Samuel Santana
Published: 2012-09-11
Total Pages: 283
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In slow paced, post-World War I America, Guadalupe is no different than any other town its size on the California Central Coast. With its whistle stop ambiance, sparse population and vibrant collection of personalities that make up the small farming community, Guadalupe is a haven to those who prefer a tranquil existence and those who recognize a lucrative opportunity when they see it. Jonah Quentin and long-time friends, Mel and Ona Archer, came to the fertile Santa Maria Valley with nothing more than an idea and a surplus Curtiss Jenny biplane to set up shop as the valley’s first crop dusting company, the latest concept in agricultural pest control. Even with its limitations Angel Dust Incorporated is an instant success, though perhaps a little too successful for a corporation whose fleet consists of only one tired old surplus biplane flown by Jonah, an ex-Army Air Service fighter pilot who knows nothing about crop dusting. Late in the evening on the Forth of July 1926, Jonah wants nothing more than to cap off a night of celebration with a shot of whiskey and a beer at the Bésame Bar & Grille, Guadalupe’s not so clandestine speakeasy. But first he must step over a dirty little girl, around the age of four, sitting on the gin mill’s steps despite the late hour. Jonah, a devote bachelor, has no idea that that night their lives would merge forever. By the time Anna Lea turns seven a deep love for flying already smolders deep inside her. She loves nothing better than to sit on Jonah’s lap and peek over the rim of the cockpit while leisurely circling high above the small town surrounded by a sea of crop fields. At age ten, still on Jonah’s lap, Anna Lea is hooked when she holds the controls for the first time in flight, with Jonah handling everything else below the stick since she’s way too small to even reach the rudder bar. By her seventeenth birthday Anna Lea is flying tracks five feet above long rows of crops with the skill of a veteran fighter pilot. On the morning of December 7, 1941, following a vicious attack by the Japanese Imperial Navy, the United States plunges headfirst into World War II and Americans everywhere scramble to lend a hand. But even though manpower is stretched dangerously thin, America, the land of opportunity and progress, continues to hold fast to the narrow-minded notion that women are the weaker, inferior sex, with little to contribute outside their own front doors. But with the dismal initial progress of the war, the country hesitantly turns its eyes to the other half of its populace that for generations has been ignored as a viable contributing force. After several attempts and failures, Nancy Harkness Love, an affluent aviatrix from Houghton, Michigan, and Jacqueline Cochran, a successful self-made businesswoman and pilot from the Florida panhandle, finally convince the General of the Air Force, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, that the Army Air Force would benefit from having women pilots ferrying military aircraft from the factories to the airfields, and from airfield to airfield, to free up male pilots for combat duty overseas—something the Royal Air Force had been doing since 1939 with the advent of the Air Transport Auxiliary. At first the proposal to have women pilots perform a task that only men were suited to do was met with sarcasm, indifference and even hostility. But despite it all the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or “WASP,” took to the sky. When Anna Lea reads in the local paper that the Army Air Force is hiring women civilian pilots to help in the war effort, crop dusting quickly loses its allure and she sets her eyes on the WASP. Nobody tells her that the demanding, intensely paced training would be the easy part. From its humble beginnings the WASP program is an unpopular decision among the Air Force rank and file; some even call it blasphemy. Nobody wants a woman soaring high above the clouds in control of the worlds most powerful and modern military aircraft, undermining the male pilot’s superior aptitude and physical prowess. SEND ME AN ANGEL is a fictionalized account of the blatant prejudices and harsh chauvinism the 1,074 women of the Women Airforce Service Pilots endured and ultimately overcame, and the intestinal fortitude it took to became a fully operational WASP.
