North Canaan plane ride inspired World War II WASP 'Duke' Caldwell

NORTH CANAAN — At 92, Mildred “Dukeâ€� Caldwell, a North Canaan native, likes to stick close to the Peoria, Ill.,  home she has lived in for so long she’s forgotten when she moved there. She feeds the deer and is amused by the antics of the wild turkeys that wander into her yard. The closest she gets to any kind of flying is talking to her neighbor down the street, who flies a C-130 in the Air National Guard.

Those conversations take her back more than six decades, to the days when Caldwell was in  the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program. Of course, women were not sent into combat back then, but the danger of what she did is still mind-boggling.

It’s not a well-known group. The plan was to train women to do flying jobs here, freeing up the men to fly in war zones. It lasted from September 1942 to December 1944. For whatever reason, the official records were immediately stamped “classified� and stored away. Its veterans, not considered fully enlisted personnel, were not afforded military benefits.

That changed in 1977, but most people heard about it for the first time last July, when President Barack Obama signed a law allowing the 300 or so surviving WASP veterans to be given the highest civilian honor, the Congressional Medal of Honor.

For Caldwell, the story goes back to her childhood, growing up on Church Street in North Canaan. A perhaps latent love of flying surfaced when a small air show performed in town. She spent $2.50 of her paper route money on a short plane ride, already knowing this was what she wanted to do most — someday.

“I went to college to be a gym teacher, but I was always looking for a way to get my pilot’s license,� she said recently, during a phone conversation with The Journal.

It was at school in Troy, N.Y.,  that her roommate gave her the nickname, “Duke.â€� While watching an Errol Flynn movie, her roommate decided Caldwell looked like the actor, who played a character named Duke in the film. The name stuck.

“When I was teaching, my students called me Miss Duke,� she said.

Soon after, she left for Pennsylvania and a job with a little airplane company called Piper. She was willing to work menial jobs, knowing that one employee perquisite was free flying lessons.

She got her license, just as the WASP program was accepting its first candidates in 1943.

“The physical training was tough,� she said. “We were down there in Sweetwater, Texas. A lot of women dropped out. Luckily I was already in good shape.�

She was eventually selected to fly C-26 bomber planes in training missions, becoming one of the first women to fly military aircraft. More precisely, and shockingly, she served as a target. Her plane towed a windsock-type target that trainees shot at with live ammunition.

“No, I was never scared,� she claims now. Maybe time has dulled the memory of her emotions, but one is inclined to believe this still feisty woman.

“I wasn’t scared, because I was doing what I wanted to do.�

Her plane was never hit, but she did recall landing once to find her towrope had been severed by a bullet very close to her plane’s belly.

She also remembers a mishap involving one of the trainees.

“He was manning a belly turret. He turned around to try the machine gun, and he ended up shooting his pilot in the fanny.�

It wasn’t a life-threatening wound, fortunately.

After her stint as a WASP, Caldwell worked for seven years at an aviation company at a small airport in South Miami. She and two other former WASPs did airplane maintenance and tested crop-dusters they helped build.

Graduate school followed and then she went back to teaching physical education. No regrets about any of it, she said.

As for women in combat, “I think it’s wonderful that they are allowed to do it if they want to. I’m an old PE teacher, and I always believed I could do just about anything.�

As for the war in Iraq: “Everytime I hear something on the news about it, I wonder why in the heck we are doing that, and I know I’ll never get a decent answer.�

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