The Pittsburgh Press (August 12, 1941)
ROLE FOR WOMEN
By Major Al Williams
Our woman’s department seems to be considerably exercised by what one lady calls “the intolerable discrimination against women,” barring them from the Civilian Pilot Training Program.
There it is – the way it was posed to me. We are facing the gigantic task of attempting to recapture precious years eaten by the locusts on creating a national defense with which to defy the world. The real, but never defined, emergency we face is to provide the arms and men to backup all the threats we have hurled against every major nation in the world. That’s our emergency – a gigantic job.
In the first place, the Civilian Pilot Training Program is a misnomer. The program was initiated and has been sailing under false colors. It was started long before the question of shooting involvement in this war dared be voiced. It was begun with the positive and insistent explanation that its real purpose was to simulate the private flying industry and the manufacture of private airplanes. We carefully exposed its hidden purpose by stating that it was another project for arming this nation in the air and that the people should be told the whole truth right off the bat. For this we were accused of all sorts of things. But time has revealed the truth.
Real purpose of CPTP
In other words, the Civilian Pilot Training Program is a program for training military fighting pilots. That’s the real purpose of the program and its continuing purpose. It’s important to remember this because the rest of this discussion hinges on it.
Now the ladies – or at least some of them – seem to believe that there is discrimination against them. As a matter of fact, and as I understand it, women candidates have been accepted and trained by the Civilian Pilot Training Program. And the experienced military airmen of the country have long been debating why they were accepted or trained.
Women surely cannot be aspiring to the status of fighting pilots. Some of the more aggressive women fliers of the country raised a little fuss some time ago because they were not permitted to become airline transport pilots. They had passed the requisite professional examinations, and couldn’t understand why they were excluded from this work. There’s no question about women’s brains and physical capacity and courage to fly almost any kind of airplane.
But flying airplanes day and night – any day and any night. Oh, the medical experts say they are not physically capable of that and point to records which clearly and incontrovertibly prove that there are times when women are emotionally and nervously unstable and unfit for flight duty. The establishment of this point indicates that since a fighting pilot must fly when, as, and if he is ordered, that the exclusion of women from this bracket is based on soundly established ground. This much of the discussion is technical and it can be confirmed on part or in toto by consultation with a doctor.
At this point I supplement some of my opinions on the adaptability and capacity of women pilots for fighting in the air. Until we are safely armed, we can dispose of the uses to which women pilots might be put in auxiliary flight capacities. But the manpower of this country has not even been tapped yet in the development of American airpower. Furthermore, the shortage of equipment for flight training is so pressing at this time that it would be unsound to involve experimentation in ascertaining just how women pilots militarily trained might be used in the national defense setup.
Women have done good job
Women pilots from all countries have demonstrated their flying brains and flying skill. Some of them have performed flying fears beyond the capacity of the average male pilot. But this is the exceptional women – and not the ordinary woman by any means. And I suggest here that it is decidedly one thing to sit in an airplane and work out the navigation for a long-distance flight, while it is a decidedly different matter to withstand the rigors and strains of banging a high-speed fighting plane around corners and pulling out of dives.
These strains are testing to the fullest extent the staminas of the finest physical specimens among the male pilots – and women cannot stand up under such physical hardships. Then, too, and at this point I admit I may be a bit old-fashioned – I don’t believe we as a nation are ready to send out women into combat. Woman is entitled to equal rights with man – even though she is something apart and finer than man. The moral index and real worth of any nation is in the fitness of its women – as women.
Finally, there are no such things as personal rights (reference the discrimination angle point in the complaint) in war. The efficient marshaling of a nation’s fighting strength means the assignment of personnel to jobs best fitted for them – and not on the basis of rights or wishes.