If society then had allowed it, how would they have done in combat? A number
of them have in recent years asked themselves that question, and they had
no easy answers.

Of course being an excellent pilot (as the WASP no doubt were) is no
guarantee that you will be a good combat pilot. I have no grasp of
what it takes to fly a plane in combat. I think from my army training
that I could manage to work my way through infantry combat, but I'm
not so sure about the sort of thing that was going on in the air in
WWII. And 1940s women of course were carrying extra baggage in their
upbringing as helpers, mates, mothers etc etc.

Still there is no question that some of them would have made the
passage into combat flying. Essentially we are all made out of the
same raw material. Women were fighting as partisans in Yugoslavia in
the 1940s, and working with the resistance movements elsewhere; women
dropped as spies into German-occupied Europe; and women flew as combat
fighter pilots with the Red Air Force. Civilization is fairly thin on
us. I suspect that if the WASP had been required to fight, the
survivors would have acquitted themselves as well as the Russian women
pilots.


all the best -- Dan Ford
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