Hazel Ying Lee, WASP pilot.
I love love LOVE this photo. Aviator hat on. Shit eating grin on her face. Cigarette dangling from her hand. She sits on the wing of a plane in one of those old fashioned balloon looking shorts and a pair of boots that just must be too big for her. That, my friends... is a plucky heroine. That, my friends, is a certain Hazel Ying Lee, World War II WASP Aviatrix.
Hazel grew up in Portland, Oregon. Not quite the espresso-sipping philosophy-reading bastion it is today, the only job she could get as a Chinese American once she left school was as an elevator operator. But hey, at least she was a citizen by way of being born in the US, something that naturalized immigrants from China or anywhere else in that region weren't allowed to become...by federal law.
Then, when she was 20, Hazel Ying Lee learned how to fly. She was one of the first Chinese American women to earn her pilot's license when she passed her test in 1932. At this time, less than 1% of pilots in the US were women, but she knew from the first time she was in a plane that she wanted to be a pilot.
She went to China a year later and sought to join their air force. But you know, so what they needed pilots? So what Japan had just invaded part of their country? Women? Too erratic to be combat pilots. Sorry, honey.
So Hazel stayed in Canton, China working a desk job and flying chartered private flights while one of her brothers and her husband joined the Chinese Air Force. She was still there in 1937 when Japan quit being cute with it and full-on invaded China. She stayed in Canton for a while longer, helping with civilian air-raids, then fled back to the US via Hong Kong.
Although I absolutely know in my heart of hearts that World War II was a horribly devastating time, why does so much of it lend itself to tragic romantic fantasy? I can see her coming to the decision that if they won't let her fight in this war, she's by god not going to die from some air-raid bomb when she should by all rights be dropping bombs herself. A dodgy stowaway sequence later and she's on the midnight plane from Hong Kong back to the West Coast, under constant threat of death from enemy anti-aircraft fire. This being 1938, there's probably a dramatically flapping scarf and some lipstick involved.
Hazel spent the next few years in New York buying and shipping wartime supplies to the Chinese government. And for a while, that was the best way for her to fight her war...until Pearl Harbor that is. And then, the US Army started entertaining a crazy notion brought forth to them by pilot Jacqueline Cochran.
To digress a bit, Jacqueline Cochran was total badass in her own right. (A peek behind the curtain, there's a really poorly recorded podcast about her in the vault.) She won the prestigious Bendix Race, which was an air-race across the country, set a transcontinental speed record - notice that there is no "for women" after that. She was the first woman to fly across the ocean, the first woman to break the sound barrier and the first woman to fly a bomber across the ocean. And in that last one, came the idea that she brought to the army.
See, Jackie Cochran had flown that Lockheed bomber across the Atlantic as part of the Wings for Britain program which ferried American-built aircraft to besieged England. While there, she joined the RAF and recruited women across Europe to join the RAF's non-combat airforce division. So the idea comes to her...why should women only be given this opportunity to help with wartime effort in England?
Cheeky wench starts lobbying with Eleanor Roosevelt to help her create a non-combat civilian aviation division for women in the US. This persuasion starts in September of 1940, mind you, before the US is even in the war. There was a lot of resistance to the idea but as pilot resources started to wear thin, first came the WAFS (Womens Auxiliary Ferry Squadron) to fly airplanes from factory to airbase and then Jacqueline got her wish in 1943 when the Women Airforce Service Pilot (WASP) division was started.
Hazel Ying Lee seized this opportunity and a decade after the Chinese army told her women were too erratic to fly in the air force, she was accepted into the WASP program, one of the 1,074 to pass training and join out of 25,000 female pilots who applied.
WASP did not enter combat, which isn't to say their job wasn't dangerous. 38 ended up dying by the end of the program, and there were many emergency landings. One of their primary duties was to fly planes from the factory to a way station where it would then be flown by combat pilots to battleships or to give to allies. This was the first time that many of these planes were flown, and some didn't leave the assembly line without their flaws.
Another duty was to fly planes that towed targets for practice in combat training. That's probably not a good day. There's at least one tale of a woman getting shot in the foot by someone whose aim really did need that training.
Hazel was part of a select group within this program that learned to fly pursuit, i.e. to be able to fly the fastest, highest-powered fighters the United States was producing, even if only from Buffalo, New York to North Dakota. Out of the thousand odd women in the program, only 134 were trained to fly these planes.
And did I mention that she did it in style? Hazel used to label the planes she flew and those of others with Chinese characters scrawled in lipstick on the tail. When there was a mission she was on that involved staying overnight in a city, her fellow pilots tried to get assigned with her, because even in the some airstrip town in the middle of nowhere, she could find a Chinese restaurant, make friends with the kitchen, and order in rapid Cantonese, or hell, help them cook it herself. One article I read said that some of her fellow pilots still had cartoons of her running around playing cook.
Oh and there was the time some farmer thought she was part of a Japanese invasion and held her at pitchfork point after she'd had to make an emergency landing in his field. One version of the story has her talking him down and then getting fed up and flat out commanding him to drop his pitchfork. Another has his son realizing that she was a WASP who'd had a mishap and called the nearby military base after which his father calmed down enough to put down the pitchfork. I kind of like the latter one, just getting a mental picture of Hazel and the farmer's son exchanging shrugs and rolled eyes with some paranoid pitchfork-holding old man in between them, desperate to believe he can repel an invasion with the power of agriculture.
But, as any viewer of WWII movies can tell you, one cannot engage in those kind of happy-go-lucky shenanigans and expect to last.
On Thanksgiving morning, 1944, Hazel was approaching the airport in Great Falls, North Dakota after being delayed in Fargo due to weather for several days. She was flying a P-63, as was another pilot who had a broken radio. She was cleared by the tower to land over the radio at the same time that he was by way of light signals. As they both headed in, the tower realized what was going to happen and radioed them both to pull up. But only Hazel had an operating radio so when she pulled up and the other pilot didn't, she crashed right into his plane.
The other pilot survived with minor injuries, but Hazel died from burns sustained in the crash two days later.
Her family learned of her death, and then of her brother Victor's on the battlefield in France within days of each other. Just to make it all better the cemetery in Portland didn't want to let them be buried in the plot that the Lees had selected...because the plot was in the white section of the cemetery.
One really shameful to contemplate court battle later and Victor and Hazel were laid to rest in Portland.
The P-63, the plane that Hazel and her fellow WASP members spent many days and nights flying from Buffalo to North Dakota, was used in the liberation of Berlin, and also when the Soviets liberated Northeastern China. So, air force or no, Hazel got to play at least a bit of a role.
