Last week I was thinking how so often, in discussions of the greatest generation and World War II, it is almost always the men who are mentioned. World War II brought a major change in the role of women in both the military and society.

The role of women in World War II first made a real impression on me about 25 years ago when my father, who became a POW after his B-17 was shot down over Germany, came across a Clarion Ledger article about Dorothy Stout of Vicksburg. Right after my father was liberated in April 1945, he had just crossed into the American front lines when he encountered Dorothy dispensing coffee to combat soldiers and newly freed POWs on a German road. She and her two coworkers would travel right behind the front lines in their Red Cross “club-mobile” to serve coffee, doughnuts and cigarettes to combat troops. I remember my father saying how surprised he was to find a girl from home in Germany so near the front and the fighting.

I have written several times about my father’s experiences being shot down over Germany and held as a prisoner of war, but my mother, Ida Billups Ward, also did her part. Like so many other members of the “Greatest Generation” both of my parents reacted immediately when Pearl Harbor was bombed on Dec. 7, 1941. My father was living in Washington, D.C., where he was working for the FBI and attending George Washington University part time. He immediately enlisted in the Army Air Corps. My mother, who was attending Virginia State Teachers College (now Longwood University), returned to Columbus.

Upon returning home in the spring of 1942, my mother started working at the Columbus Army Air Field Hospital. I have her Base ID card, and it shows the base’s name as Kaye Field. The base was first named Kaye Field after her cousin Sam Kaye, an Army Air Service World War I pilot who had been a flight leader in the famed Hat in the Ring Squadron of Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker. Because of confusion with the name of Key Field in Meridian, the base’s name was changed to Columbus Army Air Field.

While working at the base hospital, she joined the Civil Air Patrol. She first flew as CAP observer. After flying lessons at Camp’s Field between Starkville and Mayhew, she became the first girl in the Columbus Civil Air Patrol unit to fly solo. In the CAP she flew a Piper Cub.

The most poignant story I heard her mention concerned an enjoyable date she had with a pilot from the base one Sunday. She and her cousin Emmaline Hardy had a double date with two pilots. They all had a delightful time and decided to all go back out together the next weekend. That week while working at the base hospital she heard that two pilots had just been involved in an accident and had both died in the crash. They were brought to the hospital, and she discovered it was her friends from the previous Sunday.    

I was in college before I ever knew my mother had been a pilot. I asked her why she quit flying. She said at the end of the war after she was dispatched to Birmingham alone in a Piper Cub, a small single-engine, two-seat plane that had a top air speed of only about 85 mph. She was put in a lengthy holding pattern over the Birmingham airport with a number of large fast four-engine aircraft. She said the turbulence from the big planes was bouncing her all over and it scared her half to death. She turned around, flew back to Columbus, and never flew as a pilot again.

Marietta McCarter is another example of those untold stories of the service of women in World War II. During the war she worked in the Red Cross office at Columbus Army Air Field. One of her duties was to inspect the Prisoner of War camp at Aliceville, Alabama, where much of Rommel’s “Afrika Korps” was held after their capture in North Africa. It was only shortly before she died that I ever heard her mention her experiences.

I never heard Sue Richards Hardy (Mrs. Tom Hardy) talk of her experiences, either. At the beginning of the war, Sue went to Los Angeles where she was a riveter in an airplane plant, helping build B-25 bombers. She then went to work with the Red Cross and was assigned to a position in England. Marcella Billups joined the Navy serving as a WAVE, and I never heard her mention that. As I started looking for other area women involved in the war effort I hit a brick wall. There has been some material published on the ordinance plant at Prairie and the people that worked there, but little other information on the contributions of local women is to be found.

The role of women in assisting the war effort could not be clearer than at the Columbus Army Air Field. There, WACs (Women’s Army Corps) and WASPs (Women’s Air Force Service Pilot) played important roles. The WASPs served as airplane ferry pilots, flying planes between bases, and flying planes to check them out after engine repairs or replacements. There were eight WASPs assigned to the base at Columbus, but I found the names of only two: Florence Miller and Mary Helen Clark. The WACs at the base were under the command of Lt. Hazel Dale and served in non-combat positions such as airplane mechanics, radio operators and air traffic control.

Women were an essential part of the greatest generation and this country’s efforts during World War II, and they should be fully recognized and celebrated. Families need to record and preserve their stories of the men and women of the  greatest generation before those stories are lost in the fog of time.

Rufus Ward is a local historian.

Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].

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