Avenger Field and the WASPs

Just outside Sweetwater, Texas, sits one of the most consequential and least-known airfields in American history, Avenger Field, the only all-female military air base the United States has ever operated.

In nineteen forty-two, with the country desperately short of male pilots needed for combat, aviation pioneer Jacqueline Cochran convinced the Army Air Forces to let women fly military aircraft in non-combat roles. The program, the Women Airforce Service Pilots, known as the WASPs, needed a home, and a training facility in Houston proved too small. Avenger Field in Sweetwater was chosen, and it became the beating heart of the program.

What the women did there was extraordinary. They flew every type of aircraft the Army owned, from basic trainers to the most advanced fighters and bombers of the era. They ferried planes from factories to airbases across the country. They towed targets for male gunners to shoot at, real targets, with live ammunition. They tested aircraft that had just come out of repair, checking whether the mechanics had gotten the job right. They flew the B-twenty-nine Superfortress, the largest bomber in the American arsenal, at a time when many male pilots refused to fly it because of its early safety record.

Eighteen classes graduated from Avenger Field between nineteen forty-three and nineteen forty-four, earning their silver wings from Cochran herself at ceremonies on this field. One thousand and seventy-four women earned those wings in total. Thirty-eight were killed in service. When the program was disbanded in December nineteen forty-four, as returning male pilots needed assignments, the women were denied military status, veterans' benefits, and the right to have their bodies sent home at government expense when they died.

Congress finally granted the WASPs full military status in nineteen seventy-seven, and in two thousand ten, surviving members received the Congressional Gold Medal. The National WASP Museum now stands in the original nineteen twenty-nine hangar on this field.