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At 94 years old, she doesn’t look a day over 70 as she flexes her
bicep with a smile on her face. A denim button-down shirt, bright
red bandana holding back her curls and the strong, confident
demeanor of a woman America recognizes instantly. She is a true
Rosie the Riveter.
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February 9, 2017 - Margaret “Peggy” Wills, B-24 electrician during
World War II, holds a recruitment poster at Minot Air Force Base in
North Dakota. Wills was a Rosie the Riveter at Holman Field in St.
Paul, Minnesota. (U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Apryl Hall)
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Margaret “Peggy” Wills was born in 1922 in Bozeman,
Montana. Her father was a World War I veteran who left the
war early due to injury, and kept a victory garden to help
feed his seven children. Once the Great Depression had taken
everything it could from them, including Wills’ mother, they
picked up and moved to St. Paul, Minnesota.
Then
19-years-old and looking for work to help the family, Wills
applied for a job at Holman Field near St. Paul. Thinking
she was going to be doing secretarial work, the Second World
War forced a job title change, and she soon realized she
would be doing work slightly out of her comfort zone.
“They call everybody who did anything on the
planes, they called them all ‘Rosie the Riveter,’” Wills
said. “They would have to say, ‘Rosie the Electrician’
because that’s what I did.”
Wills’ crew of around 12 people, both
men and women, were given a crash course on electrical work
before they began working on wartime aircraft.
“They
brought the B-24s in at the end of our hangar, and we
finished up by doing the electrical work like running lights
and the warm air used to keep the pilots’ suits warm,” Wills
said. “There was a lot of stuff, I couldn’t think of all the
stuff we did!”
Wills caught on quickly and began to
enjoy her work, despite the 12-hour shifts and the hard
manual labor.
“To me, the most important thing was
just doing it, not thinking about it,” Wills said. “I had
had it hard all my life and it was never any harder than any
of that. I was just glad I had a job and happy I could do a
good job at it.”
To add to her sense of
accomplishment, Wills took pride in her work. She realized
in a short time she was doing her part in helping our nation
during a time of war.
“I was doing the right thing,”
she said. “Somebody had to do the electrical work or they
wouldn’t fly. I was always so happy every time I left the
plane. The guys would say, ‘Your work was all good,’ and
that made me feel good. I never had accolades for anything
I’d ever done really.”
Pride was evident all over
Holman Field during WWII, Wills said. When they weren’t
working around-the-clock to launch the B-24 fleet, they were
giving blood for the Red Cross. A time Wills admits she
stuffed tools into her coveralls in order to meet the weight
requirement to donate blood.
“It was a large place,
but we all were very patriotic I think,” Wills said “There
was a time when they came in to give us a certain amount of
money. We turned it down because our boys were fighting and
dying over there.”
During a trip to Fort Snelling, a
man approached Wills asking her if she would talk with him.
He told her he was home on leave and was contemplating going
AWOL because he didn’t want to go back to war, afraid he
wouldn’t make it home again. Wills could see how distraught
he was and tried her best to encourage him.
“Me with
my big heart, I said, ‘You’re going to be okay, you just
have to have somebody believe in you,’” she said. “He said,
‘I want you to say my name.’ He thought he wasn’t coming
back. I’ve never forgotten it because he made me say it. I
did a lot of praying for that boy.”
Wills recalls
several occasions like that one throughout the three years
working as an electrician. It was something she was used to,
up until August 15, 1945, when she showed up to work and the
atmosphere was celebratory.
“We were all on top of
the wings of that B-24 dancing,” Wills recalls, smiling. “It
was fun just to get together, we were having a good time. I
loved working there.”
Women were invaluable during
the desperate times of WWII. Whether they were fixing
running lights on B-24s or encouraging panic-stricken
soldiers to keep on going, their efforts were instrumental
in America’s success.
“It was just that women had
never worked and they didn’t know what they could do,” Wills
said. “You know what happens, if a woman does it and it
turns out good, she’s going to get the okay for it, but boy,
the women just flooded in! It made me proud that I was a
woman.”
Her pride may have been born then, but lives
on today. As she looks at the old recruitment poster more
than 70 years later, she still emanates the true spirit of a
Rosie.
By U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Apryl Hall
Provided
through DVIDS
Copyright 2017
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