utter unbelief. Honolulu … was familiar with the emblem of the Rising Sun on passenger ships but not on airplanes. I looked quickly at Pearl Harbor, and my spine tingled when I saw billowing black smoke. Still, I thought hollowly, it might be some kind of coincidence or maneuvers. It might be, it must be. For surely, dear God …"
Fort landed amid machine-gun fire that killed Bob Tice, the airport manager, who had also been in the air and landed just behind her. The nation had just been plunged into war, and Fort, like every one of her countrymen and women, would never be the same.
CORNELIA Fort was born in 1919, growing up in a household with servants on an estate overseen by a houseman who doubled as chauffeur and tutored Cornelia in Latin. Her father, a prominent physician, was one of the owners of the National Life and Accident Insurance Co. She had three older brothers and was a tomboy from the time she could walk. A fearless horseback rider, she was also a terrific student and a voracious reader with an appreciation for classical music.
The seed of wonder that flowered when Fort began flying may have been planted at the 1924 Tennessee State Fair, when she and her brothers watched a barnstormer named Jersey Ringel thrill the crowd with his stunt flying and wing-walking.
Her father, who had been head of the draft board during World War I and had seen firsthand the deaths caused by dogfights and aviation mishaps, wanted to counteract the glamorous portrayal of flight they had just seen. He took the boys, ages 8 to 12, into his study when they returned home and made them swear on a Bible that they would never fly. It never occurred to him to invite 5-year-old Cornelia, who listened with rapt attention outside the door, to take the same pledge.
Like her brothers, Fort went to a public grade school, but then attended Ward-Belmont, one of the most prestigious girls finishing schools in the Southeast. She spent a year at Ogontz College outside Philadelphia — attended by Amelia Earhart 10 years earlier — before heading to Sarah Lawrence for two years, studying with teachers like Joseph Campbell, later to write "The Power of Myth," and spending weekend nights in New York.
Still, she left school at 20 a lost young woman, sure only that she could not build a life around country clubs and charity balls. Then a friend took her for a 10-minute plane ride on a sunny spring day. Fort was entranced, and she set out immediately to become a pilot. She earned her commercial and instructor’s licenses and learned aerial acrobatics. She taught in Nashville, then accepted a job in Colorado Springs, Colo., before heading off to Honolulu to work for the Ole Andrew Flying School.
With war raging in Europe, Fort wanted to contribute in some way to America’s efforts to strengthen itself militarily. She welcomed the chance to help train the potential pilots among the military personnel and defense workers in and around Pearl Harbor. They flew out of Rodgers Airport, about a mile from Hickam Field and adjacent to Pearl Harbor.
Fort also took tourists on joy rides to the far side of the island just after sunrise, when the winds were light (flying in the afternoon wasn’t always possible for light planes because of the wind). They’d circle over pineapple fields and banana trees to an old hotel called the Haleiwa, which sent a "banana wagon" to pick them up at the grass airstrip for a lavish breakfast.
Then there were the simple pleasure trips. In a letter to her family, she wrote that she flew "up into the extinct volcano Haleakala on the island of Maui and saw the gray-green pineapple fields slope down to the cloud-dappled blueness of the Pacific."
Fort and her 20-year-old friend Betty Guild sometimes ate dinner at Waikiki’s hottest nightspot, Lau Yee Chai’s, chatting and dancing to big-band music. She might shop at upscale stores like Liberty House and McInerny’s, and though she enjoyed the military men who were her students, she’d avoid their hangouts like the Army and Navy YMCA on Hotel Street, and the Black Cat Cafe, with its hula girls and 15-cent hamburgers.
This was a city of drills and blackouts — the lights might go out at night as Fort read in her apartment — where Navy destroyers and tourist ships shared a harbor.
"I’m of two minds about Honolulu — it is truly beautiful and such weather as could never be found anywhere — all blue and green and gold, sunshine without that drenching heat you might expect in the semi-tropics," she wrote in a letter home. "I spend my one day off prone on the beach (and not Waikiki, that Coney Island of the Pacific), absorbing sun and surf and resting up from my soldier-sailor-defense worker students. For this is really a boom town, and that I don’t like."
THE MORNING of Dec. 7 was as beautiful as any she had seen in Honolulu, but that was the day the city, the country and the world were turned upside down. The Japanese attack crippled the Pacific Fleet and killed more than 2,000 U.S. military personnel, including several of Fort’s students. She and Guild met at the airport the next day and were astounded at the sheer number of bullet holes in the plane Fort had been flying. It was a wonder she had lived through it.
It took three months, but Fort was able to book passage on a ship to San Francisco in March. Newspapers and newsreels wanted to talk to her, and soon she was asked to take part in a war bonds tour, telling her story in theaters in city after city on a bill with entertainers and politicians, as attendants passed the hat and took pledges to raise money for the war effort.
Fort wanted to fly, but much of civilian aviation was shut down and the military still did not want female pilots. She told a reporter at one stop, "I wish I were a man — just for the duration. I’d give anything to train to be a fighter pilot."
Her opportunity came on Labor Day weekend of 1942, when she received a telegram inviting her to New Castle Army Air Force Base in Wilmington, Del., to become part of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, the WAFS. The small squadron, eventually to number 28 women, served under Nancy Love, a 28-year-old pilot who had overseen routing and scheduling for the Ferry Division in Baltimore.
The group included heiresses and schoolteachers, flight instructors and barnstormers, all eager for the chance to serve their country. They were paid less than the men, trained longer, were given smaller planes to ferry and even had a housemother at their barracks, but still they treasured the opportunity to contribute to the war effort.
Their first mission involved ferrying six Piper Cubs from the factory in Lock Haven, Penn., to Long Island’s Mitchell Field. Curious onlookers crowded the airfield. "They would not have stared one-half as much," one of the pilots said later, "had we been freaks from the circus sideshow."
They followed that successful delivery with many more, compiling a delivery record equal to their male counterparts. By the end of the year, the Army decided to divide the women into five groups and place them at five bases nationwide, to serve as mentors for women being released from a training program headed by ace pilot Jackie Cochran in Sweetwater, Texas. Eventually, 1,100 women served in what came to be called the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP.
Fort was transferred to Long Beach, Calif., where she ferried planes to Love Field in Dallas until March 1943, when she died in a midair collision with an aircraft flown by a young lieutenant. She was the first female pilot to die on active duty in U.S. military history.
Her sisters in the sky went on to compile an excellent record, flying until December 1944, when male pilots returning from Europe asked for and were assigned the work the women had been doing.
It wasn’t until 1977 that they were recognized, with retroactive designation as a military unit, something denied them during the war. Still, Fort and the WAFS and WASP served to inspire many female pilots, including astronauts, and they continue to inspire them today.
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Rob Simbeck is author "Daughter of the Air: Cornelia Fort, Pearl Harbor and the Female Pilots of WWII" (Grove Press). He will give a talk and sign books at 10 a.m. Monday at Kaunoa Senior Center, 401 Alakapa Place, Paia, Maui ($6 for lecture, $12 with lunch; call 270-7308), and 2 p.m. Saturday at Kapolei Public Library (693-7050).
