Cornelia Clark Fort (1919 - 1943)

The above words are inscribed on Cornelia's headstone. She is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Nashville, Davidson County, Tennessee, USA.^[1]

Those few words, seemingly carefully chosen, poignant perhaps to those who knew her but powerful and meaningful to those who understand the complexity of the military machine.

She was indeed killed on the job, a tragic accident that did not need to occur, at the age of 24.^[2]Doing what she loved, flying, and what she wanted to do, serving her country. Her commanding officer sent a compassionate letter back to the young pilot's mother: Nancy Love wrote"My feeling about the loss of Cornelia is hard to put into words...I can only say that I miss her terribly, and loved her...If there can be any comforting thought, it is that she died as she wanted to...in an Army airplane, and in the service of her country." In the service of her country, remember that.

Despite the military jargon that was just used, Cornelia and the other 37 female pilots who died flying military planes during WWII, received no military recognition. The army didn't pay for their burial expenses because the women were considered civilians, nor did they even provide or allow a flag for the coffin.^[3]

You will find no military records on Fold3, her death certificate yes but, as of the writing of this biography no military records. Neither will you find a US, Headstone Application for Military Veterans on Ancestry or FamilySearch. What you will find if you Google her is a lot of information about her. If you want to feel like you know her read the book "Daughter of the Air, The Brief Soaring Life of Cornelia Fort" by Rob Simbeck. Simbeck cites Fort’s letters and diaries, various historical documents, and interviews of people who knew her personally and also flew with her. All the facts not attributed to someone else in this biography are from his book.

Her own words provide insight into the political and social atmosphere of her era. From the very beginning, Fort and the other women in the squad were the focus of hostility from their male counterparts. "Any girl who has flown at all," she once wrote, "grows used to the prejudice of most men pilots who will trot out any number of reasons why women can't possibly be good pilots... The only way to show the disbelievers, the snickering hanger pilots," she concluded, "is to show them."

Several things become apparent when you read her story. The first and foremost, to me, is that she was not going to be the person her parents wanted her to be. You get the impression that they were raising a debutante who was to be the demure wife of a southern gentleman. Louise Fort probably summed it up best when she called her sister "a great rebel of her time."

Another thing was her love of flying. In the spring of 1940, Cornelia took her first flying lesson. She was instantly addicted and within a year Cornelia became the first female flight instructor in Nashville, Tennessee. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Civilian Pilots Training Program, she took a flight instructor's job at Fort Collins, Colorado. Then she was hired to teach defense workers, soldiers and sailors to fly in Hawaii. I have attached a copy of the ships manifest she travelled on, note the date.

On one particular Sunday morning she and an advanced student pilot flew out of John Rogers Airport and proceeded to practice touch and go's. Pearl Harbor lay about 3 miles to the northeast. Cornelia noticed a military style aircraft coming in fast and then she realized it was on a collision course, she quickly seized control from her student and managed to pull the plane up just in time to avoid a mid-air crash. As she looked around she saw the red sun symbol on the wings of the disappearing plane and in the distance she saw smoke starting to billow over Pearl Harbor. This particular flight is immortalized in the film, Tora! Tora! Tora!

The Texas Woman’s University Libraries owns an extensive collection of photographs and historical documents pertaining to women, and among them is a scan of “page 13 left” of Cornelia Fort’s logbook, covering the first week of December. Her log for December 7, 1941 reads: "Flight interrupted by Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. An enemy airplane shot at my airplane and missed and proceeded to strafe John Rodgers, a civilian airport. Another airplane machine-gunned the ground in front of me as I taxied back to the hangar." Click here to view the log on the TWU website.

A telegram dated January 24, 1942 from air racer Jackie Cochran, reached Cornelia. It asked Fort to join a select group of American women who would fly with the Royal Air Force Air Transport Auxiliary in Britain. She wasn't able to accept because she was still in Hawaii and nothing was moving but, in the fall of 1942 she was one of a handful of women to receive another invitation. This time the telegram asked her, "if interested, to report within twenty-four hours to Wilmington, Delaware, for service in the Ferrying Division of the Air Transport Command." The army had decided to let women ferry aircraft and she was going to be one of them.

Cornelia was the second pilot to join the Women's Axillary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS).^[4] The WAFS primary mission was to ferry aircraft from the manufacture to various airfields throughout the United States. This freed up male pilots for combat service. The WAFS eventually combined with the Woman's Flying Training Detachment to become the more widely known Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), Cornelia would not see that day.

On March 21, 1943, she was ferrying a BT-13 (a single-engine bomber-trainer) from Midland, Texas, to Dallas when she collided in mid-air with another BT-13, piloted by a male Flight Officer. Cornelia’s plane went out of control, and it hit the ground almost vertically. The male pilot was able to land his crippled plane, but Cornelia, whose left wing was struck in the collision, was killed in the crash.

The ferry pilots did not usually fly in formation and that other BT-13 should have been no where near her. She didn't just die in the performance of her duty, she was killed in the service of her country.

An educated young woman from a wealthy and affluent family who refused to be stereotyped and dealt with the hostility, harassment and prejudice of her era with grace, class and eloquence.

Shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack, she wrote a strange, eerily past-tense letter home to her mother: “I dearly loved the airports, little and big. I loved the sky and the airplanes, and yet, best of all I loved the flying.” At the end, she wrote, “I was happiest in the sky at dawn when the quietness of the air was like a caress, when the noon sun beat down, and at dusk when the sky was drenched with the fading light.”

The Cornelia Fort Airpark that was built in 1945 near her family farm was named after her. Her own words on an historical marker at the site simply and modestly sum up her wartime contribution: "I am grateful" she wrote, "that my one talent, flying, was useful to my country."

Sources

1. ↑ Find a Grave Memorial 7448655
2. ↑ Texas, Death Certificate's, 1903-1982
3. ↑ CNN article by Kevin Bohn dated May 22, 2009 "Unsung heroes of WWII finally get their due."
4. ↑ Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II by Sarah Byrn Rickman, University of North Texas Press, 2008