The photograph above was taken on March 7, 1943, at New Castle Army Air Base in Wilmington, Delaware. The women in it are pilots of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron — the WAFS. They are standing on a flight line in uniform, the planes behind them. Two weeks after this picture was taken, one of them was dead.
By the spring of 1943, Cornelia Fort had been ferrying military trainers for six months. The work was straightforward and dangerous in the way all flying is dangerous: weather, mechanical failure, unfamiliar airfields, the accumulated fatigue of long cross-country legs in open-cockpit aircraft. The WAFS flew the planes that male pilots didn’t want to fly — the slow ones, the trainers, the aircraft that needed to get from a factory in California to a base in Texas without tying up a combat-ready pilot.
Fort flew PT-19s and BT-13 Valiants. She was good at it. She had survived Pearl Harbor. She had more flight time and more nerve than most of the men she worked alongside. She was one of the original twenty-eight women selected by Nancy Love — chosen for experience, skill, and temperament, because the entire future of women in military aviation depended on the first group not failing.
She knew the stakes. She had written: “All of us realized what a spot we were on. We had to deliver the goods or else. Or else there wouldn’t ever be another chance for women pilots in any part of the service.”
On March 21, 1943, Fort was part of a group ferrying BT-13 Valiants from Long Beach, California, to Love Field in Dallas, Texas. They were flying in loose formation over west Texas, near the town of Merkel.
A male officer — Flight Officer Frank Stamme Jr. — was flying too close. The kind of close that male pilots sometimes flew around the women, either showing off or testing them or doing whatever it is that men do when they fly next to a woman and forget that the physics don’t care. Stamme’s landing gear struck the left wing of Fort’s BT-13.
The impact was enough to send her plane into an unrecoverable dive. Fort could not bail out. The aircraft went in. She was killed on impact.
Stamme landed safely. He was not court-martialed. The official report attributed the collision to his flying in an unauthorized close formation. He was reprimanded. That was the end of it for him.
Cornelia Fort — the Nashville debutante who saw Pearl Harbor from the cockpit, the first woman in Tennessee to earn an instructor’s rating, the second woman recruited into the WAFS, the pilot who could describe why she flew better than the poets — was the first female pilot in American history to die on active military duty. She was twenty-four years old.
Her body was returned to Nashville. She is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery, the same graveyard where Nashville buries its governors and its generals. Her headstone reads: “Killed in the Service of Her Country.”
It is a simple statement and it was not easily won. The WAFS and their successors, the Women Airforce Service Pilots — the WASPs — were classified as civilians for the duration of the war. They received no military benefits. They were not eligible for veterans’ status. When a WASP died in service, the military would not pay to ship the body home. The other women in the squadron would pass a hat to cover the cost. It took until 1977 — thirty-four years after Fort’s death — for Congress to grant the WASPs retroactive military status.
Fort’s essay, “At the Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” was published posthumously in the July 1943 issue of Woman’s Home Companion, four months after her death. It is one of the finest pieces of writing to come out of the war — not because it describes combat but because it describes purpose. She wrote about what it meant to ferry a trainer to Texas while other pilots flew bombers to Africa:
“Delivering a trainer to Texas may be as important as delivering a bomber to Africa if you take the long view.”
She wrote about watching a bomber take off during a review, followed by four fighters, and knowing the bomber was headed across the ocean:
“As they circled over us I could hardly see them for the tears in my eyes. It was striking symbolism and I think all of us felt it. As long as our planes fly overhead the skies of America are free and that’s what all of us everywhere are fighting for.”
And the last line she ever published — the sentence that sits at the end of the essay, written by a woman who had already cheated death once over Pearl Harbor and had no way of knowing she wouldn’t cheat it again:
“That’s all the luck I ever hope to have.”
The airfield in Nashville that bears her name is quiet now. The runway along the Cumberland River is a walking trail. The planes are gone. The wind still comes off the river the same way it always did, and if you stand on the old tarmac and face east, toward the bend in the Cumberland, you can feel what a pilot would have felt approaching from that direction — the drop in the terrain, the trees falling away, the flat strip of land opening up in front of you.
Cornelia Fort left Nashville because she wanted to fly. She saw Pearl Harbor because she was already in the air when everyone else was still asleep. She joined the WAFS because the telegram came and she didn’t hesitate. She died because a man flew too close to her airplane and didn’t know what he was doing.
She was twenty-four. She had been a pilot for three years. She had been alive for the most consequential eighteen months in American aviation history. She is buried in Nashville, and her name is on an airfield that most Nashvillians drive past on their way to Shelby Bottoms without stopping.
Her headstone says Killed in the Service of Her Country. It doesn’t say she was the first. It doesn’t have to.
Photo: U.S. Air Force / Public Domain