Hell Hath No Fury (28 page)

Britain's Royal Navy has a similar policy, although it has placed much emphasis on the risk of a submarine having to surface, and abort its mission, if a female crew member gives birth. These fears have not deterred other navies. In 1995, the Royal Norwegian Navy became the world's first navy to appoint a female submarine captain. Three years later the Royal Australian Navy followed suit and allowed women to serve on combat submarines, followed by Canada and Spain.

Reference: Susan H. Godson,
Serving Proudly: A History of Women in the US Navy,
2003.

VOLUNTARY AID DETACHMENT

VAD, United Kingdom, World War I

In 1914 there were several uniformed services in Britain that were open to women: Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service, the Territorial Force Nursing Service, the
First Aid Nursing Yeomanry
(FANY, see Chapter 6), and the Voluntary Aid Detachments, the last a voluntary and unpaid service formed in 1910 to provide medical assistance in wartime.

By the outbreak of World War I there were more than 2,500 Voluntary Aid Detachments in the United Kingdom staffed by 47,000 individual VADs, two-thirds of whom were women. Initially the British War Office was unwilling to accept VADs serving in theaters of war, but the scale of casualties on the Western Front meant that in 1915 the restriction was removed. Women volunteers over the age of twenty-three and with more than three months' experience were allowed to serve overseas, not only in France but also in the Middle East and on the Eastern Front.

By September 1916, some eight thousand VADs were serving in military hospitals. Most of them were working under the General Service Scheme, introduced in June 1916, under which the military authorities made direct payment to VADs who were employed not only on nursing duties but in cooking, storekeeping, dispensing, and clerical work. The inexperience of some of the well-born VADs inevitably resulted in friction with their professional nursing counterparts.

Between 1914 and 1918, more than 90,000 VADs worked as nurses, ambulance drivers, clerks, and cooks. In addition to their contribution overseas, VADs operated hospitals in Britain. For many of them the war proved a life-changing experience, their newfound personal freedom coinciding with the British Empire's almost unimaginable loss of nearly a million men. The VADs went on to perform sterling service in World War II.

Reference: Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield,
Out of the Cage: Women's Experience in Two World Wars,
1987.

WOMEN'S ARMY AUXILIARY CORPS

WAAC, Later Women's Army Corps, United States, World War II

The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was the brainchild of US congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers, who in 1941 introduced a bill to establish an army women's corps separate and distinct from the existing
Army Nurse Corps
(see Chapter 8).

In World War I, women had worked with the US Army as volunteer communications specialists and dieticians but had not enjoyed official status and had received no legal protection, medical care, disability benefits, or pension rights. Rogers wanted to ensure that in the event of another war, women would be able to serve in the army while enjoying the same legal protection and benefits as the men.

The army's high command, while welcoming Rogers's initiative, argued for the creation of a body that would pose no threat to army culture, and the bill that emerged represented a compromise. The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps was set up to work with the army “for the purpose of making available to the national defense the knowledge, skill and special training of the women of the nation.” The army would provide up to 150,000 female auxiliaries with food, uniforms, living quarters, pay, and medical care. However, women would not be allowed to command men, a far cry from the days when an estimated 70,000 men flocked to fight under
Boudicca
's command (see Chapter 1), and the ranking system and pay reflected their lower status.

Other discriminations abounded to remind the women of their inferiority. Members of the WAAC might serve overseas, but they would not receive overseas pay. They were not covered by government life insurance, veterans' medical coverage, and death benefits granted to regular army soldiers. If they were captured, they would not be protected under international conventions.

In spite of opposition from conservative southern senators, Rogers's bill passed Congress by 249 votes to 86. The Senate approved the bill by 38 votes to 27 on May 14, 1942, and the president signed off on it the next day. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson appointed as the WAAC's first director Oveta Culp Hobby, an experienced newspaperwoman who worked with the War Department's Public Relations Bureau and had a firm grasp of national and local politics. From the outset, it was Hobby's stated intention that the auxiliaries of the WAAC would free men for combat. Applicants had to be US citizens between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five with no dependents. They had to be at least five feet tall and weigh no less than one hundred pounds.

The first auxiliary units to reach the field were assigned to the Aircraft Warning Service (AWS). By October 1942, twenty-seven WAAC companies had been activated at AWS stations on the eastern seaboard, tracking the movement of every aircraft in their station area. Initially, the majority of auxiliaries were assigned roles as typists, stenographers, and drivers, but over time a wider number of opportunities opened up for the Wacs, as they were known. Some 40 percent served in the United States Army Air Force (USAAF), working as weather observers and forecasters, cryptographers, radio operators, sheet-metal workers, parachute riggers, link trainer instructors, bombsight-maintenance specialists, aerial reconnaissance photograph analysts, and control-tower operators. They also operated statistical-control tabulating machines—early computers—which held service records.

A few Wacs in the USAAF were given flying duties as radio operators on training flights, and as mechanics and photographers. One Wac in the China-Burma-India theater was awarded an Air Medal for her work in mapping “the Hump,” the Allied air-supply route over the eastern Himalayas from Assam to China, which was opened in April 1942 when the Japanese cut the Burma Road.

Wacs also served in the Army Ground Forces (AGF) or Services of Supply (redesignated Army Service Forces [ASF] in 1943) field installations. The latter included a bewildering range of duties. Some Wacs in the ASF were assigned to the Chemical Warfare Service to work in laboratories and in the field. They trained as equipment testers, trialing walkie-talkies or meteorology instruments, or as glassblowers, making test tubes for the army's chemical laboratories. More than twelve hundred Wacs served in the signal corps as telephone switchboard, radio, and telegraph operators, cryptanalysts, photographic technicians, or analysts of photo-reconnaissance mosaics. The army's medical services benefited from WAAC laboratory and dental technicians, medical secretaries, and ward clerks.

Wacs assigned to the Corps of Engineers played a part in the Manhattan Project, the joint research effort undertaken by the Allies to develop the atomic bomb. A key element in the program was the cyclotron in the Chemistry Division at Los Alamos, in New Mexico, run by Master Sergeant Elizabeth Wilson. Another important Wac member of the Los Alamos setup was Jane Heydorn, an electronics technician who was closely involved in the construction of equipment for the testing of the A-bomb. Wacs also played their part at the Manhattan Project's seventy-eight-square-mile plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, maintaining top-secret files on the A-bomb program. Another team, based in London, helped to coordinate the flow of information passing between British and American scientists engaged on the project.

The Army Ground Forces (AGF) received some 20 percent of WAAC assignments. They encountered resistance from the army high command, some of whom felt that women could be used more effectively on war-industry production lines (see
Rosie the Riveter,
Chapter 6) rather than being trained for a variety of tasks within the military. As a result, many of the Wacs assigned to the AGF felt that they were not made welcome and subjected to over-bearing discipline. Three-quarters of the Wacs in AGF were involved in routine office work. Many of the remainder worked in motor pools, where the chances for transfer and promotion were very limited.

The first women in the WAAC to serve overseas were five officers, two of them French-speakers, who were posted to General Eisenhower's headquarters in North Africa in November 1942. Their ship was torpedoed during the Atlantic crossing, leaving them to be picked up from their lifeboats by Royal Navy destroyers and delivered with no uniforms and supplies to Algiers, where anxious officers greeted them with fruit and toiletries. They later served on Eisenhower's staff in the North African, Mediterranean, and European campaigns.

The campaigns in North Africa and Italy saw a cautious movement toward employing a WAC unit, 669th Headquarters Platoon, as close as six miles from the front line, handling a complex communications network plotting the movement of troops and the supply chain that sustained them.

Early in 1943, the progress made by the WAAC was temporarily slowed by a mounting public relations crisis that threatened moves by the War Department to post more women overseas. True to the age-old tradition of stigmatizing as harlots or whores any women who ventured out of their housewife roles, the WAAC had gained an entirely undeserved reputation among many enlisted men for low morals, and the War Department sought to address this problem by integrating the WAAC into the regular army.

In July 1943 the organization became the Women's Army Corps (WAC) and all its members were given the option of either joining the army as Wacs or returning to civilian life. Some 25 percent, many of them from the AGF, decided to leave. For those who stayed, life in the WAC was accompanied by a realignment of the ranking system, which in the case of enlisted women now mirrored that enjoyed by their male counterparts. Subsequently, enlistment never matched the high levels achieved in the opening months of the war but nevertheless enabled the War Department to meet its overseas posting requirements.

In the middle of 1943, American women came close to handling weapons when the US Army conducted an experiment to determine whether they could effectively operate antiaircraft guns. Not only did the women who participated succeed, they also performed better than their male counterparts.

But the US Army's chief of staff, General Marshall, with the support of Colonel Hobby, concluded that the US public was not ready for women to assume so “masculine” a role. The results of the experiment were subsequently classified as “secret” (see
Mixed Antiaircraft Batteries,
Chapter 7).

The first Wacs to arrive in the European theater of operations in the summer of 1943 were 557 enlisted women and 19 officers serving with Eighth Air Force. A detachment of 300 Wacs served with the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), located outside London in Bushey Park, and followed it to France in July 1944.

Working as stenographers, typists, translators, legal secretaries, cryptographers, telegraph and teletype operators, radiographers, and clerks, they played their part in the planning of Operations Neptune and Overlord, the Allied invasion of northwest Europe. By May 1945 there were some 7,500 Wacs in the European theater, stationed in England, France, and Germany.

From the outset the WAAC and WAC had been a racially segregated organization, and it was not until February 1945 that a battalion of black Wacs received a foreign assignment when the 688th Central Posting Battalion, commanded by Major (later Colonel) Charity Adams, arrived in the United Kingdom before moving to France. The battalion was responsible for the redirection of mail to all US service personnel in the European theater. To clear the backlog of Christmas mail, the Wacs worked three eight-hour shifts seven days a week. At peak numbers, 4,040 African-American women served in the WAC, 4.5 percent of the total strength.

Wacs who were posted to the Southwest Pacific Area Command operated far behind the lines and, at first, in trying conditions. Many arrived in the tropical theater kitted out with winter clothing, including ski pants, earmuffs, and heavy twill overalls. A shortage of khaki trousers exposed the women to malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Appropriate clothing remained a problem until the end of war and was often the cause of dermatitis, a skin disease aggravated by heat and humidity. Evacuations for health reasons eventually ran at 267 per thousand. Nevertheless, in all theaters it was recognized that health problems were no greater for women than for men.

The morale of women of the WAC in the southwest Pacific also suffered because they were confined to compounds surrounded by barbed wire and escorted to work by armed soldiers, an imposition many regarded as irksome. Male soldiers joked sourly that the Wacs in the theater were not releasing men for combat because so many troops were required to guard them.

Experience in the wartime services demonstrated the differences between women and men in their ability to function within a military hierarchy. The WAC director noted that “women need to remain individuals.” The stress on individuality, coupled with women's lack of experience with the military hierarchy, was reflected in their greater readiness to treat one another as individuals and not as part of a troop.

Moreover, many Wacs resented the “caste system” that separated officers from enlisted personnel, because it restricted enlisted women's contact with close friends or family members who were male officers. However, the qualities most valued by the WAC leaders were fairness, unselfishness, and sincere concern for the troops. Selfish ambition, while it might be tolerated by males in the male officer corps, was considered an “absolutely disqualifying” drawback in WAC officers.

After VE Day in Europe, on May 8, 1945, the demobilization of the WAC began, and by the end of December 1946 the corps's strength had shrunk to less than 10,000, the majority of whom were stationed in the United States. During World War II, 657 Wacs received medals and citations. Sixty-two were awarded the Legion of Merit, marking exceptionally meritorious conduct in the line of duty. Sixteen received the Purple Heart, awarded to soldiers wounded by enemy action. The majority of the Purple Heart Wacs had sustained their wounds in V-1 attacks in 1944 when they were stationed in London. Another 565 were awarded the Bronze Star for meritorious service overseas. By the end of the war, the WAC was releasing the equivalent of seven US Army divisions for active duty.