Two weeks later, Betty checked the assignment board and found she had been ordered to report to Jacqueline Cochran at her office in the Pentagon. Some important papers were to be hand-delivered to Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. Somehow Betty had been given the task. She was delighted. This meant she would be able to meet with Jim Truxton in Washington sooner than she’d thought.
The WASP office in the Pentagon was deep in the heart of the building at the end of a long string of corridors. Jacqueline Cochran was warm and welcoming, and Betty chatted with her awhile before collecting the papers to be delivered and heading back to the Shoreham Hotel, where she would be staying for the night before flying out first thing in the morning.
That evening Betty had dinner in the hotel dining room with Jim Truxton, who had traveled to Washington to meet her on a special twenty-four-hour leave from Floyd Bennett Field in New York. Betty sized Jim up. Jim Truxton was her height and had clear blue eyes and brown wavy hair set back on a high forehead. Betty decided he must be about thirty, five years older than she was. His face was creased with a permanent smile, and she liked him from the start. Over dinner Jim told her more about himself and his work as a navy pilot. He was assigned to a duty he loved, protecting large convoys of thirty to fifty ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean from New York to England. The ships carried vital supplies to keep Great Britain’s war effort going. Because of this, many German submarines prowled the ocean waiting to torpedo and sink the ships. Jim Truxton’s job was to shadow the convoys in his Martin Mariner Seaplane, spot the submarines, and drop depth charges on them.
As dessert arrived, Jim Truxton began to unfold his vision for CAMF to Betty. By the time the evening was over, Betty had promised to pray about becoming involved with the group once the war was over.
A month later, in August 1944, Betty received a follow-up letter from Jim Truxton asking her if she would be willing to open CAMF’s first office in Los Angeles. Betty thought about it for a long time. As a WASP, she was officially a volunteer, which meant that unlike enlisted men such as Jim Truxton, she could quit anytime she wanted. Being a woman pilot made her the only “airman” who could actually begin the work of CAMF while the war was still in progress. But Betty was not a quitter. She loved her flying work, especially since she knew it was helping America’s war effort. In the end, she decided not to leave the WASP to start CAMF’s first office. Instead she decided to wait until God opened the door for her to work with CAMF.
A week later, Betty received news she could never have predicted. She was asked to copilot a C-60 Lodestar airplane to Tampa, Florida, to be used for paratroopers to practice jumping into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The first leg of the flight from Wright Field to Atlanta went without a hitch. It was after she had landed in Atlanta that Betty received the surprising news.
A short, blond woman in a WASP uniform ran up to her as she prepared the plane for refueling. “Have you heard the news?” the woman asked.
“What news?” Betty asked, thinking the woman may have confused her with someone else.
“About the WASP,” the woman replied. “We’re being disbanded!”
“Disbanded?” Betty echoed, unsure whether she had heard right.
“Yes, disbanded,” the woman replied. “There isn’t a date set yet, but they say it’s going to happen before Christmas.”
“But why would the government disband the WASP before the war is over?” Betty asked, trying to understand the news.
“General Arnold says the work the WASP does is going to become part of the Army Air Force. And of course, the kicker is, women can’t be in the military. So we’re all going to be dumped.”
Betty’s heart sank. Was her “military” career about to come to a premature end after all?
The question lingered in her mind as she completed the second leg of the flight to Tampa and as she flew across the Gulf of Mexico dropping paratroopers dressed in full combat gear over the deep blue waters.
When Betty got back to Wright Field two days later, the news was official. It came in the form of a letter from Jacqueline Cochran addressed to all WASP personnel. Betty’s heart sank as she read it. “The Army Air Force will issue a certificate of honorable service and discharge similar to the type issued to officers when they are relieved from active duty. In addition, you will receive a card designating you as a rated pilot of military aircraft indicating the horsepower rating for which you are qualified. These cards can be used as a basis to obtain a CAA commercial license in the same manner as do male military pilots…. Those who wish to continue to fly for the Army Air Force will be disappointed, but no WASP familiar with the pertinent facts would question the decision or its time limits….”
As if that were not blunt enough, there was also a letter from General H. Arnold. It read, “The WASP became part of the Army Air Force in order to release male pilots for other duties. Their very successful record of accomplishments has proved that in any future total effort the nation can count on thousands of its young women to fly any of its aircraft. You have freed male pilots for other work, but now the war situation has changed and the time has come when your volunteered services are no longer needed. The situation is that if you continue to serve, you will be replacing instead of releasing our young men. I know that the WASP wouldn’t want that. So I have directed that the WASP program be inactivated and all WASP be released by 20 December 1944.”
Gradually the “pertinent facts” Jacqueline Cochran referred to in her letter began to filter down to the women. A bill to militarize women pilots and allow them to serve as enlisted women had been defeated in Congress in June 1944. The bill had failed mostly because of the lobbying efforts of a group of male civilian flight instructors who had been hired by the Army Air Force as flight trainers. As such they were exempt from being drafted to go overseas and fight. However, by now the final outcome of the war seemed certain, and the need to train new pilots began to taper off. The United States now had more than enough trained pilots. With no more pilots to train, the male civilian flight trainers would be drafted and sent off to fight. To avoid this, they needed to come up with some other essential unenlisted flying tasks. Their solution was to take over the WASP jobs and keep themselves and their civilian salaries safe at home.
When they discovered the truth, many of the women were upset. They had risked their lives alongside the men, only to be thrown aside when it suited the powers that be. And when they applied for jobs as commercial pilots, they were offered positions as stewardesses. They were told the “real” flying jobs were being held open for male pilots when they returned home from the war.
Betty was offered a nonenlisted secretarial job in the Army Air Force, which she turned down. She had joined the WASP to use her flying skills, not her office skills, to help the war effort. And now it seemed her flying services were no longer needed. As her days of flying military aircraft wound down, Betty was not bitter, as were so many of her colleagues. All along she had been preparing to put her flying skills to work in another direction.
Betty had accumulated extra leave time, so in early October 1944, she began packing her bag for the train trip back to Evergreen Point, Washington, to visit her parents, whom she hadn’t seen in eighteen months.
Three days before she was due to leave, a good friend and fellow pilot asked her if she would fly a new experimental plane with him to Baltimore. She was torn between wanting to get home to her parents and taking one last flight, especially in a new airplane. In the end she told her friend she would go with him if he could not find anyone else to go along.
Her friend did not call her back, so Betty assumed he had found someone else to copilot the airplane. Two days later, the solemn news was delivered to the assembled crowd in the mess hall. The plane had taken off from Baltimore on a return flight to Wright Field, but after only three minutes in the air it exploded in a huge fireball. All those aboard—Betty’s pilot friend, the general in charge of helicopter development at Wright Field, an operations officer, and a three-man crew—were killed.
That evening was Betty’s last night as a WASP, and she took a long walk in the cool fall air. She was saddened by the news she’d just heard, and relieved that once again she had narrowly escaped death. She could easily have been copilot on the doomed flight. As the moon shone down, lighting her path, she had a strange feeling that the unseen hand of God was guiding her and that He would continue to guide her in the dangerous situations she was sure lay ahead as she sought to put her flying experience to work helping to spread the gospel around the world.
Chapter 7
Getting Started
It was a cold, wet night on October 30, 1944, when Betty Greene stepped off the train in Seattle and into the arms of her father. It was a wonderful reunion—everything Betty had dreamed it would be since she had learned the WASP would be disbanded. Her older brothers Joe and Al were there, too, along with their wives and an ever growing brood of nieces and nephews. Betty loved being back in the midst of her family, but from the outset she told them she was home only to visit, not to stay. Another mission awaited her. She was going to help the Christian Airmen’s Missionary Fellowship get started so that when the war finally ended, Christian pilots would have a way to use their flying talents for missions.
Six weeks later Betty was on another train, this time headed for Los Angeles, California. After living in the wonderful natural surrounding of home—the tall evergreen trees and the deep green waters of Lake Washington—she found it hard to imagine settling into a large, sprawling city like Los Angeles. But Los Angeles was where Jim Truxton had arranged for CAMF’s headquarters to be situated. He had chosen Los Angeles because of a generous offer from a man named Dawson Trotman. In 1933 Dawson Trotman and his young wife, Lila, had moved to Long Beach, California, to share the gospel message and open their home to sailors. This vision for evangelism had led to their running a number of Bible study groups and the development of a Bible memorization system known as the Navigators. Dawson Trotman had named his ministry after the Bible memorization system.
When the war broke out, the Navigators system became very popular with Christian servicemen. Soon nearly every ship and military base had a group of eager young Christian men meeting together to study and memorize the Bible and encourage one another. To keep in contact with these men, the Navigators published a newsletter called The Log, which was sent to thousands of Christian soldiers, sailors, and pilots on a regular basis.
Jim Truxton had written several letters to Betty about Dawson Trotman. Although the two men had met only briefly once, Dawson Trotman was an eager supporter of the fledgling CAMF. He promised to do all he could to help get the new organization started, including offering free office space and a room in his home where Betty could stay while she got established in Los Angeles.
Dawson Trotman picked Betty up at the train station and drove her through tree-lined streets to his home. Nothing could have prepared Betty for the house she was going to be staying in. She had just finished thanking Dawson for his generous offer of a room, adding that she hoped her staying there wouldn’t make the house too crowded, when the 1941 Oldsmobile coupe they were riding in turned into the driveway of house number 509. As she gazed up at the fifty-year-old house, Betty chuckled to herself. There was enough room for her and about forty others in the house—a two-story mansion with a full attic. The house had twin turrets and a huge verandah that ran the length of the house.
