[Music}
[Male Narrator] This is Texas, cradle of our Army's Air Force.
This is an A.A.F. field too. But, over headquarters rides a strange little girl gremlin called Fifinella.
And out of those buses are stepping girls. Girls who give a new angle to an Air Force story.
They’re WASP’s, Women’s Airforce Service Pilots.
But even before they get a chance to take the polish off their nails,
it’s out on to a dusty Texas drill field with ‘em.
Right away the Air Force wants to get a little muscle on those pretty arms.
This scene provides a pretty fair picture of what the girls look like from all angles
None of them are under 21 or over 35
Now, chinning yourself is a very wholesome kind of a,
very wholesome kind of a, thank you sir, a very wholesome kind of condition
for young ladies about to embark on a serious venture.
[music]
It doesn’t make much difference how they get you up, 6 AM
at Avenger Field is no more pleasant or exciting than anywhere else.
It’s merely the beginning of another non-ladylike day of grind
and GI-study which won’t end until long after the Texas sun has set.
Very simply and seriously, the WASP’s, girls like Mary Abbott, maybe a little younger, maybe older, are willing
to plow into as rugged as six months stretches as anything handed to women in the whole war effort
Map reading and physics, navigation and code with strict AAF exams in each too.
For men it would be touch, it’s tough for girls too.
[music]
To be accepted as a WASP, each girl had to have 35 hours in the air beforehand.
Enough to know men’s airplane
talk when they hear it.
But flying here is different, Kay.
The instrument board of a Link Trainer has instruments and radio devices and controls you never dreamed of.
This is the Army, Kay.
The Army judges each girl, not by her eagerness,
but by her ability to fly. The little blonde on the right, with her hair bleached by the sun,
you or I might judge by other standards.
She doesn’t. Lonnie, her name’s Lenore Horton, is pretty serious about her flying, for the duration, anyhow.
She and her good friend from New York named Nancy Church have paired off as a flying buddy team.
Nancy’s riding the controls today and will get credit for the time.
Lonnie gets some good practice on a radio and navigation.
Next flight they'll trade.
[music]
There they go, Lonnie and Nancy, the two of them. Two girls of a large and important sorority.
All of them just as determined to be good flyers, just as sincere, maybe just as pretty.
Someday, not so far away, in a month or so, this trainer will be a
P-47 or P-38 being ferried from factory to field, from one field to another,
with Lonnie, or Nancy, or Jean, or Peggie, or Barbara at the stick.
[engine noise]
Nobody should ever tell a WASP that flying’s not a woman’s job.
They wouldn’t believe it any more than if it were said a girl can’t be a good flyer and a woman,
a woman at the same time.
[music]
Yes, they talk Army talk and they wear GI clothes but a very small,
we’ll call it a change of clothing, can remind her among others that she’s still a softer, fairer sex worried to death
that she is going to get her hair wet.
[music]
At this point, nobody should tell a screen magazine audience that a WASP is anything
but a woman when she gets time for relaxation in the sun.
Six months in the sunshine and in the skies can come to an end pretty quickly at Avenger Field
but to Lonnie and Nancy and the rest of the class
graduation day means that they've grown up. They are Army fliers.
As they know, their experience here has been no interlude for romantic adventure,
but a period of intensive training for a highly important job. At the moment,
there is a bill in congress to bring them into the Air Force.
It makes no difference
for as they go up to receive their wings from the top woman pilot of them all,
the founder of the WASPs Ms. Jacquelyn Cochran,
each WASP like other women in other services has achieved no little thing.
She’s gone into a man’s world
because the men needed her. Gone through a tough ordeal as just a girl and come out a girl
pilot with a US Army Air Force.
[music]
No time to waste. Everywhere,
they’re badly needed for ferrying duty so that the men trained in training can go off to fight,
while WASPs help get their ships started on the road overseas. There is a reason for the WASPs.
[music]
So long ladies, go to it.
Someday you’ll be able to sit down in the evening with your husbands who will probably be fliers and
remind them that during the war, you did your part. Keep ‘em flying Fifinella.
[music]
[Second Male Narrator] For Uncle Sam's traveling GI,
global war also means global sightseeing.
Here, somewhere in India, the lads and lassies prepare to enjoy a three-day pass in this strange new country.
First, a ride in a local Jeep.
A little crowded perhaps, but no more so than one of our own jeeps or the surrounding sidewalks.
Indians like the Americans, and the Americans like the colorful bazaars, the flower
vendors, the fortune tellers swarming along the narrow streets.
They also like the idea that afterwards, they'll be able to talk about this little jaunt.
The USA is always in a soldier's mind, so he stops to see what time it is in the old hometown.
Ma is probably asleep now.
Mary's just coming out of the movie.
In India, the GI finds that the first price is never the last price,
and rapidly learns to bargain with the skill of a Baghdad merchant.
Naturally, it'd be easier if he could speak the language.
The parlez-vous of the last war was nothing compared to the tongue-twisting Hindu of this one.
As for the printed word, well, that's something else again.
Here is the latest edition of the afternoon paper, but no Dick Tracy. Sorry brother.
But if a soldier really wants a string of beads, or this long mean-looking knife bad enough,
he can make himself understood.
The little sideshows on almost every corner get their share of attention.
Sometimes, it's a trained monkey or a pair of birds doing their stuff in a marketplace.
Or it's an old man with a squeaky flute and a bag of cobras.
[music]
It's a trick to hypnotize a deadly snake. Ask the noncom who tried it and spent a week in the hospital.
Most of these large cities have a racetrack.
Though a soldier may not get a gander at one of those famous milk-white steeds out of the Arabian Nights,
he'll always get a chance to play his rupees across-the-board on some local Man O' War.
[music]
Frequently he rubs elbows with Tommy Atkins.
Sometimes, they're even lucky enough to share
a winner!
[music]
[Third Male Narrator] In the newsreels, and in the newspapers, you see a lot about heroes.
Fliers who have captured an island single-handed.
Sailors, who spent 36 days on a life raft.
This man isn't from the Air Forces.
He isn't a sailor. His name is Patrick McDonald. His mother comes from Ireland,
and he speaks with a good Irish brogue. He's a Private in the infantry, and he's just been invalided home from Italy.
[Patrick McDonald] Back home when you heard about Italy,
it was the kind of place lucky people would pick for a vacation.
I always wanted to go to Italy myself.
[Music]
According to the movies, you drank wine and sat in the sun, and
listened to the native jug blowers. And the main industry was spaghetti making.
The spaghetti was supposed to be the best in the world.
Well..
...we got to Italy and so what?
It wasn't much.
We fought so hard, and looked so long for a place to sleep, and rest our feet, that we didn't see anything.
Nobody who was with the Infantry in Italy will ever get enough sleep again.
Back in Sicily, where we took the boats, it was hurry up and wait.
Chop chop and wait. Hurry up to get on the boats and then wait.
They packed us on the deck like sardines.
And from our deck, we could see ships to the edge of the horizon.
On the day before we landed on the beach in Salerno,
they told us their tenant government had signed an armistice.
We landed during the night and dug in on the beach.
Then the Krauts took the lid off off hell.
There was fighting on the beach, and there was fighting up ahead.
[explosions]
And there was fighting in the harbor and on her banks.
For a while it didn't matter whether you were in the Infantry, the Air Forces or the Navy,
The fighting was hot all around.
We could hear the big Navy guns, and the anti-aircraft guns, and the roaring of the dogfighters out at sea.
The Krauts got the range of our boats, more than a couple of times,
but the Navy guns kept up a running fight with the Germans on the hills, behind the shore,
and the Germans in the sky.
The Nazis claimed to have sunk the Savannah.
Well, their bombers got a direct hit on a gun turret,
They knocked out lot of men, and set some fires,
But 20 minutes after they hit, the damage was under control, and the Savannah back in the fight again.
[music]
It was hot on the beach, and it was plenty hot, a mile out to sea.
But the Navy kept the water clear for landing barges,
and it felt mighty good to see those reinforcements coming in.
First you get your feet wet, then you get sand in your shoes,
Then your hit barbed wire.
There's a lot of SNAFU in the Infantry, and sometimes you're late, sometimes you're early,
sometimes you're in the wrong place, and the artillery doesn't show up.
All you know about the plan of a campaign is your mission,
your [inaudible] and the shape of the man in front of you.
[music]
Italy was supposed to be the kind of place where a man would take Betty Grable for a honeymoon.
But with the way land mines were planted there, you wouldn't want to take a dog to Italy.
[explosion]
Transportation was also different from the movies.
When you got ready to sleep, there was always some fighting to do.
It's a good thing the Infantry training is tough.
Infantry fighting is tougher. And the Nazis weren't firing any blanks, and the machine guns weren't in any frims.
[Sounds of gunfire and explosions]
The 155th did great work.
[explosions]
But their artillery men didn't have to carry their guns. In the Infantry, you carry our own weapons.
Before I got into the Army,
I always wanted to do a lot of traveling to foreign countries.
But I never counted on traveling on sore feet, with the gravel in my shoes,
sandpapering my blisters. I never counted on traveling with my mouth full of dust,
and a cold K-ration sitting on my gut like lead.
Now a lot of guys like the Infantry.
Mark Clark's father was a Doughboy, and General Clark was born in an Infantry camp.
He picked the Infantry in spite of the trouble he has seen.
He'd rather ford a stream, then fly over one.
And Italy was full of streams and rivers. And the Nazis pulled the bridge out of every one.
Everything that our Air Forces didn't hit, the Germans destroyed.
Delayed-action mines, and the rubbish, made the work of clearing up communications, tricky and dangerous.
The Germans wrecked the railroad stock they couldn't take with them, and blasted out the road beds.
But GI road gangs,
old hands from the Pennsylvania and the B&O,
repaired the beds, set new tracks, and kept the supplies moving.
The Air Forces and their artillery,
can make a mess out of a place, but they can't kill the Kraut snipers in the cellars. That's for us.
You can break down a lot of walls with a Flying Fortress, but you can't clean the enemy out of a town.
That's for us, too.
We captured a lot of Germans.
Some of them, husky kids. All of them pretty cocky, unless they were dead.
Italy used to be famous for ruins.
But there are fresh ruins in the towns we passed through,
made by the Kraut's idiots and our own 105s
One time house wreckers from Brooklyn, pulled down the half destroyed buildings.
Nobody much hung around to watch, like the crowd that always gathers round back home.
There wasn't time.
The deeper we cut into enemy territory,
the tougher things became.
The wounded began moving in another direction.
Back to the temporary field hospitals behind the lines for treatment and evacuation.
Nobody gripes much about the care they got at the field hospitals,
and I hear the nurses were swell.
From our foxholes, we saw the plans from Africa, heading for Naples.
From the hills outside the city, we could hear the bombers nailing their targets.
It was a good feeling to know those were our planes.
But, when their work was done,
the Air Force boys turned back, and took off for quarters in Africa. We kept on walking.
Naples may have looked like something from a bomber,
but fighting your way in through the streets,
Americans and British,
there is nothing but a pile of broken buildings and a smell of smoke.
There have been a lot of changes in warfare in the last couple of hundred years.
But most of it is still at close quarters. The Infantry gets the dirty work, that you don't hear much about.
There wasn't much left of Naples when we got there, excepting the people.
When your dog tired and when you haven't washed for a week, it makes you feel good to hear a crowd cheering.
For a while I thought we were real heroes.
You do get some idea of what the war is about,
when you see half-starved civilians, kids without homes or fathers.
There weren't many soldiers among the people of Naples.
But their city had been a battlefield for months.
Many of the old folks had been thrown in jail for talking against Mussolini.
You know about total war, when you see women, filling their drinking water, out of sewers and broken mains.
The Germans crossed up the water system before they left Naples.
We set up water depots for the city, and the MPs did some good for once.
[music]
The Germans had carried off the city's food stores.
We give the people flour and distributed the bread they baked.
You know about war when you see people fighting for bread.
The Germans planted delayed-action mines through the city.
[Music]
But that's something for the engineers to worry about.
[music]
The Infantryman can't stay long on any one place.
Be washed and shaved.
Climb the hills outside of town, and hit the road again.
The War Department has created a new badge for the Infantryman,
and any Doughboy you see wearing this rifle, is a
qualified Infantryman.
If he has the wreath too, he's been slugging it out in a combat area where it's kill or be killed.
[Music]