Interview with Iris Cummings Critchell by Keri Kittleson
.
Thank so much for allowing me the
opportunity to interview you. Mrs. Sarah Rickman has given me this special
opportunity to be able to talk/interview a real WAF-WASP.
Interviewer: Can you tell me something about your life, and about the adventures you have had?
Mrs. Critchell: I have been very fortunate to have lived a long life with several different stages. My parents were quite unusual for their time, and they provided me with a remarkable preparation for life. My father was an athlete and an early “sports doctor” He was involved in the revival of the modern Olympic Games in the 1890’s and served as a coach and athletic director at Swarthmore College, and served as a doctor with the RAF in WW I. My mother was a college graduate and high school language teacher. I grew up in a strong atmosphere of outdoors and sports activities well balanced by a love of learning of languages and literature.
When I was 15 years old in 1936, I was in National sports competitions and made the U S Olympic Swim team to Berlin in the women's 200-meter breaststroke. That is a long and amazing story and I cannot do it justice in a short time. In one way it showed that the spirit of the Olympic Games is the same and has prevailed through the years. In another way it was a time when the games were held in Nazi Germany in a disturbed world. When our Olympic team marched in the Olympic stadium in Berlin, we were all standing and singing and all sorts of welcoming activities were going on. I had a little Brownie camera with me, a tiny camera of its day. The Von Hindenburg zeppelin was flying around the stadium. I stool there taking pictures of Von Hindenburg and I didn’t listen to the speaker very much. When I was in the Olympics I was already well into all the literature on the aviation pioneers and had attended an early air meet and flown as a passenger in an open cockpit bi-plane.
At the finish of the Olympic games you were allowed attend additional things like attend art shows and dance shows. They also had an air glider meet. I asked to be taken to the air glider meet. I was fifteen years old and I could not fly yet, but I was well into the subject. I was taken to this glider meet and it apparently was very famous. It became very important to the future impact of glider aviation in Germany. At 15 was enjoying sports competition but wanted to go onto college and be prepared to do whatever I needed to do to reach my goals. There were not exactly a whole lot of careers defined for women in aviation. I was going to find out what I need to do and be prepared. That is the guidance my parents gave me. Outdoor training and sports competition gave me one part of my wonderful preparation for the future. My reading and learning in astronomy and aviation provided the influence to prepare me to major in the physical sciences and mathematics as I finished High School and went on to college, which was pretty unusual for women at that time.
Interviewer: Who was your most important female role model in aviation, and why?
Mrs. Critchell: I had grown up reading about all the aviation pioneers men and women. I never had a “role model”. I simply learned all I could about the flying experiences of the real women pioneers. There were at least six of them who were flying from the 1929 period on, of whom I had the privilege of working with or flying with or knowing in some activity more than ten years later when I started flying in 1939. Several I worked with after WWII. I held them each in a high level of respect and learned a lot from them.
Interviewer: How did other men and women treat you when you decided to become an aviator? Were your parents supportive of you being a non-traditional female role?
Mrs. Critchell: I had been interested in the sciences and aviation for a long time and had thought it might be possible to become a pilot since I was 8! I encountered nothing but support, because I was raised where this was not a “male/ female “role distinction. If you could prepare well and learn to perform well you could be accepted in this field male or female. Our pioneers proved that.
Interviewer: What inspired you to become a pilot and WAF (later converted to WASP)?
Mrs. Critchell: I was already earning my living as an instructor in aviation flight and classes for two years before I considered the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) who preceded the WASP.
Interviwer: How were the WASPs treated differently from the men pilots?
Mrs. Critchell: They weren’t. If they were qualified and could be counted on to carry out the mission they were accepted as just another pilot needed to move airplanes to where they were needed.
Interviewer: How did you feel when you were accepted into the WASP program?
Mrs. Critchell :When I started I followed steps that led to being assigned to the 6th Ferrying Group of the Ferrying Division, Air Transport Command. The WASP name did not exist at that point. It was first given to the women who were learning to fly at Sweetwater (in Sweet Water Texas) in late 1943. We were assigned to the Ferry Command BEFORE Sweetwater started to exist. It was several months after Sweetwater training school was created that the name WASP was applied to us simply as an overhead group name to us women pilots in the Ferry Command. Until then our flight orders read Civilian Pilot, WAFS.
Interviewer: What was your daily schedule like as a WAF ?
Mrs. Critchell: The airplanes in which we were qualified for pursuits (WAF) for ferry flights were very much needed overseas and were very high priority and in demand to be produced at the factories at very high numbers. As we would return from a delivery flight having flown home on an airline to find we were already on orders to start on the next flight that afternoon or the next day. It got to be kind of a joke when we later checked into squadron leader and headquarters. They would say “hi, we are going to bed, but you are on orders to get some clean clothes, get your stuff, throw them in a parachute bag and get ready to go out again.” This was really the story for 1943 and 1944 for me. The airport in Long Beach would be covered with hundreds of airplanes flown in from the factory. On the pacific coast in California there is often fog from the stratus clouds in the morning. We had to wait until the late afternoon and fly for about a half an hour or into Palm Springs which is inland away from the stratus cloud fog. Then from Palm Springs we could be off the ground just after sunrise. There might be up to 50 ferry planes on route at one time.
We would prepare the flight by checking into base operations, check the weather, and then we file a flight plan for the route and destination and a plan to refuel. We made all those decisions based on our experience and when we had our orders. We could only take our parachute bag which would have our parachute, one change of clothes and an oxygen mask. We would get into an army truck and get out into the middle of the airport and find the particular number for the specific airplane we were assigned for our orders. We would then pre-flight and inspect the airplane and the fuel supply. We would then check the flight record for any notes. We then put on the parachute, attach the oxygen mask, buckle the seat belt and start on the checklist. We turned on the one little radio it had and call the tower. We then would be given taxi instructions to the runway. We would have navigation charts we would follow. The airplane was equipped for combat not navigation. When we got to cruising altitude we would then follow the direct route. With P51 and P38 it was easy to make El Paso (or Albuquerque or other varied destinations) 31/2 hours later as our first stop with the fuel range of the airplane.
When we got to an El Paso base we stopped for 1 hour to refuel and file a new flight plan. The red cross would then bring us egg salad sandwiches and Cokes. The next stop would be Monroe Louisiana. We would then stay overnight on the base in nurses quarters or a local hotel. We could then use the officers club and I would have a swim before dinner. The next day we would leave at sunrise and travel to Atlanta land and get another egg salad sandwich and Coke. Then we would fly non-stop to Atlanta to Newark. They would be so anxious to get the airplane; I would be climbing out and they attached a chain to the tail wheel and pull the airplane to the dock. They would tow the plane onto the deck of a Liberty Ship, which was then shipped to England. The Germans would have submarines all up and down the East coast and they managed to sink many of the Liberty ships with the P51’s. The P51’s did not have the cruising range to fly to Europe so they needed to travel by ship. The only airline service was out of LaGuardia on the east side of New York. The volunteer Red Cross ladies would drive us to the airport. We had government transportation request papers to be brought back to Long Beach CA. There were only DC3’s flying for the airlines at that time that only had 21 seats. As a group we had such high priority all the other passengers had to deplane and give us their seats. It was very difficult for ordinary civilians to get a seat on an airliner on the transcontinental run that was being used by the ferry pilots to get their pilots back. We would land back in California in Burbank and ride in a recon truck to Long Beach. We would arrive about 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock in the afternoon and would often be sent right back out again for the same mission. Occasionally, we would be able to sleep on base overnight. This occurred most of June to December of 1944. It was wartime so we just went head and did what needed to be done.
Interviewer: Can you tell me about the WAFS?
Mrs. Critchell: I am very excited about Sarah Rickman’s book called the ”The Ferry Command.” That is the story that has never been told. It paints the story to you like my story about flying the P51 to Newark. That type of thing is our story and not the story of the other 800 women who went to Sweetwater (WASP). There were only 120 of us that ever flew pursuits. Only 22 women flew the P38 and only 5 of us who flew the P61. These things were very special to the military needs of the day and had nothing to do with us. We happened to be there at the right place at the right time. We were prepared and we had the background and they were able to check us out in these pretty remarkable airplanes. The story of the later WASP’s Sweetwater is the one that had been told and over told. I was a part of the WAF’s that was told by Sarah in her book that will probably be published by the end of the year. Sarah’s story is going to be an excellent addition to filling in the history of women in aviation during the war era. In the end we were all called WASP’s; we were incorporated by title. We finally got most of the blue military uniform 6- 8 months before the program was discontinued. We basically wore the same uniform the men did but minus the rank of the enlisted men. We were just civilians and the civilians just wore pilot civilian WAF wings. Our group happened to be minimally engaged but nobody wrote it up. The world picture is of the Sweetwater group (WASP) and it is an entirely different thing. They did remarkable things and had a very tough duty.
Nancy Love’s WAFS simply started the USAAF (Army Air Forces) assignment of women pilots with prior flight experience. Due to my teaching commitment on the Navy Cadet training program, I couldn’t join the group until Dec 10, 1942. I was in the second group to be assigned out of the then Houston training base to join the WAFS already stationed at Long Beach Army Air Field.
Interviewer: What task did you fear the most as an aviator?
Mrs. Critchell: There was no room for this. You simply prepared well and got in and did the job. There were plenty of problems and we lost 5 girls from our squadron but you never knew things enough ahead of time to start worrying about something.
Interviewer: How did you feel about not being recognized as a war veteran until the 70s?
Mrs. Critchell: I wasn’t very much concerned about this. It might benefit some who had financial and health care needs. But those of us who had been in the WAFS, later known as WASP for more than a year, were offered direct commissions in the Reserves of the new USAF in 1949. I served as a 1st Lt in the weather division for 5 years. Others like our WAFS squadron leader Barbara London served as a Major for twenty years in the Reserves.
Interviewer: Which woman aviator do you think was the most successful leader?
Mrs. Critchell: I knew Nancy Love. Nancy Love served us Ferry pilots as an outstanding real leader. She was a born leader. She was a very remarkable lady who did a lot of flying in the early 30’s and early 40’s and was very well prepared. She had been a test pilot for the FAA and CAA and had done a lot of unique flying in the Boston area for many many years. We were all pleased and honored to be serving under Nancy Love.
Interviewer: How do you think the early women in aviation made it easier for the women in aviation today?
Mrs. Critchell: According to a leading history author, Claudia Oakes, “the fame of these early pioneer women pilots did not spring entirely from the novelty of women flyers but from the genuine respect that had earned by their exploits.”
Interviewer: Thank you so much with your generosity and time with this interview.
Mrs. Critchell: You are so welcome. I am so glad to see you doing this job so enthusiastically. I appreciate the privilege of being able to fly. It is not like being able to walk around on the ground where you can stop, pick a book up, and find the answer on page 62. You have got to be prepared to take care of things in real time. Flying is a different environment and very challenging and it is amazing human beings were ever able to fly. It took many years before flying even became possible. Keep up the good work. Call or write to me anytime.
Interviewer: Lastly, this is not specifically about women in aviation but I wanted to ask you about Bates Field Aero Club that you have been such a big part of over the years.
Mrs. Critechell: The full two year four semester flight and ground training program ran from 1962 to 1990 when it was discontinued when I retired!
Then the students and college asked me to teach the first year course again- without the flight. I did this for the next five years and the students formed a special aeronautics interest club they call the Barnstormers. That is still in existence. They go on interesting tours every years and fly gliders at least once a year. The Special Harvey Mudd College Heritage in the History of Aviation has been carefully preserved as our aeronautics Special library for which I am still responsible.
The special unique aeronautics training concept lives on with the seven students each year who become the Aeronautical Scholars, sponsored by the Bates Foundation and several of our alumni.
I am still around mentoring and advising and occasionally flying intro flights with few students. I still have a current pilots certificate and Flight Instructor Rating.
Interviewer: Thanks again for answering this last question. It is nice to see such a legacy of learning and aviation.
Interviewer: Can you tell me something about your life, and about the adventures you have had?
Mrs. Critchell: I have been very fortunate to have lived a long life with several different stages. My parents were quite unusual for their time, and they provided me with a remarkable preparation for life. My father was an athlete and an early “sports doctor” He was involved in the revival of the modern Olympic Games in the 1890’s and served as a coach and athletic director at Swarthmore College, and served as a doctor with the RAF in WW I. My mother was a college graduate and high school language teacher. I grew up in a strong atmosphere of outdoors and sports activities well balanced by a love of learning of languages and literature.
When I was 15 years old in 1936, I was in National sports competitions and made the U S Olympic Swim team to Berlin in the women's 200-meter breaststroke. That is a long and amazing story and I cannot do it justice in a short time. In one way it showed that the spirit of the Olympic Games is the same and has prevailed through the years. In another way it was a time when the games were held in Nazi Germany in a disturbed world. When our Olympic team marched in the Olympic stadium in Berlin, we were all standing and singing and all sorts of welcoming activities were going on. I had a little Brownie camera with me, a tiny camera of its day. The Von Hindenburg zeppelin was flying around the stadium. I stool there taking pictures of Von Hindenburg and I didn’t listen to the speaker very much. When I was in the Olympics I was already well into all the literature on the aviation pioneers and had attended an early air meet and flown as a passenger in an open cockpit bi-plane.
At the finish of the Olympic games you were allowed attend additional things like attend art shows and dance shows. They also had an air glider meet. I asked to be taken to the air glider meet. I was fifteen years old and I could not fly yet, but I was well into the subject. I was taken to this glider meet and it apparently was very famous. It became very important to the future impact of glider aviation in Germany. At 15 was enjoying sports competition but wanted to go onto college and be prepared to do whatever I needed to do to reach my goals. There were not exactly a whole lot of careers defined for women in aviation. I was going to find out what I need to do and be prepared. That is the guidance my parents gave me. Outdoor training and sports competition gave me one part of my wonderful preparation for the future. My reading and learning in astronomy and aviation provided the influence to prepare me to major in the physical sciences and mathematics as I finished High School and went on to college, which was pretty unusual for women at that time.
Interviewer: Who was your most important female role model in aviation, and why?
Mrs. Critchell: I had grown up reading about all the aviation pioneers men and women. I never had a “role model”. I simply learned all I could about the flying experiences of the real women pioneers. There were at least six of them who were flying from the 1929 period on, of whom I had the privilege of working with or flying with or knowing in some activity more than ten years later when I started flying in 1939. Several I worked with after WWII. I held them each in a high level of respect and learned a lot from them.
Interviewer: How did other men and women treat you when you decided to become an aviator? Were your parents supportive of you being a non-traditional female role?
Mrs. Critchell: I had been interested in the sciences and aviation for a long time and had thought it might be possible to become a pilot since I was 8! I encountered nothing but support, because I was raised where this was not a “male/ female “role distinction. If you could prepare well and learn to perform well you could be accepted in this field male or female. Our pioneers proved that.
Interviewer: What inspired you to become a pilot and WAF (later converted to WASP)?
Mrs. Critchell: I was already earning my living as an instructor in aviation flight and classes for two years before I considered the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) who preceded the WASP.
Interviwer: How were the WASPs treated differently from the men pilots?
Mrs. Critchell: They weren’t. If they were qualified and could be counted on to carry out the mission they were accepted as just another pilot needed to move airplanes to where they were needed.
Interviewer: How did you feel when you were accepted into the WASP program?
Mrs. Critchell :When I started I followed steps that led to being assigned to the 6th Ferrying Group of the Ferrying Division, Air Transport Command. The WASP name did not exist at that point. It was first given to the women who were learning to fly at Sweetwater (in Sweet Water Texas) in late 1943. We were assigned to the Ferry Command BEFORE Sweetwater started to exist. It was several months after Sweetwater training school was created that the name WASP was applied to us simply as an overhead group name to us women pilots in the Ferry Command. Until then our flight orders read Civilian Pilot, WAFS.
Interviewer: What was your daily schedule like as a WAF ?
Mrs. Critchell: The airplanes in which we were qualified for pursuits (WAF) for ferry flights were very much needed overseas and were very high priority and in demand to be produced at the factories at very high numbers. As we would return from a delivery flight having flown home on an airline to find we were already on orders to start on the next flight that afternoon or the next day. It got to be kind of a joke when we later checked into squadron leader and headquarters. They would say “hi, we are going to bed, but you are on orders to get some clean clothes, get your stuff, throw them in a parachute bag and get ready to go out again.” This was really the story for 1943 and 1944 for me. The airport in Long Beach would be covered with hundreds of airplanes flown in from the factory. On the pacific coast in California there is often fog from the stratus clouds in the morning. We had to wait until the late afternoon and fly for about a half an hour or into Palm Springs which is inland away from the stratus cloud fog. Then from Palm Springs we could be off the ground just after sunrise. There might be up to 50 ferry planes on route at one time.
We would prepare the flight by checking into base operations, check the weather, and then we file a flight plan for the route and destination and a plan to refuel. We made all those decisions based on our experience and when we had our orders. We could only take our parachute bag which would have our parachute, one change of clothes and an oxygen mask. We would get into an army truck and get out into the middle of the airport and find the particular number for the specific airplane we were assigned for our orders. We would then pre-flight and inspect the airplane and the fuel supply. We would then check the flight record for any notes. We then put on the parachute, attach the oxygen mask, buckle the seat belt and start on the checklist. We turned on the one little radio it had and call the tower. We then would be given taxi instructions to the runway. We would have navigation charts we would follow. The airplane was equipped for combat not navigation. When we got to cruising altitude we would then follow the direct route. With P51 and P38 it was easy to make El Paso (or Albuquerque or other varied destinations) 31/2 hours later as our first stop with the fuel range of the airplane.
When we got to an El Paso base we stopped for 1 hour to refuel and file a new flight plan. The red cross would then bring us egg salad sandwiches and Cokes. The next stop would be Monroe Louisiana. We would then stay overnight on the base in nurses quarters or a local hotel. We could then use the officers club and I would have a swim before dinner. The next day we would leave at sunrise and travel to Atlanta land and get another egg salad sandwich and Coke. Then we would fly non-stop to Atlanta to Newark. They would be so anxious to get the airplane; I would be climbing out and they attached a chain to the tail wheel and pull the airplane to the dock. They would tow the plane onto the deck of a Liberty Ship, which was then shipped to England. The Germans would have submarines all up and down the East coast and they managed to sink many of the Liberty ships with the P51’s. The P51’s did not have the cruising range to fly to Europe so they needed to travel by ship. The only airline service was out of LaGuardia on the east side of New York. The volunteer Red Cross ladies would drive us to the airport. We had government transportation request papers to be brought back to Long Beach CA. There were only DC3’s flying for the airlines at that time that only had 21 seats. As a group we had such high priority all the other passengers had to deplane and give us their seats. It was very difficult for ordinary civilians to get a seat on an airliner on the transcontinental run that was being used by the ferry pilots to get their pilots back. We would land back in California in Burbank and ride in a recon truck to Long Beach. We would arrive about 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock in the afternoon and would often be sent right back out again for the same mission. Occasionally, we would be able to sleep on base overnight. This occurred most of June to December of 1944. It was wartime so we just went head and did what needed to be done.
Interviewer: Can you tell me about the WAFS?
Mrs. Critchell: I am very excited about Sarah Rickman’s book called the ”The Ferry Command.” That is the story that has never been told. It paints the story to you like my story about flying the P51 to Newark. That type of thing is our story and not the story of the other 800 women who went to Sweetwater (WASP). There were only 120 of us that ever flew pursuits. Only 22 women flew the P38 and only 5 of us who flew the P61. These things were very special to the military needs of the day and had nothing to do with us. We happened to be there at the right place at the right time. We were prepared and we had the background and they were able to check us out in these pretty remarkable airplanes. The story of the later WASP’s Sweetwater is the one that had been told and over told. I was a part of the WAF’s that was told by Sarah in her book that will probably be published by the end of the year. Sarah’s story is going to be an excellent addition to filling in the history of women in aviation during the war era. In the end we were all called WASP’s; we were incorporated by title. We finally got most of the blue military uniform 6- 8 months before the program was discontinued. We basically wore the same uniform the men did but minus the rank of the enlisted men. We were just civilians and the civilians just wore pilot civilian WAF wings. Our group happened to be minimally engaged but nobody wrote it up. The world picture is of the Sweetwater group (WASP) and it is an entirely different thing. They did remarkable things and had a very tough duty.
Nancy Love’s WAFS simply started the USAAF (Army Air Forces) assignment of women pilots with prior flight experience. Due to my teaching commitment on the Navy Cadet training program, I couldn’t join the group until Dec 10, 1942. I was in the second group to be assigned out of the then Houston training base to join the WAFS already stationed at Long Beach Army Air Field.
Interviewer: What task did you fear the most as an aviator?
Mrs. Critchell: There was no room for this. You simply prepared well and got in and did the job. There were plenty of problems and we lost 5 girls from our squadron but you never knew things enough ahead of time to start worrying about something.
Interviewer: How did you feel about not being recognized as a war veteran until the 70s?
Mrs. Critchell: I wasn’t very much concerned about this. It might benefit some who had financial and health care needs. But those of us who had been in the WAFS, later known as WASP for more than a year, were offered direct commissions in the Reserves of the new USAF in 1949. I served as a 1st Lt in the weather division for 5 years. Others like our WAFS squadron leader Barbara London served as a Major for twenty years in the Reserves.
Interviewer: Which woman aviator do you think was the most successful leader?
Mrs. Critchell: I knew Nancy Love. Nancy Love served us Ferry pilots as an outstanding real leader. She was a born leader. She was a very remarkable lady who did a lot of flying in the early 30’s and early 40’s and was very well prepared. She had been a test pilot for the FAA and CAA and had done a lot of unique flying in the Boston area for many many years. We were all pleased and honored to be serving under Nancy Love.
Interviewer: How do you think the early women in aviation made it easier for the women in aviation today?
Mrs. Critchell: According to a leading history author, Claudia Oakes, “the fame of these early pioneer women pilots did not spring entirely from the novelty of women flyers but from the genuine respect that had earned by their exploits.”
Interviewer: Thank you so much with your generosity and time with this interview.
Mrs. Critchell: You are so welcome. I am so glad to see you doing this job so enthusiastically. I appreciate the privilege of being able to fly. It is not like being able to walk around on the ground where you can stop, pick a book up, and find the answer on page 62. You have got to be prepared to take care of things in real time. Flying is a different environment and very challenging and it is amazing human beings were ever able to fly. It took many years before flying even became possible. Keep up the good work. Call or write to me anytime.
Interviewer: Lastly, this is not specifically about women in aviation but I wanted to ask you about Bates Field Aero Club that you have been such a big part of over the years.
Mrs. Critechell: The full two year four semester flight and ground training program ran from 1962 to 1990 when it was discontinued when I retired!
Then the students and college asked me to teach the first year course again- without the flight. I did this for the next five years and the students formed a special aeronautics interest club they call the Barnstormers. That is still in existence. They go on interesting tours every years and fly gliders at least once a year. The Special Harvey Mudd College Heritage in the History of Aviation has been carefully preserved as our aeronautics Special library for which I am still responsible.
The special unique aeronautics training concept lives on with the seven students each year who become the Aeronautical Scholars, sponsored by the Bates Foundation and several of our alumni.
I am still around mentoring and advising and occasionally flying intro flights with few students. I still have a current pilots certificate and Flight Instructor Rating.
Interviewer: Thanks again for answering this last question. It is nice to see such a legacy of learning and aviation.