Roberta also has to contend with her impetuous sister, Virginia "Virgie" Alford (Geraldine Fitzgerald), and other concerns such as an affair involving Nadine Shannon (Diana Barrymore), one of her pilots.

With the depression that sets in among the women, a top-secret mission to deliver an aircraft to "Easy Queen Island," a front line air base in the Pacific, appears to be the way to prove their worth to their army superiors.

[5] After approval of the script, under the working title of "When Ladies Fly", pre-production began with the choice of Loretta Young, under contract at Universal Pictures, as the lead, with Geraldine Fitzgerald, on loan from Warner Bros., playing her younger sister.

[6] While director John Rawlins was about to begin principal photography, the United States Army Air Forces reviewed its commitment to the project, demanding major script revisions and threatening to have the film closed down.

[7] Principal photography for Ladies Courageous at both Universal Pictures Studios and location shooting at the Long Beach Army Air Field in California began on August 23 and continued to early November 1943.

By the time the troubled production reached the screen, Ladies Courageous was already the subject of a congressional review of the formation of the Women Airforce Service Pilots.

[11] Reviewer Thomas M. Pryor emphatically noted in The New York Times that "... 'Ladies Courageous' represents a very curious compliment to the WAFS on the part of its producer, Walter Wanger, and the Army Air Force, which sanctioned and participated in the making of the picture, now at Loew's Criterion.