Hazel Ah  Ying Lee was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1912. She was the daughter of Chinese immigrants—the second of eight children.

Lee was nineteen when she experienced her first flight, at the end of a friend’s flying lesson.  She was hooked. She immediately began to save up the money for flying lessons from her job as an elevator operator in a Portland department store.

A few years earlier, it might have been hard for her to find a flight school that would take a Chinese-American teenage girl as a student. But the Portland Chinese Benevolent Society had recently opened the Chinese Flying Club of Portland in response to the Japanese invasion of China. Benevolent associations across the country had opened similar schools in cities with large Chinese populations with the goal of training pilots for the Chinese military.

Lee earned her pilot’s license in 1932, one of the first Chinese-American women to do so. In October of that year, she left for China with a squadron of her fellow classmates. When she arrived, she found that she was not allowed to fly with the Chinese Air Force. (Why this would have surprised her is not clear.) The air force offered her an administrative job, but she chose instead to relocate to Guanzhou,* where she worked as a commercial pilot. (Could she have done this in the United States in the 1930s? I’m not sure, but my impression is no.) She lived through the devastating bombing of that city by the Japanese in 1937—part of the Canton Operation, which was designed to blockade China and isolate the British port of Hong Kong. She spent a year in Hong Kong as a refugee, then returned to the United States where she worked for an organization in New York that sent armaments to China.

The creation of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program by the Army Air Force in 1942 gave Lee a chance to get back in the air. ** The purpose of the program was to train women to fly military airplanes.  Trained WASP (not WASPs) flew non-combat missions and acted as test pilots in the United States, thereby freeing up male pilots for deployment overseas. Lee immediately applied. Lee was the first of only two Chinese-American women accepted into the program.*** At 30, she was older than most of her fellow pilots and soon became a leader in her training class. She was playful as well as a good pilot. For instance, she would write her classmates names in Chinese characters in lipstick on the tails of planes their planes.

Women pilots put up with grief because of their gender, but Lee faced special challenges because she was obviously Asian. On one flight, she was forced to land in a field. The farmer ran out to the field to investigate, armed with a pitchfork. He assumed she was part of a Japanese invasion force. Hazel had to talk fast to convince him that she was Chinese, and more importantly, American, before he would allow her to call for assistance. Back at the base, she reduced the entire chow line to tears of laughter with the story, but they all knew it could have ended badly.

After Hazel graduated from the training course in Sweetwater Texas, she was stationed at Romulus Army Air Base in Michigan, where she flew large transport aircraft as part of the 3rd Ferrying Group. In September, 1944, she was sent to Pursuit School, in Brownsville Texas, where she was trained to fly fighters like the P-51 Mustang and the P-63 Kingcobra.

In November, 1944, Lee picked up a P-63 Kingcobra from the Bell aircraft factory in Niagara Falls and flew it to Great Falls, Montana, which was a major staging area for planes being sent to the Soviet Union. (Male pilots flew the planes from Montana to Alaska, where Soviet pilots waited to fly them on the final leg to Russia.)

On November 23, Lee was making an approach to land. Another group of P-63s was arriving in at the same time.  The radio on one of the planes in that group had failed several days before.  The pilot, Jeff Russell, had relied on the other fliers in his group to inform the control tower  at each stop that he did not have a radio.

As Lee began her approach to the runway, Russell was above her. Unfortunately, the personnel in the control tower lost track of who didn’t have a radio. When someone in the tower realized they were too close and yelled “pull up,” Lee heard the order instead of Russell. Responding to the order, she ran into Russell’s plane. Both planes crashed at the end of the runway and burst into flames. Both pilots were rescued from the planes, but Lee was too badly burned to survive. She died on November 25, 1944—the last WASP to die in the line of duty.

Because the WASP were officially civilian pilots, even though they flew under military command, the military did not pay for her funeral expenses, as they did for her mail counterparts.**** Lee’s family had to pay for the costs of transporting her home and burying her. When they tried to buy plots for Hazel and her brother, a soldier who had died in France three days after Hazel, the family was told that they could not be buried in the cemetery because they were Asian. The Lees fought back, and won.

The WASP program was disbanded on December 22. In 1977, Congress retroactively granted military status to the women who served in it.

*You may know it as Canton.

**The fact that the P is WASP is plural means that describing the women who served as WASPs is incorrect. But working around it is a pain.

***The other Chinese-American WASP was Margaret Gee, who went on to work as a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

****Women in the WASP program also received less pay than their male counterparts, had to pay for their own room and board, and bought their own uniforms.