Thanks to Night at the Museum 2, Amelia Earhart is apparently having a moment. Which is great. But even nicer than Amy Adams playing the great aviator is the possibility of some actual living pilots getting their due. The Women Airforce Service Pilots, founded in 1942, was designed to create a corps of female civilian pilots who could take over home front flying jobs while male fliers served overseas. Although many of them flew military aircraft - the first women in American history to do so - they were not considered part of the army, and are only now being considered for the highest civilian honor, the the Congressional Gold Medal. The bill is being pushed by Kay Bailey Hutchison and Barbara Mikulski, and as in many such cases, it's a race against time: there are fewer than 300 surviving WASPs, all in their late 80s if not older.

The program was started largely at the urging of prominent pilot Jacqueline Cochran, who argued that women were more than capable of doing a civilian pilot's work with proper training. Standards were rigorous: of the 25,000 women who applied, only 1,830 were accepted, and of these about seven hundred dropped out of the arduous training course. Among other things, all pilots had to be over 21 and at least 5' 1/2" tall in order to man a cockpit. If they did make the grade the pilots were forced to pay their own way to the 21-27 week training camp, and were given only $250 a month. They flew everything from bombers to test planes, and their jobs ranged from helping with aircraft training to testing repaired planes, working as flying instructors, and transporting flyers and cargo - in short, all the work of a military pilot, with the risks to match: thirty-eight pilots died in the line of duty - at which time, their families were responsible for the transport of their bodies.

The women were summarily dismissed after the war without so much as a thank-you or any reorientation help, and did not receive veterans' benefits until 1977 (women had been accepted into the Air Force three years previously.) The attitude of many of the pilots was, however matter-of-fact; says one 89-year-old WASP, "We were proud of what we did, and the war was over. It was time to get on." Most of them speak of how pleased they are to serve as role models, and must be gratified at the growing number of female pilots. However, Deanie Parrish, who, with daughter Nancy, maintains the Wings Across America WASP website, is pleased to have received one form of official recognition; it always troubled her that those WASPs killed while on the job didn't qualify for the honors of a military funeral. Says she, "I didn't care for veteran status, but now I could have a flag on my coffin ... that is important to me."

Unsung Heroes Of World War II Finally Get Their Due [CNN]
Wings Across America
Amelia Earhart's Soaring Spirit [LA Times]

Congressional Gold Medal for My Hero! [Everyday Citizen via Daily Kos]
Ask the Pilot [Salon]
Alumna Leads Charge To Honor WWII's Female Pilots [Baylor]

[Minsk, May 9. Image via Getty]

A Belarussian WWII veteran (2-R) dances with a group of young women in downtown Minsk on May 9, 2009 during Victory Day celebrations commemorating the end of WWII. Belarus was heavily involved in the war as its soldiers served in the Soviet Red Army and many battles were fought on its territory. AFP PHOTO / VIKTOR DRACHEV (Photo credit should read VIKTOR DRACHEV/AFP/Getty Images)

•  A recent survey has named "To Kill a Mockingbird" the most inspirational book of all time, beating out the Bible, which came in at number two. • Click here to watch an awesome video of a fox tracking mice in the snow. •  British women are more likely to have a baby before the age of 25 than they are to get married, according to a new report. • At the end of WWII, an estimated 2 million German women were raped by Russian soldiers. For decades, the suffering of German women was considered taboo, and it is only now that the first scientific study of the rapes is being conducted. • Researchers have found that women who sit up, walk, or kneel at the first signs of going into labor are likely to have a quicker labor than those who are in a reclining position. •  Ugh. A 20-year-old student from Colorado is facing felony animal abuse charges after she taped her boyfriend's eight-month-old puppy to the inside of his refrigerator. •  Aw: a widow in Japan has published a book full of text messages that she sent to her dead husbands phone. • Freakonomics compares ballet dancer's amazing leg lifts to basketball player's free-throw shooting. • Mental Floss has unearthed a very old clip of Bill O'Reilly reporting on Super Mario Bros. •  Some reasonable legislators in Vermont are working to reduce teen "sexting" charges so that high school students wont be charged with child porn for sending pictures of themselves via text message. •  eMarketer has found that way more women use the internet than men, but men visit more sites and stay online longer. • Outside Los Angeles, an order of nuns are praying for a new oven. The Dominican nuns are suffering from the recession, and without their funds brought in from sales of their pumpkin bread, times are even tougher. • Some very bored guy invented a chair that twitters his farts. If you are so inclined, you can follow his tweets here. • Just what the dying world of print journalism needs: Pumpsmag, a rag devoted entirely to gentleman's clubs and the women who work there. •

Carle is arguably the most famous author of children's literature in the U.S. "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" is second only to "Peter Rabbit" in its popularity. With 29 million copies sold, "Caterpillar" is more popular than "Goodnight Moon" and the Dr. Seuss favorite, "The Cat in the Hat." Sales of the book, and its caterpillar-inspired products, bring in an amazing $50 million each year. Carle attributes the popularity of his picture book to its happy message: "It is a book about hope. If you're an insignificant caterpillar, you can grow up to be a big butterfly in the world."

As Newsweek points out, Carle's book about hope is partially inspired by his years spent in Germany during WWII. Carle was born in America to German immigrant parents, but at the age of six, his mother decided to move the family back to Stuttgart. When the war broke out, Carle's father was drafted by the Germans, and Carle remembers spending a good portion of his childhood listening to bombs hit overhead as he hid with his family hid in the cellar. Carle's children's books were inspired, at least in part, by his own difficult childhood:

"With my books," Carle says, "I try to recapture a period I should've had and didn't-for more fun, more nonsense, more humor." But when you know his background it's almost impossible not to look at his work without seeing echoes from his past. Despite the colorful hopefulness of his stories, they're suffused with a sense of loneliness-that solitary caterpillar, making its way in the world. In fact, the opening of "Willi the Worm" read: "This is Willi Worm. He is very hungry. He hasn't eaten through anything for a long time." There's even something about the way he describes the caterpillar's diet ("On Saturday he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese … ") that evokes the way he describes what he ate after the war when he went to work for the Americans.

Carle now lives in Florida, in a brilliantly colored house by the water with a tidy, well-tended garden. He devotes much of his time to maintaining America's first picture book museum in Amherst, MA, which is currently showing a special exhibition of his work. He also frequently updates his blog, where he writes about his favorite foods (Blackforest honey), run-ins with the local wildlife, and posts pictures of children happily reading his books. "I'm very happy," he says. "In fact, I told my wife I've never been so happy."

The Surprising Dark Side Of The Very Hungry Caterpillar [Newsweek]
Eric Carle Blog [Official Site]
The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art [Official Site]

It's a tragic irony that those few people who are genuinely ahead of their own time generally experience as a personal misfortune what future generations will recall as the locus of their genius. Miller, who worked as a top model for Vogue and other magazines after being discovered by Condé Nast himself in the 1920s, had enough creative energy and pure balls-out chutzpah to forge about 29 subsequent careers, often in women-unfriendly careers, none of which gave her any lasting recognition within her own lifetime.

There were the three years she spent living and working in Paris as Man Ray's assistant, muse, and co-collaborator — which generated many of the images that would prove definitional of Ray's career, and also featured their co-discovery of solarization. There was her marriage to an Egyptian businessman named Aziz Eloui Bey and the years in his homeland, which she spent quietly taking some of the most iconic Surrealist photographs, like "Portrait of Space."

Then, there was the separation from Eloui and the job with British Vogue, which brought her to England in the late 1930s, to do fashion and celebrity photography for the princely sum of £8 a week. Towards the end of World War II, Miller became the only known woman photographer to cover the combat. She landed in France just 20 days after D-Day, and recorded everything from the first wartime use of napalm — at the siege of St. Malo — to the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau to the dire postwar situation of the Hungarian peasantry.

Even her wartime photography, like "Non-Conformist Chapel" and "Remington Silent" above, which were taken during the London blitz, retain a sense of her surrealist aesthetic.

And then, after the war, suffering from what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder, Miller went back to England, went back to fashion photography at Vogue, before remarrying, bearing a son, and retreating to a farm in the country where she tolerated her painter husband Roland Penrose's various infidelities and threw her energies into entertaining. (Obsessed with gourmet cooking, she would host her old artist friends, like Picasso and Henry Moore, for dinners where she would serve things like blue pasta and cauliflower in pink sauce and drink sufficient quantities of alcohol to forget either what she saw in Europe during the war, or the fact that Penrose was sleeping with a trapeze artist, or both.)

According to just-released files from Britain's National Archives, it was in 1941 that an unnamed Vogue coworker denounced her as a communist to the MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service. Investigations into Miller's "queer foods and queer clothes," wide and varied circle of friends, sexual activity, and working life ensued. Miller was at the time living at the Hampstead home of a convicted Soviet spy, Wilfred MacCartney, which also drew the authorities' attention.

It was MI5's conclusion that Miller, though politically left-wing and with apparent socialist sympathies, was — unlike her friend Picasso — not an ardent Communist, and certainly not a Soviet operative. Nonetheless, the agency kept reading Miller's personal mail and updating her file through the 1950s, by which time she'd long lived an uneasy but thoroughly domestic life with Penrose.

I've always enjoyed Miller's work, and the story of her life — a woman who, faced with the possibility of only finding recognition as a function of her connection to the powerful men around her, rallied through the system and forged her own way forward, wherever possible — is inspiring. Is it at all surprising she rattled authorities in her adopted country to such an extent that they thought she might have been a spy? In a way, it's almost flattering that she was considered a potentially subversive element merely for being a steely and talented woman. Like a lot of women, Miller gained notoriety through the media available to her — first as a subject for photographers like Edward Steichen (who, in addition to taking her picture numerous times for Vogue, made Miller into the first woman to be pictured in a menstrual pad advertisement in the late 1920s), and then later as a content provider herself. But unlike a lot of women, Miller managed to take the avenues open to her, at a women's magazine like Vogue, and use the opportunity to create some of the most compelling and enduring records of WWII. It's tremendously sad that the rising tide of postwar domesticity, the invented ideal of the woman's place being at home and hearth, combined with the lasting horror of her wartime experiences acted together to so circumscribe her world in the end. But it's also kind of cool to think about Miller marshaling all her emotional intensity and her exacting intellect to tackling three-stage reductions, braising, complicated pastries, and the invention of Surrealist cookery. I suppose you can't keep a good woman down.

British Spies Kept Tabs On Photographer Lee Miller [AP]
Glamorous Socialites Were Spied On By MI5 [Guardian]

All photos from the Lee Miller Archive

According to the IHT, after parachuting into France, Pearl "interrupted the Paris-Bordeaux railway line more than 800 times and attacked convoys in June 1944, the month of the D-Day invasion." In fact, says the paper, Pearl was so pivotal to the French Resistance effort that "the Nazis issued a 1 million franc award for her capture."

Her story gets even more novelistically romantic post-WWII. Apparently, during the war, Pearl fell in love with a French fighter named Henri, and their affair is allegedly the basis for the Sebastian Faulks novel Charlotte Gray.

The British government tried to honor Pearl with a civilian award for her service after the war, but she refused it. In a letter to the Air Ministry, Pearl wrote, "The men have relieved military decorations, why this discrimination with women when they put the best of themselves into the accomplishment of their duties? I must say that the MBE looks puny. If I wear a decoration, I wish to be proud of it."

Pearl finally received her military honor — "parachute wings" — in 2001. I can already picture Cate Blanchett (who starred in the movie version of Charlotte Gray!) in the film adaptation of Pearl's life, her blond tresses glinting in the Normandy sun while she leads the French Resistance fighters to glory.

Female British Spy's Exploits During World War II Are Revealed [IHT]
The Brave Secretary Who Became One Of Britain's Top Women Wartime Secret Agents [This Is London]

Earlier: Strong Women