Woke cancel culture has claimed more victims; this time, the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP). Yes, you read that correctly. Celebrating WWII woman veterans is racist. Last week a proposed WNBA shirt celebrating the WASP legacy hit the airwaves, and the news eventually dripped into the victimhood echo chamber known as Twitter.
One particularly awful professional victim emerged. Jasmine Baker, “women’s sports culturalist, award-winning journalist, speaker, creative director, comms” – cramming every achievement in your entire life into your Twitter bio just radiates competence – emerged from under her bridge and shrieked in horror. We can’t celebrate WASP! Why? Because WASP was racist! The woke cancel culture lynch mob attacked in full force and the WNBA folded like a cheap lawn chair. The shirt was pulled. Good riddance, right?
Upon its formation on August 5, 1943, WASP put women behind the controls of military aircraft for test flights, ferry missions, and training other pilots. Officially, woman aviators freed up men to serve in combat. In reality, this was not true. Nations entering the war universally suffered a shortage of adequate planes, not pilots.
The actual explanation was pressure from women themselves. Famed aerial pioneer Jacqueline Cochran petitioned Eleanor Roosevelt to allow female pilots to participate in the war effort. Under the auspices of the U.S. Army Air Corps, more than a thousand women passed WASP’s grueling entry training and took to the sky.
An important characteristic about WASP is that they were a civilian component, rather than a military unit, meaning that the women paid for their own room and board, uniforms, and other personal expenses that soldiers usually received for free.
Being relegated as civilians alone was not discrimination in of itself, as many other personnel served in an equivalent status. To name just one example, the Civil Air Patrol provided coastal surveillance, rescued sailors, and even bombed German U-boats, and did it all with civilian pilots. However, the plight of the WASP aviatrixes was indeed a story of aggressive sexism. WASP units were frequently stuck with older planes which were made even worse by male maintainers deliberately neglecting them. Criminal negligence was often still not enough; some men resorted to outright sabotage, like pouring sugar into the women’s fuel tanks.
I have frequently heard the argument – from the usual suspects – that WWII military women were content with their status as second-rate soldiers and everything was just dandy. This claim runs contrary to real life. Most or all of them would have served in combat if given the opportunity. According to Anne Noggle, “All of us serving as Women Airforce Service Pilots wondered how we would fare if we were called upon to fly combat. We talked about it in our barracks during our six months of flight training, training conducted in the same aircraft and with the same basic routine as male cadets. Our questions and speculation were purely hypothetical.”
Speculation about combat was hypothetical because the odds of WASPs going to the frontlines were zero. Though they were barred from ever proving themselves in battle, woman pilots did receive another hazardous duty which they unanimously accepted: towing targets behind their planes for anti-air gunnery exercises.
Flying through a training shoot was safer than real combat, but not by as much as it should have been. Many of the woman flyers sustained gunshot injuries. For some reason, male gunners believed that they were supposed to shoot directly at the planes (I’m not exaggerating, they actually said that). Maybe those gunners didn’t realize the planes flying overhead had people inside, but that’s odd since unmanned drones hadn’t been invented yet. But of course the real answer is obvious when taken in context with all the WASPs’ other mishaps.
One of the most outrageous incidents in WASP history occurred on March 21, 1943, when Cornelia Fort died while leading a flight of BT-13s from California to Texas. One of the male pilots in the formation rammed his plane into hers, clipping a wing and sending Fort into a fatal tailspin.
Aviation is dangerous and collisions are a common accident, but such collisions tend to happen during landing or over a target area and are often further aggravated by poor visibility. A pilot smashing into his flight leader for no explicitly stated reason is interesting to put it mildly. Since no proper explanation was ever released (or at least one that I was able to find at the time of writing this article), it’s unknown if the male pilot deliberately rammed Fort’s plane, was trying to scare her, had an extraordinary mechanical failure, or was just really incompetent. Regardless, he continued serving through the end of the war and it doesn’t appear he was disciplined for the incident.
38 servicewomen in WASP gave their lives, and the horrific reality is that they all knew at least some of those deaths were caused by sabotaged planes crashing. Up until the Global War on Terror, the U.S. military held the dubious distinction of having killed more of its own female soldiers than the enemy.
Adding insult to injury, the Army refused to pay for the return of fallen WASP warriors’ remains to their families. The costs had to be collected by the women passing around a hat. And of course as civilians, woman pilots were barred from receiving military honors at their funerals. In fairness, male civilian auxiliaries were also denied these benefits, but they weren’t being murdered by their own side either.
How could men hate women so much? As I mentioned in an earlier article, American woman workers were widely despised as scabs. It’s important to remember that the World War II generation grew up during the Great Depression.
From Day 1, feminists and their corporate masters established men and women as each other’s enemies, or more accurately, enemies of themselves. Trapped in the grip of poverty during the darkest years of the Great Depression, many girls and young women left the household to try and find any work they could, however meager it was. Needless to say, corporations loved a sudden flood of workers willing to toil under appalling conditions for almost nothing in return.
One of the most astonishing features of the 1930s was that as men were laid off by the millions, they were seamlessly replaced by women, except for much lower pay. The Great Depression wasn’t a disaster inflicted by the divine, it wasn’t even a disaster at all, at least not in the normal sense like a hurricane or a volcano. It was just the wealthy ruling class manufacturing a pseudo-crisis and using it as an excuse to rob everyone else blind. Industrialists and bankers crippled their own civilizations to make more money. That’s an insane thing to do, but shared insanity is an innate characteristic of our ruling elites in the modern era.
During the war, attempts to militarize the WASPs failed, rendering them unqualified for veteran benefits in the post-war era. In 1977, Barry Goldwater, who was a ferry pilot himself, successfully pushed through legislation to upgrade the women’s duty status but faced intense opposition from the Department of Veteran Affairs, the American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars. Even today, generations later, American woman soldiers faces intense public hostility, and it has little or nothing to do with their abilities. Corporate America and their willing feminist pawns stirred up so much hatred between men and women, it lasted for generations. That hatred has not only failed to die down, it only intensified. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
And yet despite their horrible mistreatment at the hands of the Army, WASPs proudly served their country without complaint. They are, in every sense of the term, American heroes, and in the same league of heroes as any other minority group of soldiers who faced varying levels of abuse and discrimination. People like that show a spirit of patriotism difficult to match.
When globalists launch a coordinated attack against the legacy of WASPs, not only are they spitting in the faces of our heroes, it’s a direct assault on the U.S.A. itself. Globalist billionaires are working tirelessly to separate us from our history. When they succeed, and they practically have already, the globalists win.
The precedent has been set. WASP has been booted from popular culture for good. This is particularly tragic because those women were barely in popular culture to begin with. We vaguely know who they were, but that’s about it. Their story has been declared untruth and abolished from the public sphere before it was even properly told.
As for Jasmine Baker, she may think she’s groveling before her (mostly white male) owners in a sufficiently subservient manner, and they may pat her on the head once in a while, but they don’t actually like her. They don’t even know her name. They’ll toss Baker to the wolves the moment she becomes inconvenient, or if she simply becomes good fodder for a victim higher up in the Oppression Olympics food chain than her. Yes, she’s probably safe from getting canceled, for now. But useful idiots have a deeply deserved tendency to get eaten by the demons they were feeding.
Books by Anne Noggle
Two wonderful books by Anne Noggle about American WASPs and Soviet female aviators in World War II. View a wider selection of books by and about her here.
Ian Kummer
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