Florine Phillips Maloney
January 14, 1920 – April 3, 2013
Class: 44-W-4
Training Location: Avenger Field (Sweetwater, Tex.)
Assigned Bases: Love Field (Dallas, Tex.) and Ellington Army Air Field (Houston, Tex.)
Planes flown: PT-17, BT-13, AT-6, AT-10
Florine was born in Chicago, Illinois on January 14, 1920, the second of three children. She described her childhood as a happy one, raised by a single mother and surrounded by an extended family of cousins.
During high school, Florine became interested in journalism, working on the school paper and her high school yearbook. Following graduation, she entered the University of Chicago but soon transferred to a business college. Upon completing the coursework there, she became a steno typist and eventually worked for American Airlines as a reservation agent on the midnight to eight am shift.
With just a little encouragement from her brother, who was in pilot training with the Army Air Forces following his attendance at West Point, Florine began taking flying lessons at a small airport near her home. Eventually, American Airlines transferred her to Love Field, Dallas, Texas. It was there that she heard the word “WASP” for the first time. After discovering what it meant, she immediately applied to enter the flight training program required to become a WASP and was accepted.
She arrived at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas on November 1, 1943, together with 103 other hopeful young women pilots. Less than 2 months after arriving for training, she was granted leave for 48 hours to travel to Love Field to marry Lt. Robert Mancib.
After seven months of Army Air Force flight training, she and 51 of her classmates graduated on May 23, 1944 and received their silver WASP wings. Proudly in attendance at her graduation: her mother, her brother (an Army Air Force pilot), and her sister, Rosalie, marching in review as a member of class 44-W-9.
Florine’s Army orders sent her to Love Field, Dallas, Texas, where she was assigned to fly with the Fifth Ferrying Group. She ferried AT-6’s from the factory to training bases and points of embarkation. She was transferred to Ellington Field, Houston, Texas, where she primarily flew AT-10’s as an administrative pilot. Her most vivid memory of her flying assignments there was flying a Norden Norseman, fitted out as a hospital transport, to San Antonio with a soldier in traction, attended by nurses and doctors.
After the WASP were deactivated, Florine, now divorced, joined her sister, Rosalie, and applied to the American Red Cross for duty overseas. The two sisters spent almost two years in Naples, Italy, running the American Red Cross Club Division.
Florine became quite a sailor, sailing to the Bahamas, Bermuda, Tahiti, and eventually to Guatemala. She put a positive spin on the government’s disbandment of the WASP: “I like to say that I traded my wings for sails.”
Sources:
Texas Women’s University in Denton, Texas, WASP Collection
Findagrave.com
WASP Final Blog
