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Of the graduates there are, I think, about 600 still alive. By the end of the two-year WASP experiment, 25,000 women had applied for the program, 1,800 or so had gone through basic training, and 1,074 graduated. So that's where the Air Force started to look. In 1941 there were about 3,000 women who had a private flying license. The Air Force was looking for pilots to do some of the domestic jobs - ferrying airplanes, testing airplanes, towing targets for anti-aircraft practice - and to take the place of men who were going to combat. How many of these WASPs were there at the height of their service, about how many of them are still alive today - and how did you go about finding them? The photo told all you needed to know about the WASPs. There was a photo from 1943 that showed a tough and beautiful woman in a leather bomber jacket leaning against a huge plane - it was a B-25 - and there was a look in her eyes. She had ripped out a small profile of a woman who had graduated from this high school 60 years earlier. Teal Krech, who I work with at Radio Diaries, came to work one day with a page from her high school alumni magazine. Usually we go out looking for stories, but sometimes the stories come looking for you. Richman: It's always strange how stories begin. Npr.org: What planted the seed for a project on World War II women aviators? Richman's recorded 'Diaries' are sometimes eerily intimate," says one, "with the audience entering into a closer bond with the person on tape than is possible perhaps in any other medium, including documentary film." And another commends Richman as "a radio Boswell, a biographer who stands aside and lets his subjects do the talking."Įxclusively for npr.org, Richman tells the stories behind the making of the documentary The WASPs. Critics praise the technique, and Richman's use of it.
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The WASPs is only one of more than 25 radio documentaries Richman has produced –- many of them "radio diaries" where the subjects turn the mikes on themselves and record their own aural journal entries. Drawn from more than 25 hours of interviews and archival tape, the documentary The WASPs presents an oral history of the pioneering program and pilots.
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To solve the problem, the government launched an experimental program to train new pilots -– the Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASPs. The half-hour documentary begins in the early 1940s when the Army Air Force faced a dilemma: It needed thousands of newly assembled airplanes delivered to military bases, but most of America's pilots were overseas fighting the war.
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This week on All Things Considered, Richman and Radio Diaries present the documentary The WASPs: Women Pilots of WWII. That's documentarian Joe Richman, talking about the audio art form that he plies and for which he named his production company: Radio Diaries. Radio's good when you hear them whispering directly into your ear." "When you think about what radio does best, it's the characters and the intimacy of people telling their stories.