Visiting the WASP Museum - part 1

After a few hours of driving from New Mexico on Friday,

...we arrived at the National WASP WWII Museum at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, TX. It is a Harvest Host and we were booked to spend the night there.

We started our visit in Hangar 1.

Some of the influential individuals on the WASP program were identified...

Nancy Harkness Love

Jacqueline Cochran

Information about the women to joined the program as trainees.

We were amazed that 25,000 applied -- 3000 of them had their flying license before applying.

Modeling "Zoot" Suits

The WASP training program, and in fact, the WASP program itself, lasted only about 2 years. When the war ended, and the men came home, the jobs they were doing were resumed by the men.

There were bios with hand prints and signatures in concrete of some of the WASP graduates. I looked through them all, looking for where they had come from (I only saw this one from Dallas). Carl noticed how long they lived -- almost all lived into their 90s, and a few lived past 100 years old.

One of the jobs that a WASP might do after graduation... what could go wrong?

A video with Beverly Beesemyer about being a WASP tow target pilot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZsHny3wjQY

WASP towing a target sleeve with and A-24A Banshee in 1944.

38 of the WASP graduates died while in service - they were recognized with their pictures displayed here and a short description of the circumstances of their deaths. There were many that had machine failure of their aircraft. Others probably made poor decisions that caused a crash. The military did not pay for services or transportation. Their fellow WASP would take up a collection among friends to send them home on the train with an escort.

Interesting that the women in WASP were not recognized until 1972 when the government touted that women going to the military academies would be the first women to fly military planes. The WASP spoke up and were recognized.

An interesting picture from 1942 with a re-creation 62 years later in 2004.

More from Hangar 2 in another post!

Note: Harvest Hosts is putting out a new website... and they put up a video on Monday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgX90Qe6zFU   Note: remember what day Monday was when watching this video!