Volume 43- No. 43
by Dan A. D’Amelio
(Our grandson, Andrew, is a U.S. Army second lieutenant, serving with the military police in Germany. In his unit is Sergeant Jessica Hager, who by a remarkable coincidence is from the same city of Yucaipa where my wife and I live.
We arranged to meet Sgt. Hager when she came home recently on furlough, and we enjoyed meeting this vivacious young woman, who told us she The Paper - 760.747.7119
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October 24, 2013
was planning to make the Army her career.
Impressed by her dedication, I decided to find out about women in the military, and the following is what I learned.)
By the time World War II ended, there were 400,000 women in the U.S. military and they assisted in every branch of our military. In September 1942, on the suggestion of the president’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, a women’s
ferrying squadron was formed.
All the women selected had to be experienced pilots. After a forty-day orientation, the women pilots began flying airplanes from factories to Army Air Corp bases around the U.S.. During the war, the 1,074 women pilots flew every type of plane—from 9-47 Thunderbolt fighters to B-29 bombers, flying more miles than their male counterparts who were in combat. But in their line of duty the women pilots paid a consider-
able price: thirty-eight pilots killed and thirty-two injured.
Most women in our military were nurses. The Army Nurse Corps, established in 1901, was the oldest female branch in the U.S. military. In World War II there were more than 57,000 Army nurses. Although officially nurses have been noncombatants, they took part in the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Normandy.
“Women . . in Combat” Continued on Page 2