In WWII, women served bravely. Risch could learn from their courage | Opinion

It will never cease to amaze me how many tales are still to be told of the sacrifices heroic men and women made to defeat the Nazis in World War II. Here we are, 80 years from the end of this deadliest conflict, and the yarns about those who gave their all are still unfolding in books about the war.

The latest is about female flyers — crop dusters, circus performers or just experienced pilots — who felt an obligation to serve the Allied effort against the Nazis but were not allowed to fly for the U.S. They volunteered to join their counterparts in Great Britain as pilots who would ferry new and repaired aircraft to front-line squadrons. Author Becky Aikman tells the story of the Air Transport Authority which hired them in her new book, “Spitfires, The American Women Who Flew in The Face of Danger During World War II.”

“Danger” is putting it mildly, as Aikman tracks young women who flirted with death every time they flew a mission. They lived and died just as courageously as the men whose planes they delivered for warfare. Their missions were as risky as those of military pilots.

They flew without ammunition and, to increase their chances of survival, they flew without radio contact to keep their positions secret from the Germans. They were forbidden to use cockpit instruments to steer through heavy weather, a constant threat to survival as rain, sleet, fog and cloud cover sometimes claimed the lives of these ferry pilots.

The Atta-girls, as they were called, flew 147 different models of the most advanced aircraft in the world at the time, including the Hurricane and Spitfire fighters, and the Wellington bomber. The men who would take the planes into battle were often assigned to one type of plane, but these women with little training and advance notice took command of planes they’d never seen before.

The women who survived, like the men of the so-called Greatest Generation, seldom talked about it, and their heroics were sometimes forgotten. Idahoan Mary Zerbel survived the war, but her young husband was shot down on a bombing run and left her a widow at 22 as she continued to fly Spitfires to pilots for combat. Mary became a librarian, and not a word was uttered in her death notice in the Pocatello newspaper in 2012 about her young and courageous flying years at age 21.

Aikman reminds us, if we ever knew, that 2 million Americans served in the war for Great Britain, with over 500,000 in the air force. It’s a vestige of those times that so many Americans understood the peril facing Western democracies even before President Franklin Roosevelt would declare war after Pearl Harbor.

Today, governments in the West and the international order established after World War II are under siege by a strongman in Russia who has visions of creating a new empire. His invasion of Ukraine is reminiscent of Hitler’s march into Poland in 1939, but there is one thing missing from the assault on Ukraine — an American president who is willing to stand tall for Ukraine by slapping secondary sanctions on any nation that buys Russia’s oil, and who’s willing to supply Ukraine with more armaments and technology to push Putin’s forces back to Russia. Or at least to the negotiating table, where some kind of peaceful settlement can occur.

President Donald Trump is not only unwilling to support Ukraine, but he also winks and nods at Putin as he claims he is dissatisfied with the Russian president — but does nothing about it. Trump’s scorn of Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky is as though it was not Russia that invaded, launched its missiles on women and children, and refused to negotiate in good faith. According to Trump, Russia’s war against Ukrainians is nothing more than two children fighting in a park.

There was a time in American history when Congress, a separate branch of government intended by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution to check the work of the other branches, would stand up to presidents, at the very least correcting a president’s dangerous misrepresentations of a warmongering Russian. But don’t look for any checks on the president coming from Idaho’s delegation.

This is not the first column I’ve written contrasting the valor of men and women who chose to fight for the Allies in WWII to the cowardice of Idaho’s congressional delegation failing to speak out in support of Ukraine. Sens. Jim Risch and Mike Crapo, and Reps. Mike Simpson and Russ Fulcher, should know better. They know that Ukraine is fighting off autocracy with thousands of innocents killed by a Russian despot every bit as homicidal as Stalin on his worst day.

And how do they react? They stand by waiting for cues from Trump to see what they can say.

Risch deserves the harshest criticism as chair of the so-called “powerful” Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a perch from which he could influence his Republican colleagues to build a congressional base of support for Ukraine that might change the shallow soul of a president who changes his mind depending on who last gets his ear. There’s nothing “powerful” about a committee whose chair, afraid and willing to stand up, sits on his duff while Trump allows Putin to have his way with Ukraine.

What’s the price Risch would pay for exercising his constitutional duty and speaking boldly about America coming to the defense of Ukraine? No doubt, he would face opposition in the next Republican primary, but he is already too old to serve, so why not go out in a blaze of glory?

Trump would attack Risch for leaving the MAGA fold, perhaps, but Risch’s legacy would be one his grandchildren could cherish long after Trump is gone, and Idahoans could hold him up in history as showing courage to fight for the Ukrainian people.

Don’t hold your breath for that version of Idaho history. Whatever kind of conscience Risch hides from public view, it does not include coming to the rescue of men, women and children murdered in Putin’s invasion and slaughter, not with the almighty Trump taking the place of a God who knows better.

Glory to Ukraine and the young women flyers who modeled for today’s elected representatives what real courage looks like.