Seattle, Washington (UP) – U.S. troops found a woman gunner in a German plane shot down in North Africa, Lt. Joe Klaas of the Army Air Force reported in a letter to his mother.
Klaas said:
We shot down a German plane the other day with a female tail gunner. She was quite dead.
Asbury Park, New Jersey (UP) – Cox. James A. Prince, on furlough, revealed that one of the Japanese pilots who crashed their planes against the aircraft carrier USS Hornet was a woman.
He said:
The plane piloted by the woman crashed into the Hornet’s elevator. There wasn’t much left of it or the pilot, but reports confirmed by doctors that the pilot was a woman was subject of much conversation among us survivors.
I find that quite strange due the hierarchical nature of the axis forces. Is it known if these female air crewmen slip through the caps or was the hiring of female pilots allowed?
The problem is that I can’t fully confirm these stories aside from these two letters which didn’t elaborate further. The Japanese woman attacking the Hornet would’ve been a pretty big deal if fully confirmed.
Women did serve in the Luftwaffe, initially as auxiliaries and eventually, as the war grew more desperate for the Germans, combat duty. One of those women who served would eventually start a sex shop business.
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