Born: 14 November 1912, United States
Died: 16 October 1944
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Jeanne Marcile Lewellen
The following is republished from HistoryLink.org, in line with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Thirty-eight pilots in the WASP program were killed in training or on mission flights. Since the women pilots were not actually in the military, they had no benefits, not even burial coverage. For a number of those killed, fellow pilots contributed to ship the body home for burial. Often another pilot would accompany the body to the deceased pilot’s hometown. The deaths included five Washington women.
Jeanne Lewellen Norbeck (1912-1944) lost her life while testing a repaired BT-13 basic trainer in South Carolina on October 16, 1944. Jeanne Lewellen graduated from Washington State College with an English major in 1933. She went to work as a secretary on the Grand Coulee dam construction project and met engineer Ed Norbeck (1916-1991). Ed Norbeck took a job in Hawaii and Jeanne Lewellen joined him. They married there in 1940. Both learned to fly. Ed Norbeck joined the Army when war broke out and Jeanne was an early WASP pilot. Jeanne Norbeck’s name is inscribed on the Washington State University Veterans Memorial.
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