Who Is Nell Stevenson Bright?

My VIP for this week is Nell Stevenson Bright, female pilot of World War II. According to Lee Benson at the Deseret News, Nell was 21 years old in early 1943 when she saw an article in an issue of Flying Magazine about a new program. 

The article said that the U.S. Army was recruiting female pilots to make more men available for combat duty. The female pilots would work behind-the-scenes where they would test planes, ferry aircraft, transport cargo, and train new pilots. The name of the squadron was Women Airforce Service Pilots, better known as WASP.

Nell Stevenson looked at the requirements: Female. Check. Twenty-one years of age or older. Check. Five-foot-4 or taller. Check. Pilot’s license. Check. Thirty-five hours of flight time. Check. (She had 75.)

At a time in history when women weren’t allowed to serve on juries in many states or even open their own checkbooks – let alone fly in combat – Nell now had her chance to help America win the war.

More than 25,000 women applied to be WASPs, 1,830 were admitted and 1,074 completed the six-month course that included schooling in navigation, physics, Morse code, meteorology, military law and mechanics.

Nell was one of the select few. In the critical years of 1943 and 1944, through D-Day and beyond, she trained on and flew almost every plane in the U.S. Army Air Corps fleet, from bombers to fighters to everything in between. She was one of the first women chosen to pilot a B-25 bomber.

All while wearing her lipstick (the Army insisted its women flyers look ladylike).

The closest she got to the front was Biggs Field in El Paso, Texas, and Mather Field in Sacramento, California. But there’s no way of calculating the enormous impact her out-of-the-limelight service, and that of her fell WASPs, had on the men they trained, the planes they tested and the outcome of the war.

These days, [she] can be found living at the Legacy Village retirement home in Sugarhouse….

This past June 20, she celebrated her 105^th birthday.

She is the last living WASP….