Hazel Ying Lee

Pilot

• Born: August 24, 1912
• Place of Birth: Portland, Oregon
• Died: November 25, 1944
• Place of Death: Great Falls, Montana

The child of Chinese immigrants, Hazel Ying Lee became the first Asian American woman to fly for the United States Armed Forces, serving with one of the Army Air Force’s first all-female flight divisions. She had attempted to join China’s air force after the Japanese invasion but was prevented because of her gender. Instead, she served with the US Army Air Force civilian pilots’ division, for which she delivered supplies and aircraft until her death in 1944.

Areas of achievement: Military, women’s rights, war

Early Life

Hazel Ah Ying Lee was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1912, one of eight children born to immigrant parents from Canton (Guangdong), China. Lee came from an affluent family and enjoyed the benefits of that lifestyle, learning to drive a car and engaging in other activities that most Chinese women did not.

Following high school, Lee faced prejudice in finding a job. Asian Americans had been facing discrimination since the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882 and 1924, which restricted their immigration and employment. She had to settle for working as an elevator operator at H. Liebes & Co., a department store in Portland.

In 1932, Lee took her first flight in an aircraft, after which she became obsessed with learning to fly. Both Lee and her brother Victor took pilot’s training and joined the Chinese Flying Club of Portland. Lee was a rarity as a woman pilot, as fewer than 1 percent of pilots in the United States were women. She was the first Chinese American woman in the country to earn a pilot's license.

Life’s Work

Lee’s experiences with racism left her with a strong sense of Chinese nationalism, and when Japan invaded Manchuria in 1933, Lee and her brother sailed to China and attempted to enlist as pilots. Lee’s brother was accepted, but the Chinese air force rejected Lee because of her gender. Consequently, she moved to Canton and flew for a private airline. When Japan bombed Canton in 1937, Lee and her brother escaped to Hong Kong. Lee returned to the United States in 1938 and moved to New York, where she took a job shipping armaments to the Chinese Nationalist Army.

Following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the US Army Air Force was desperate for personnel and began recruiting civilian pilots. In 1943, the US Army Air Force created the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), a division of female civilian pilots headed by pioneering aviators Nancy Harkness Love and Jacqueline Cochran, who personally selected pilots for the program.

Lee was one of at least two thousand women who applied to join WASP. She was accepted to the fourth class, 43-W-4, and sent for a six-month training program at Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. During her training, Lee married Major Lin Cheung “Clifford” Louie, a Chinese Nationalist pilot who was recovering after being wounded in action. They had known each other for almost a decade and had previously become engaged.

On one of her training flights, Lee was forced to make an emergency landing in a cornfield in Kansas. When the farmer mistook her for an invading Japanese pilot, he held her at bay with his pitchfork until his son called the base and confirmed her identity.

After training, Lee was assigned to the Air Transport Command’s Third Ferrying Squadron at Romulus Army Air Base in Michigan. She was popular with her WASP colleagues and developed a habit of inscribing the Chinese characters of her fellow pilots’ nicknames on the tails of their planes. Friends described her as humorous and fun-loving, often playing practical jokes on the other pilots.

Lee attended Pursuit School in September 1944, qualifying her to fly single-engine fighter aircraft, including the P-39, P-47, P-63, and her favorite, the P-51 Mustang. In November 1944, Lee traveled to Niagara Falls, New York, to pick up a P-63 aircraft that was to be delivered to Great Falls, Montana. When she was making the return flight, on November 23, the Great Falls airstrip was crowded with an unusual number of returning aircraft. Lee and another pilot, whose radio was broken, approached the strip at the same time and collided before either could pull away. Lee was pulled from the burning wreckage but died two days later from burns sustained in the accident. She was the thirty-eighth and last WASP to die in the line of duty. Three days after her family was notified of her death, they learned her brother Victor had been killed in action in France.

Despite dying in performance of military duties, Lee was not given a military funeral, and her family was denied benefits usually given to the families of armed service members. In 1979, Congress passed Public Law 95-202, which led to formal recognition of the contribution of women service pilots and conferred military status on Lee and the other women who served in the WASP division.

Significance

Lee was the first Asian American woman to fly for the US military, making her a pioneer in both women’s rights and Asian American achievement. In fall 2007, the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in New York opened a permanent exhibit about the life and career of Lee. She helped to open the door for other women who wished to serve their country in the US Armed Forces. Her bravery and determination continue to inspire generations of women and Asian Americans.

Bibliography

Ankeny, Susan Tate. "This Chinese American Aviatrix Overcame Racism to Fly for the U.S. During World War II." Smithsonian Magazine, 23 Apr. 2024, www.smithsonianmag.com/history/this-chinese-american-aviatrix-overcame-racism-to-fly-for-the-us-during-world-war-ii-180984196/. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Martin, Kali. "Women Airforce Service Pilot Hazel Ying Lee." The National WWII Museum, 24 May 2021, www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/women-airforce-service-pilot-hazel-ying-lee. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Merry, Lois K. Women Military Pilots of World War II: A History with Biographies of American, British, Russian, and German Aviators. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. Print.

Monahan, Evelyn, and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee. A Few Good Women: America’s Military Women from World War I to the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New York: Random, 2011. Print.

Weatherford, Doris. American Women during World War II: An Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Wong, Kevin Scott. Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. Print.