WWII historian, author Katherine Landdeck delivers Helen Foster Lecture
TUPELO — Author and WWII historian Dr. Katherine Sharp Landdeck delivered the 2024 Helen Foster Lecture to a crowd at the Lee County Library on Thursday night.
Landdeck is a professor of history at Texas Woman's University, a Normandy scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum who has dedicated her life to preserving the memory of female WWII pilots.
She published "The Women with Silver Wings: The Inspiring True Story of the Women Airforce Service Pilots of World War II" in 2021. It tells the incredible true story of a special unit of women pilots tasked with providing training and other important responsibilities for the Army Air Forces during World War II.
Landdeck started by recounting a chance encounter in the early 1990s that changed her life.
At the time, she was a teacher at the Spartan School of Aeronautics in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and when she couldn't find anyone to go with her to the Biplane Expo in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in June 1993, she decided to go by herself.
After the airshow, she met Caro Bayley Bosca, a Women Airforce Service Pilot in WWII. When they parted ways, Bosca wrote her name and address on a notecard so that Landdeck could contact her in the future.
She carried that notecard around in her wallet for the next three years, and when she started graduate school and began collecting oral interviews with female pilots, the two were reunited.
Over time, Landdeck learned the entire history of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) while chronicling personal stories.
More than 25,000 women applied to the WASP program, which existed from Sept. 1942 to Dec. 1944. There were 1,830 women who went through training and 1,102 who earned their wings.
They flew 77 types of aircraft over 60 million miles across the United States.
"These are big numbers that this small group of women were able to do," Landdeck said. "They did a lot of the same jobs that (male) pilots were doing here as well. They didn't fly combat at all, but these were important jobs that needed to be done."
Landdeck shared the inspiring stories of several female pilots, along with their successful fight to be classified as veterans years after the war ended. She concluded her talk with a question and answer session before signing copies of "The Women with Silver Wings" for attendees.
Prior to the lecture, Cathy Blanchard received the Helen Foster Award for Library Advocacy.
"I thank you for this, and it's an honor to receive it," she said.
Blanchard first joined the library as a circulation clerk in 1971 and was the first African American woman to serve in the role of circulation manager. She retired in 2001 and later spent many years in a part-time role at the library.
