On August 11, 1943, the Women Airforce Service Pilots program was officially designated WASP. Jacqueline Cochran, its director, had spent eighteen months convincing the Army Air Forces that women could fly military aircraft. They could. She knew because she was one of the best pilots in the country.

The WASPs flew 60 million miles in 78 different aircraft. They tested aircraft fresh from the factory, ferried planes to combat zones, towed targets for live antiaircraft artillery training. Thirty-eight of them died in service.

When the program was disbanded in December 1944, the women received no military status, no veterans' benefits, no government insurance. Their families paid their funeral costs. They were told to go home.

Cornelia Fort, the first woman to die in a military aviation accident, was flying in formation near Long Beach, California, on March 21, 1943, when another aircraft clipped her wing. Her commanding officer tried to have her death classified as resulting from a mechanical failure rather than a mid-air collision because he didn't want women's aviation statistics to show a collision death. The record was corrected later.

The WASPs spent the next thirty years attempting to obtain military recognition. Congress repeatedly declined. The records of the program were classified in 1945 and remained classified until 1977, when they were scheduled for destruction. The women learned about the scheduled destruction from a historian who was trying to write about them. They mobilized, contacted their congressional representatives, and in 1977 the Carter administration granted them military status.

By 1977, many of them were in their fifties and sixties. They were entitled to veterans' benefits for the first time, thirty-three years after the program ended. Some of them had died waiting.

In 2009, the surviving WASPs received the Congressional Gold Medal. Cochran died in 1980. She did not see it.