MARCH 11, 2010 ISSUE
Women’s History Month Spotlight
Congressional Medal for World War II Granite Falls Woman Pilot
Sara Payne Hayden’s graduating class in 1944—the last of the classes trained as Women’s Airforce Service Pilots. Photo submitted
Sara in uniform as a pilot in 1944. Photo submitted
Disney Studios designed Fifinella and authorized it as the logo of the WASPs’ organization, Wings Over America. Download an 8 x10 image by clicking to www.wingsacrossamerica.us/wasp/fifi.htm.
Sara Payne Hayden at the Fly Girls of World War II opening at Mayborn Museum at Baylor University in Texas in 2007. Photo submitted
Granite Falls-native Sara Payne Hayden received the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor, at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. this week for piloting military aircraft in the United States in the 1940s, thereby releasing male pilots for combat during World War II.
She is one of about 300 surviving Women Airforce Service Pilots (“Airforce” was the proper spelling in the 1940s, as opposed to today’s “Air Force”), known as WASPs, who received the honor, along with families of deceased colleagues.
The women were never recognized as military and the women’s 60 million miles in almost every type of aircraft were deliberately forgotten after 1944.
“All We Wanted To Do Was Fly”
Hayden’s memory of December 1944 is hazy.
“When different [women] showed up [from a mission], what they might have said was, ‘Your orders have come. You’re through.’
“That was it. No discharge. Nothing,” she added.
The military didn’t even pay their way home. The 90-year-old Hayden was told she could take a ride on a military airplane—if there was a flight out of Randolph Army Air Base before midnight.
She caught a flight to Fort Bragg and from there returned to Charlotte, where she went back to secretarial work.
Some jobs were ferrying military aircraft across the country, but the experimental program—“the men thought the women couldn’t do it,” said Hayden—was more.
“[The military] could do anything they wanted with the women pilots,” she said. “We weren’t going to say anything. All we wanted to do was fly.
“We were test pilots to see if the aircraft was safe…when the cadets had cracked up a plane, it was repaired and we checked it out on the ground. Then we had to fly it,” she said.
“There were women who flew from North Carolina’s Camp Davis who towed targets so troops on the ground could practice with live ammunition.”
In all, 38 of 1,074 WASPs died.
Hayden graduated from Granite Falls High School, went to King’s Business College in Charlotte and began work as a secretary and bookkeeper. After the United States entered the war, a night at the movies in late 1942 changed her life: she saw a newsreel about the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron.
“[At the time the U.S.] did not have enough airplanes to have a war and did not have enough pilots to fly them,” Hayden said.
In summer 1942, the military hired qualified women pilots to ferry planes.
“When I saw this newsreel…I saw the women flying and for some reason unknown to me to this day, I said that’s what I want to do,” she remembered.
For a year, Hayden paid for basic flying lessons in Charlotte. She started military training at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas in spring 1944.
The women received $150 a month during training, then $250 a month on duty, the same as men.
“But they didn’t pay our way out there,” Hayden said.
She flew many of the Army Air Force’s planes, but her tour was short, ending unceremoniously that night in December 1944.
“The war was slowing down then, there were enough male pilots, so they told us to go home,” she said.
“I wish I could have had more of an opportunity to do the flying, but they threw us out. We got no discharge. They didn’t give us anything. We had to battle Congress [for veterans’ benefits],” she said.
They won the right of discharge and military benefits in 1977.
After the war, Hayden received a commission in the Air Force Reserve. Called to active service in 1949, she became a recruiter for two years during Korea.
“We never read a word about the WASPs. We were ignored,” she said.
Civilian life took Hayden into flight training, management of a private aviation facility in Charlotte and flying as a representative of Navion aircraft.
She has served continuously with the WASPs’ organization and is the nation’s expert in helping WASP families through the obscure discharge procedure.
“I am proud of my service as veterans’ affairs person for our WASPs. I’m the only one in [our] organization who has been doing this work. If it’s a family or a Congressman, they are going to end up with me,” she said.
Hayden has lived in Massachusetts for more than 50 years, but is often told she still sounds from North Carolina.
For more information about the WASPs, click to www.wingsacrossamerica.us.
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