Cornelia Clark Fort was not supposed to be a pilot.
She was born in 1919 into one of Nashville’s wealthiest families. Her father, Dr. Rufus Elijah Fort, had co-founded the National Life and Accident Insurance Company — the company that would later start WSM radio, which would launch the Grand Ole Opry. The Forts lived on a sprawling estate called Fortland along the Cumberland River, in the part of East Nashville where society families kept country properties. Cornelia was a debutante. She attended Ward-Belmont, the finishing school on Belmont Boulevard where well-bred Nashville girls learned to be well-bred Nashville women.
She learned to fly instead.
In 1940, at twenty-one, she walked into a local airfield and took a lesson. Something locked into place. Within months she had her private license. Within a year she had her commercial license and her instructor’s rating — the first woman in Tennessee to earn one. Her family did not understand. Nashville society did not understand. She didn’t care. She took a job as a civilian flight instructor at an airfield in Fort Collins, Colorado, and then, because Colorado was not far enough from Nashville, she took a position at the John Rodgers Civilian Airport in Honolulu, Hawaii. The airport sat on a spit of land adjacent to Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field.
She was twenty-two years old and about as far from Ward-Belmont as a person could get.
On the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, Fort arrived at the airfield before dawn. Shortly after 6:30, she went up with a student — a man she identified in her later writing only as Soumala — in an Interstate Cadet, a small monoplane with celluloid windows and a cruising speed of about ninety miles an hour. They were practicing takeoffs and landings, the most routine lesson in aviation.
Coming in for what would have been the last landing, Fort glanced around and saw a military plane flying directly toward her. She grabbed the controls from her student, jammed the throttle open, and pulled the Cadet into a steep climb. The plane passed so close beneath them that the celluloid windows rattled.
She looked down to see what kind of aircraft it was.
Red circles on the tops of the wings. The Rising Sun.
She wrote about it later, in an essay titled “At the Twilight’s Last Gleaming” that was published posthumously:
“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 … Then I looked way up and saw the formations of silver bombers riding in. Something detached itself from an airplane and came glistening down. My eyes followed it down, down and even with knowledge pounding in my mind, my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor.”
She landed the Cadet as fast as she could. As she touched down, a shadow passed over her and bullets spattered the ground around the plane. Japanese fighters were strafing the airfield. She got her student to cover. Two of the little civilian trainers from her flight school never came back — they washed ashore weeks later on the windward side of Oahu, riddled with bullet holes.
Cornelia Fort — Nashville debutante, Ward-Belmont girl, daughter of the National Life fortune — was one of the first Americans to see the attack on Pearl Harbor. She was already airborne when it started.
She stayed in Hawaii for three months. There was no civilian flying allowed after the attack. She returned to the mainland by convoy, took a job instructing in a Civilian Pilot Training program, and waited.
In September 1942, a telegram arrived from the War Department. Nancy Love was forming the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron — the WAFS — to ferry military aircraft from factories to airfields across the country, freeing male pilots for combat overseas. The telegram said to report within twenty-four hours if interested.
Fort left at once. She was the second woman to join the squadron.
She knew what she was doing and she knew what it meant. She wrote: “I knew I was going to join the Women’s Auxiliary Ferry Squadron before the organization was a reality, before it had a name, before it was anything but a radical idea in the minds of a few men who believed that women could fly airplanes.”
She ferried trainers — PT-19s, BT-13s — from factories to training bases across the country. The work was unglamorous and essential. She wrote about that too: “They chatter about the glamour of flying. Well, any pilot can tell you how glamorous it is. We get up in the cold dark in order to get to the airport by daylight. We wear heavy cumbersome flying clothes and a thirty-pound parachute.”
But she also wrote this: “I can’t say exactly why I fly but I know why as I’ve never known anything in my life.”
In Nashville, the Fort family’s estate along the Cumberland became an airfield in 1945 — Cornelia Fort Airpark. Pilots landed on a strip of grass between the river and Shelby Bottoms for sixty-five years. Patsy Cline was supposed to land there on March 5, 1963, but her plane went down in Camden, Tennessee, ninety miles short. Earl Scruggs overshot the runway in fog in 1975 and survived.
The 2010 flood swamped the airfield. The city bought the property for $1.2 million and folded it into the Shelby Bottoms Greenway. The runway is still there — people walk and bike on it now. There is no plaque that tells you a Nashville girl saw Pearl Harbor from the air and then came home and gave everything she had left.
The airpark is named for her. Most of the people who use it don’t know who she was. She was a debutante who chose engines over etiquette, who was airborne over the most famous surprise attack in American history, who joined the war effort the day the telegram arrived, and who described what flying meant to her better than almost anyone ever has:
“I know it in dignity and self-sufficiency and in the pride of skill. I know it in the satisfaction of usefulness.”
She was twenty-two when the bombs fell. She was twenty-four when she died.
Photo: U.S. Air Force / Public Domain