Jennifer Lee presents Terry Harmon with the flag for her mother, WWII pilot Elaine Harmon, at Arlington National Cemetery.
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The honor of a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery meant so much to so many.
These are women who fly F-16s, who scramble to take down enemy planes, who pull nine G’s, who dogfight.
Even in death, Elaine Harmon challenged convention.
Harmon was one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a group of female pilots who flew military planes in noncombat missions in order to free up male pilots for fighting. There are fewer than 100 WASPs still alive and many have already opted out of an Arlington interment.
World War II pilot Elaine Harmon is finally being laid to rest today at Arlington National Cemetery.
Last year, though, Army officials concerned about limited space at the cemetery ruled WASPs ineligible for Arlington.
“Their contributions were pivotal”, one pilot wrote in the journal.
Kate Landdeck, a Texas Woman’s University history professor who has researched the WASPs, said roughly 1,100 women earned their wings while the program was in effect from 1942 to 1944. It was accompanied by a journal in which fighter pilots wrote about how the WASPs influenced them and paved the way for them to fly. They scrounged up clothing that looked like the men’s uniforms.
Among those speaking at Wednesday’s ceremony was Air Force Reserve Lt. Col.
But Harmon did not know that the Secretary of the Army at the time, John McHugh, overturned the decision about a month before she died at 95. The government wouldn’t even pay for that. “I cried all the way through it”, said Marty Wyall. “It was appalling, if I can use that word”.
It was decades before the women were retroactively granted military status.
This infuriated Rep. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), the nation’s first female pilot to fly in combat.
McSally, who said the WASPs inspired her to stay in the Air Force during training, said it was deeply meaningful to be able to attend the funeral.
“These women were not afraid, and if they were afraid, they’d do it anyway”, she said.
“Why would you leave?”
Family and friends said the sense of adventure that led Harmon to fly military airplanes carried over into the rest of her life. She often recalled childhood memories of roller skating in alleys and playing tennis at Druid Hill Park, they said. WASPs won the right to an Arlington burial in a de facto Army ruling in 2002, as The Christian Science Monitor previously reported.
Harmon’s ashes are now inurned at Arlington with military honors.
Erin Miller, one of Harmon’s granddaughters, put her law firm work on hold and worked like mad to reverse the ban, all the while storing her grandmother’s ashes in her closet. Never timid, she chose to go bungee jumping in New Zealand when she turned 80.
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“I remember from what her daughter and her granddaughters have told me, she [Harmon] was so patriotically stirred by the fact that these women that she had served with were being honored at Arlington, were having their ashes or remains laid there, that she decided she wanted to be buried at Arlington, and left a written request for her daughter”, says Ms. Rickman.
