Girls of Flight City

Girls of Flight City, by Lorraine Heath, was recommended by my aunt and I really enjoyed listening to it (a bit more than 9 hours). It was inspired by the true story of a small town in Texas becoming the first training school for Royal Air Force (RAF) cadets during WWII. The British needed empty spaces for large training schools, and empty skies to train their pilots, and Texas saw an opportunity and welcomed the RAF cadets.

Well, ‘welcome’ may be too strong, because at first, many Americans didn’t want to get involved in the war and didn’t want a reminder that there WAS a war somewhere else and that they were not helping. In fact it’s worse than that: the few American pilots who decided to go help the Brits were stripped of their American citizenship and could no longer enter the US… until 1942, when they were transferred back to the US Army Air Forces when the US finally entered the war after Pearl Harbor, and then, in 1944, they were pardoned.

The other side of the story follows American women who wanted to become instructors at these pilot schools.. At first, of course, they were not allowed to do so, but as the need for more instructors grew, some women were finally hired, including the hero of this story, a young woman named Jessie. And when the US finally entered the war and men left for the front, even more women got jobs as flying instructors.

I really loved learning about this little corner of Texas and its fascinating–and mostly unknown–history. The love stories were a bit cheesy, a bit too long at times, but they were true to their time, with much happiness and terrible losses, too. I liked how the townspeople slowly started to accept, and eventually even welcome, these young cadets, the contrast between life in England and Texas in 1941, how things changed in the US after the Pearl Harbor attacks in December of that year, and the lives and deaths and dreams of these young Brits and Americans during that time period. The narrator was not great, but other than that, it was a really interesting and enjoyable book.