Word: wasps
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Athletic Commander McCampbell began winning marksmanship medals when he was in his teens. A Naval Academy graduate, he served as signal officer on the old carrier Wasp when she was ferrying planes to Malta, in the early days of the war, and was aboard her when she was torpedoed off Guadalcanal in 1942. As fighter pilots go, veteran David McCampbell is an elderly man: he was born in Bessemer, Ala. 34 years...
Pshaw. In Texas, a WASP, flying a ferry route, got so hot even at high altitude that she stripped to the waist, hung the garments on a peg, lost them to the wind, radioed Waco for help, was met at the field by a ground crew with averted eyes and a WAC bearing a shirt...
...bill would make the Women's Air-force Service Pilots a part of "Hap" Arnold's Army Air Forces. It would expand the whole WASP program to train and commission more women pilots. The bill would also give colonel's rank to handsome, energetic Jacqueline Cochran, now chief of the WASPs, and one of the ablest of U.S. airwomen...
Ramspeck and his committee went ferreting. They found out that the WASPs, earnest, hard-working and rule-abiding, are nevertheless an expensive experiment. Minimum cost of complete training for a WASP is $20,000-not $12,150, as the War Department once estimated. Of 1,313 women who have gone to WASP training schools, only 541 have graduated; 281 have flunked out; the rest are still in training. Only three WASPs (all of whom were seasoned pilots before they joined) are qualified to fly four-engine bombers. Nineteen WASPs have been killed, eleven in operational flights after graduation...
While a bill to commission Women's Airforce Service Pilots as Army officers was still kicking around in Congressional committee, 50 members of the WASP had completed their first week of schooling at the A.A.F. School of Applied Tactics at Orlando, Fla. How they jumped the legislative gun was an official mystery. But the news sparked new outbursts in the stalemated battle of the sexes over who is to ferry the Army's transports...