Nancy Harkness Love - a talk presented by Nick Knobil

A transcript of a talk presented by Nick Knobil.

Nick's mother, Julie, is Casey's sister. Nick is Karen, Ted and Steve's first cousin. Though Nick refers to Nancy as his great aunt, in fact she is a first cousin, twice removed. I consider "aunt" a term of endearment.

Back in 2020, Warren Pietsch of the Dakota Territory Aviation Museum (and Texas Flying Legend) called me to see if I’d be interested in talking about Nancy Harkness Love at an event at the Dakota Territory Air Museum in Minot, North Dakota. Of course, the Covid-19 pandemic nixed that idea, but in 2021 the invitation was renewed, and since I love fossicking around cool airplanes and airplane parts, I jumped at the idea…what follows is an attempt to re-create the talk that I gave on September 25th, 2021.

So I’m here to tell you about my Great Aunt, Nancy Harkness Love, but first let me tell you some things your probably already know.

In the spring of 1942 we were at war. We use the word “War” pretty loosely these days…we have Wars on Terrorism, Wars on Drugs, Wars on Poverty, etc.

This was war that didn’t need a lot of explaining.

To the east, the German Army had swept across Europe, around the “impregnable” barrier of the Maginot Line, and gobbled up territory from the Arctic Circle to North Africa, leaving England to fight alone, protected by 20 miles of water in the English Channel and a handful of pilots in Spitfires and Hurricanes.

Over to the west was the third largest, and battle-tested naval fleet in the world bolstered by an effective Army and Air Corps that had crushed the defenses of every nation that stood in their way and had recently executed a successful surprise attack on a place not many people had ever heard of before, but every American knows now: Pearl Harbor.

Gasoline, sugar, coal, firewood, meat, coffee, shortening: All rationed.

The manufacture of all cars and trucks was halted by the Federal Government.

To conserve fuel a national speed limit was set at 35mph.

My mother remembers scraping the tinfoil from gum wrappers and packs of cigarettes (try that sometime) to take to a collection center, along with cans of bacon grease, old pots, etc. etc.

Men flooded into the Armed Services and women flooded into factories to take their places.

In 1942 Nancy Love was 28 years old and already an accomplished pilot.

She and her husband Bob (also a pilot and a Major in the USAAC reserves) had the idea of using experienced female pilots to assist in flying duties in order to free up men for training and combat duties.

In fact, she sent a letter in 1940 to (then) Lt. Col. Robert Olds (he would retire a two-star General, and his better-known son, triple-ace Robin Olds), with a list of all the women she could identify in the US with Commercial Pilot’s licenses.

It was four pages long.

“We wouldn’t need to be trained; we wouldn’t need to be paid; we’d just show up and do what needs to be done.”

Fortunately, Nancy had a quality not uncommon amongst pilots - she was self-confident, stubborn and single-minded.

She used her contacts and her reputation to pitch her idea to all the Army brass that she could get in front of….for two years!

One day she found herself in the office of a busy bird colonel, arguing her case when the guy announced in exasperation to this girl, “The reason that women are unfit to fly military aircraft is that they are afflicted with the menstruation!”

Now…I’d like to pause this story for a minute and tell you some things about Nancy Harkness Love that you probably don’t know.

First of all: Her name wasn’t Nancy.

It was Hannah.

Hannah is a family name that’s been passed down since the first one stepped ashore in East Machias, Maine shortly after the end of the Revolutionary War, and it’s been Hannah(s) ever since.

The current youngest one is in grade school in upstate New York, and you can’t shout “Hannah!” at any family gathering without at least one woman turning around.

Well, our Hannah’s father didn’t particularly like this tradition, and didn’t care for my Great Grandmother (also Hannah) either, so her father started calling her Nancy. No one’s sure why, but Nancy it became.

Her mother, and the other women on the “Hannah” side of the family were scandalized. Her name was never legally changed, and nobody I ever heard of ever called her Hannah. I didn’t know it until I read her obituary.

She grew up (Nancy) in Houghton, Michigan ,in the U.P., and one day in the 1930 a barnstorming pilot named Jimmy Hansen landed in a field outside of town and offered rides for “a penny a pound”. She handed over a fistful of change, and well, if you’re a pilot and you remember your first hop in an airplane, you know it was all over.

She went home and begged her parents to pay for flying lessons. Her mother objected on the grounds that it was un-ladylike and would cause a scandal, strife, “and where is this ‘Jimmy Hansen’ from anyway and who are his parents…?”.

Her father, an obviously wise man, agreed, but made her promise, “Do it well, or not at all.”

Jimmy Hansen was eighteen-years-old, and Nancy was his first student.

In about one month she received 13 hours of dual instruction and 10 hours of solo flight, passed the written test, and was awarded a Private Pilot License in November of 1930. She was sixteen, and one of ~200 women licensed as pilots in the US.

That fall Nancy was sent “Back East” to Prep School at Milton Academy in Massachusetts. There were rules against students operating motor vehicles, but that did nothing to stop Nancy from sneaking off to Boston, renting an airplane and flying with two of her friends off to Poughkeepsie, NY to visit some friends at Vassar College (135 nautical miles away).

Who would rent an airplane to a sixteen-year-old with 15 hours of solo time? What could go wrong?

The requirements for a Private Pilot License in 1930 didn’t include much in the way of details like basic navigation or understanding weather…a lot could go wrong…and it did…the clouds came down, along with the visability, and she lost her bearings, and not knowing how to use a compass there was no way she was going to get ‘em back. And then the line to the oil pressure gauge broke and covered her and the windscreen with black engine oil. Convinced that the engine was going to seize at any moment she made a landing in a field. Nobody was hurt, and no damage to the aircraft.

Her passengers thought they were in Poughkeepsie, and while Nancy didn’t know where they were, she certainly knew that she had almost killed them and herself.

That day Nancy Harkness became a serious pilot. - “Do it well or not at all.”

She started college at Vassar and took lessons from Johnny Miller (of Pitcairn Autogyro fame) and obtained her limited commercial license at the age of eighteen, and her Commercial Transport license a year later.

Even though she gained some fame as “The Flying Freshman”, the Great Depression caught up to her family and she had to quit school… and so, she said, “I had the strange idea that I could get a job in aviation.”

She applied for a job at a small FBO / Charter / Flight School / Aircraft Sales outfit called Inter-City Aviation at Boston Airport (now known as Logan International).

The owner, Bob Love, figured out that Nancy was more than a pretty face, and hired her to demonstrate and sell airplanes on commission, and do other odd-jobs around the shop.

But it was hard to earn a living selling airplanes during the depth of the Great Depression, so Nancy sought out other ways to make ends meet.

She left her job at Inter-City and worked on contract with the Federal Bureau of Air Commerce to establish navigational aids for pilots.

Her territory was from Maine to Florida, and you may have even seen some of results today; she supervised painting the names of towns on the most prominent structure in the area, often a water tower. (This would have been helpful on that trip to Poughkeepsie…)

She loved the work as she got to fly from town to town up and down the east coast, recruiting men to paint big letters on the tops of buildings and water towers.

Bob Love apparently didn’t care for it too much, though. So he asked her to marry him, and in 1936 they took off on their honeymoon in a brand new Beechcraft Staggerwing (S/N 28) and flew to California, where, unbeknownst to Nancy, Bill Ong at Beechcraft had entered her in the National Air Races in Los Angeles.

She finished fifth out of twelve entrants in her first attempt at pylon racing in the Staggerwing (She raced one more time in a Monocoupe but decided she didn’t care for pylon racing).

Settling into domestic life, she became a test pilot (why not?). She was approached by the designers of the Gwinn AirCar and the Hammond “Y”, both so-called “Safety Airplanes.

Both aircraft were failures.

Nancy was hired not only because she was a competent and methodical pilot, but because the airplanes could be marketed as “so easy even a –girl- can fly it!”.

This marketing strategy was copied later by an insurance company, “So easy even a cave-man can do it…”, which as you know pissed off cave-men everywhere.

I’d like to point out that a few years ago I gave a ride in my airplane to a sixteen-year-old girl named Lydia Jacobs from Lincoln, Maine, and next thing I knew she had her PPL, sold her car to buy a beat-up Cessna 150 and flew it to Alaska, and then entered in the famous STOL competition in Valdez (placed 4th in her class). Now she’s flying Cessna Caravans in and out of the willy-whacks and on ice runways where the sun goes down on Labor Day and doesn’t come back up until the 4th of July.

But even today some guy will see her climb down out of that big Cessna and get back into his car and drive away rather than get into an airplane with her. (“Enjoy your STAY!” she yells.).

Can you imagine what it was like eighty-five years ago?

So let’s go back to our bird colonel who has just told an experienced and determined Transport Pilot, Air Racer and Test Pilot that she can’t fly military aircraft because she’s a woman.

I don’t know his name, but I feel sorry for him even today. The guy just didn’t know what he was up against.

Family legend varies depending on who you talk to, but when Nancy described in detail the nature of the menstrual cycle, and how from time immemorial women had shouldered physical and psychological burdens of all types, including politely enduring the ignorance of bureaucrats, etc. all while menstruating -- our colonel either became uncomfortable or climbed out of the window to get away from her. I doubt that he actually climbed out the window, but it’s fun to think about.

When the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron was finally authorized in September of 1942 one of the stipulations was that they were not permitted to fly while having their periods, a policy which many years later was re-used in a different circumstance called “Don’t Ask – Don’t Tell”.

Now Nancy had had her picture in the paper plenty of times before , but now she was on the front page, from the New York Times Magazine to the Egyptian Gazette in Cairo.

Nancy interviewed each of the applicants, who needed at least 500 hours of Pilot In Command time and a high-performance (200hp) endorsement and chose the 28 women that became “The Originals”, the first women to fly for the USAAC. Each one of them has their own story, but they all had one thing in common in 1942…they had to get checked out in military aircraft, and Nancy lead from the front and so was the first woman to be certified to fly in 20 different military aircraft they needed to operate.

At the time the WAFS were activated, Jackie Cochran had just returned from England and she immediately pressed the Army to stand up what became the WFTD (Women’s Flying Training Detachment (aka WoofTeddies). (Jackie would teach ‘em how to fly, and Nancy would tell ‘em where to go.)

(I’m giving you all these dates because I want to illustrate just how short a span of time passed between the beginning, and the end of the WAFS/WASP.)

Five months after the WAFS and then the WFTD were activated, the two were merged in August 1943 into the WASP with Jackie in charge, and Nancy running the Ferrying operations from Wilmington, Delaware with pilots stationed at 122 bases across the country.

But there were dark clouds on the horizon – In the photos everyone was always smiling, but…

In the summer of 1943, Nancy and WAF pilot #2 Betty Gillies were signed off to fly the Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress” and were assigned to a group of 200 B-17s being ferried from the US, across the North Atlantic to Prestwick, Scotland.

It was to be the first aircraft delivered to the European Theater of Operations (ETO) by women.

They were very excited, and her husband Bob wrote a letter of introduction to a friend stationed in London with the droll postscript, “Incidentally, one of (the pilots) is my wife.”

This is General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the Commander in Chief of the US Army Force.

When he found out about Nancy and Betty ferrying a B-17 to Europe he immediately overturned the order.

Nancy and Betty were in Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada when they received orders to turn their aircraft over to “qualified male personnel” and return to their base.

These women are not smiling. They’d just been humiliated, and their skills discredited in front of 200 other crews, simply because they were women.

When I was a little kid, my grandfather (a jokester) once whispered in my ear, “Go ask your Aunt Nancy what she thinks about Hap Arnold…” and sent me off like a little cruise missile. I had no idea who Hap Arnold was at the time, and I’m sure he had good points, but I didn’t learn about any of them on that particular day.

And things went from bad to worse and through the fall of 1943 and the spring of 1944 more and more bad press, public outcry, and political investigations went on until June when the US Congress decreed the WASP to be unnecessary and unjustifiably expensive, and recommended that the recruiting and training of inexperience women pilots to be halted…just 10 months after the WASP was created.

There was support from some to keep the WASP operational, but not enough.

The women trainees at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas were allowed to complete their training, even though they would never have an assignment after they graduated.

Nancy’s last flight on December 17, 1944 was delivering a C-54 from the Douglas plant in California to a field back east. (Coincidentally it was the 41st anniversary of the Wright Brother’s first flight)

Between September 1942 and December 1944 (26 months) 38 WAFS/WASP were killed in the line of duty. Nancy attended almost all the funerals.

Being civilians, the WAFS/WASP had to chip in amongst themselves to pay for the funerals, as the US Government had no such obligation (and wouldn’t recognize them as veterans until 35 years later, in 1977, and a year after Nancy’s death).

It was over.

Almost.

Six days after the WASP were deactivated, Nancy received orders to report to Calcutta, India to “…coordinating Ferrying Division matters…” and oh by the way…bring all your flying gear…

The public records state that this trip was a reward for Nancy’s service to the country, but I think that colonel (remember him?) suggested that it might be a good idea to put as much of planet earth between them and her.

Oh, she got a medal (with her husband Bob), and she was also given a commission as a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve when it was created in 1947.

I’ve gone through a bunch of photos of my Great Aunt Nancy, but I’ve never found one of here in USAF uniform.

I think I know why. No wings on the left breast and no hope of flying assignments. (The women to wear the silver wings of the USAF wouldn’t happen until 1977…)

…besides…Nancy and Bob had better things to do…

Life most folks after the war, they started a family.

The youngest two, my cousins Allie and Marky just live a couple of towns away from me in Maine and were a huge help in preparing me to speak to you tonight.

The oldest? Well she became a pilot, she married a pilot, and they have a son that’s a pilot, too.

Her name is Hannah!

Nancy died when I was only 16, and she was about the same age as I am today (too young!), so I didn’t know her as well as I might have but I’m pretty sure that if she were here tonight, that first…

She would want to know everything about the B-52 that these three young women right here fly (Captains Zeemer and Long, and Lieutant Sahm), and second…

She would have enormous respect for their skills and achievements, and would share vicariously the pride of wearing those wings and the effort it took to pin them on.

Thank you.