Goodbye Glamour Gals: the true story of American women pilots in WWII

In 1940s America, Jacqueline Cochran was the rarest kind of woman: she was a self-made millionaire pilot who, since the disappearance of her friend Amelia Earhart, had become the nation’s most famous darling of the air. But she was no darling. At the outbreak of World War II, Cochran used her considerable celebrity and wealth to launch a fight of her own against the US Army. The notion might have seemed absurd, but she aimed to command a group of women pilots within the Army Air Corps.Cochran was feminine and scrappy, but she was not the only woman pilot with ambition. Vassar-educated, socially connected Nancy Love also wanted women flying military planes, but she had a different idea of how they should be used. Goodbye Glamour Gals is a story of extraordinary women in an extraordinary time.A cold rivalry developed as Cochran and Love struggled to convince the Army that women were a national resource. Each gained allies and, remarkably, two fragile programs emerged. But in a world hostile to progressive women, it was clear only one organization could succeed. With the aid of a powerful general, Cochran managed to merge the programs under her command, relegating Love to a vague, subordinate role. The Women Airforce Service Pilots—the WASP—were born, and by summer 1944 they were flying every kind of airplane in the Army, from the P-51 Mustang (the fastest) to the B-29 Superfortress (the biggest). The women pilots worked under punishing conditions, drank, swore, and did things the Army way. They did this while often wearing impeccable makeup, enduring brutal discrimination, and fending off aggressive sexual advances.Inevitably, the WASP project ignited a national media controversy that portrayed the hardworking women pilots as the Army's glamorous trophy girls, and Cochran and Love were compelled to join forces in opposition—taking their fight all the way to Congress.Although the story is true, Goodbye Glamour Gals is written in a fictional narrative style. All 100,000 words are deliberately consistent with the 1940s lexicon, researched down to the idiom. Read more