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Elaine Harmon & the WASP: The Women Who Flew for Their Country, and the Fight to Be Buried by It

Elaine Harmon flew military aircraft for her country in the Second World War, spent forty years making sure her country remembered the women who had done it, and left one final wish: to be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, with her fellow veterans. The Army said no — a month before she died, it had decided women like her never belonged there at all. This page is the documented record of the service, the two times the institution moved the goalposts across seventy years, and the daughter and grandchildren who refused to accept the second move.

The service, and the promise

The Women Airforce Service Pilots — the WASP — were created in 1943, when the Army Air Forces, short of male pilots, merged two women’s flying programs into one. The numbers, as the Department of Veterans Affairs records them, are stark: more than 25,000 women applied, 1,830 were accepted, and 1,074 earned their wings. They received the same training as male cadets, and they flew everything in the inventory — fighters, bombers, transports, trainers. They ferried more than 12,000 aircraft from factories to bases, logged over 60 million miles, towed targets behind their own planes while gunners trained on them with live ammunition, test-flew newly built and newly repaired aircraft, and trained the male pilots who went overseas. They freed men for combat. That was the mission, and by the Army’s own later accounting they accomplished it.

Elaine Danforth Harmon of Maryland was one of them. She had learned to fly at College Park Airport through the Civilian Pilot Training Program while a student at the University of Maryland, and she joined the WASP against her mother’s wishes. She trained at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas, as a member of class 44-W-9, graduated in November 1944, and was stationed at Las Vegas Army Air Field in Nevada. She flew the PT-17, the BT-13 and the AT-6 Texan, and served as co-pilot on the B-17 Flying Fortress; her wartime work included flying with male pilots who needed retraining in instrument flying. “It was a man’s world,” she said in an interview recorded for the Library of Congress, “but we did something really great that was needed for the war effort.”

The promise, as the women understood it, was that they were soldiers in everything but paperwork: Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, who formed the program, intended them to be militarized, and the women wore uniforms, lived under military discipline, and flew military missions on that understanding. Congress never passed the bill. What follows is what that missing paperwork cost them — for the rest of their lives, and in Elaine Harmon’s case, after it.

What happened

The WASP were classified as civil-service civilians. That single classification governed everything. They were paid less than the male civilian ferry pilots they replaced, bought their own dress uniforms, and received no military benefits and no insurance. And when the flying killed them — as it killed 38 of the 1,074 — the government did not ship their daughters home. The families of the dead paid for the transport themselves, or their fellow WASP took up a collection. When WASP Mabel Rawlinson died in a crash in 1943, the Air Force’s own account records, the government would not pay to send her remains to her family and would not allow a flag on her casket; her service sisters passed a hat, shipped her home flag-draped in defiance, and escorted her there themselves. No military honors. No gold star in the window. Thirty-eight times.

In December 1944, with the war’s tide turned, the program was disbanded — a bill to militarize the WASP had failed in Congress, and the women were sent home at their own expense. Their records were sealed, classified, and filed away, and the WASP largely vanished from the history of the war they had helped fly. The women dispersed, raised families, and, as Harmon’s granddaughter Erin Miller later put it, were told not to publicize what they had done.

Elaine Harmon went home to Maryland, worked as an air traffic controller while her husband was still in the Pacific, raised four children after she was widowed in 1965, and built a 25-year career as a real estate appraiser. When the WASP began to reconnect in the 1970s, Harmon became, in historian Katherine Sharp Landdeck’s account, their informal secretary — tracking down her fellow pilots around the country and hosting them when they came to Washington to lobby. She spent the next forty years telling the WASP story to anyone who would listen: she met five presidents, and in March 2010 she stood at the Capitol when the WASP received the Congressional Gold Medal. Her final wish, written in her own hand and left where her family would find it, was specific: “I would like to be buried in Arlington Cemetery.” She added: “Even if there are no ashes left, I would like an empty urn placed at Arlington.”

What the institution did afterward

The institution’s record with the WASP is a pattern of ground given and ground taken back.

In the mid-1970s, the Air Force announced that women would fly military aircraft for the first time in American history — a claim the WASP, who had done it three decades earlier, recognized as erasure. They organized. With the help of Sen. Barry Goldwater, himself a wartime ferry pilot, and Col. Bruce Arnold, the son of Hap Arnold, they carried their case to Congress against the opposition of major veterans’ organizations, which argued that recognizing the WASP would dilute the status of veterans everywhere. On November 23, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed Public Law 95-202, the G.I. Bill Improvement Act, whose Section 401 declared WASP service to be active duty — but the declaration was written to reach only “all laws administered by the Veterans Administration.” Honorable discharge certificates followed in 1979, and campaign and victory medals in 1984. The women were veterans. The fine print mattered later.

In 2002, the Army determined that the WASP, as active-duty designees, could have their ashes placed in the columbarium at Arlington National Cemetery with military honors. For thirteen years, they could. Harmon attended the first such funeral, her family has said, and knew that was what she wanted.

In March 2015, Secretary of the Army John McHugh reversed the 2002 determination. Under a new reading of the 1977 law, the Army concluded that the cemetery’s superintendent had overreached, that the statute had made the WASP veterans for VA purposes only, and that they had never been eligible for Arlington in the first place. The Army also cited the cemetery’s limited space. The ruling came a month before Elaine Harmon died, on April 21, 2015, at 95. Her family applied for her inurnment, as she had asked. The Army denied it. Her ashes — in the black box from the funeral home — waited in a bedroom closet, among folded sweaters and old photographs. “Gammy doesn’t belong on a shelf,” her granddaughter Tiffany Miller said.

The family did not accept it. Her daughter, Terry Harmon, and her grandchildren, led by granddaughter Erin Miller, went public and to Congress. An Associated Press account of the family’s campaign in December 2015 drew national attention; the family’s Change.org petition drew more than 175,000 signatures. Rep. Martha McSally of Arizona — a retired Air Force colonel and the first American woman to fly in combat — carried the bill in the House, with Sens. Joni Ernst and Barbara Mikulski and Rep. Susan Davis leading the effort alongside her. McSally called the Army’s decision a “cruel injustice”: at the moment the military was opening every position to women, it was closing Arlington to the pioneers who had paved the way.

The House passed the bill unanimously on March 22, 2016; the Senate followed, and on May 20, 2016, President Obama signed Public Law 114-158 (H.R. 4336) — the act that restored what the Army had taken. Its text is one operative sentence long: the Secretary of the Army shall ensure that the cremated remains of persons whose service was deemed active duty under Section 401 of Public Law 95-202 “are eligible for above ground inurnment in Arlington National Cemetery with military honors.” No more interpretation. The goalpost was set in statute.

Where it stands now

On September 7, 2016 — nearly seventeen months after her death — Elaine Harmon’s ashes were placed in a niche of Arlington’s columbarium, the first WASP inurnment under the new law, with full military honors: a color guard, a three-volley salute, and taps, and a flyover of World War II-era aircraft. Women fighter pilots who had aided the family’s campaign carried her burial flag on their own missions before the service and documented its travels; Lt. Col. Caroline Jensen, an F-16 pilot and former Thunderbird, told the mourners: “Because of the legacy of the WASPs and the service of women like Elaine, I stand before you.” Her fellow WASP Florence Reynolds, known as Shutsy, came to see it done: “Finally, we’re over the last fight. We had to fight all the way along. I didn’t think we’d have to fight to be buried.” Her daughter Terry received the flag. The niche bears the inscription she spent a lifetime earning: “Elaine Danforth Harmon, WASP.”

The right the law restored is not hers alone. It belongs to every WASP — including the 38 who died in service as civilians and the fewer than one hundred who were still living when the law passed, by historian Katherine Landdeck’s count — and it now rests on an act of Congress rather than on an administrator’s permission, which is precisely why the family insisted on a statute instead of another ruling. Erin Miller, who led the campaign, later wrote its full account in Final Flight Final Fight: My Grandmother, the WASP, and Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington National Cemetery’s own education program now teaches Elaine Harmon’s story to schoolchildren, oral history and all — the institution that barred her door now assigns her as a primary source.

That is the pattern this site exists to document. The service was rendered in 1944. The status took thirty-three years, the resting place seventy-two, and the last of it arrived only because a family kept a black box in a closet for seventeen months and refused, in Erin Miller’s words, to let the Army’s no be the end of it: “The Army said ’no’ to the wrong family.”

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

The WASP were written out of the record once; this page lets the record speak in its own medium. Five films: the women in their own words, the wartime film, the campaign to restore Arlington, the granddaughter who led it, and the historian who has spent a career on their archive.

The women themselves. The Department of Veterans Affairs' tribute to the first women to fly U.S. military aircraft — WASP telling their own story, wings and all. (U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs.)

The wartime record. The Army's own 1943 screen magazine: WASP in Link trainers, in class, on the drill field, in the air, and receiving their wings from Jacqueline Cochran. (U.S. National Archives.)

The campaign. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association's film backing the restoration of WASP inurnment rights at Arlington — the fight the Harmon family started, while it was still being fought. (AOPA.)

The family. Erin Miller — Elaine Harmon's granddaughter, who led the campaign — tells the whole fight, from the Army's denial to the act of Congress, on the American Legion's Tango Alpha Lima podcast.

The history. Katherine Sharp Landdeck of Texas Woman's University — home of the WASP archives — on the full story of the women with silver wings. (The National WWII Museum.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.