Women in the U.S. military in WWII

Until World War II, women had not been accepted in the U.S. military, but by the end of the decade, all four branches of service had more or less initiated comprehensive gender integration programs.

In May, 1941, the U.S. Congress worked on a bill to recruit women into low-skill Army jobs, such as laundering and cleaning. However, after the military attack on Pearl Harbor, men in these and higher positions were sent to the front lines, so Congress created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) program in May, 1942. Under the initial program, the WAAC extension was controlled by the Army, which positioned servicewomen liminally between soldiers and support staff. While women’s secondary status became a major handicap to recruiting efforts, the main problem was the negative and disrespectful attitudes of male soldiers toward their female colleagues, an issue that remained problematic throughout the decade. These attitudes were supported by the Army’s “separate but equal” ideology concerning women: the nearly 13,000 enrolled women did not receive the same post-injury care, pay, benefits, or rank enjoyed by their male counterparts.

The Army’s Women’s Programs

In July, 1942, 400 white women and 400 black women, who had joined out of a sense of patriotic duty, were segregated upon arrival at the Army WAAC officer-training center at Fort Des Moines. WAAC director Oveta Culp Hobby, who would eventually win the U.S. Army Distinguished Service Medal, worked closely with ambivalent male Army officers to recruit up to 63,000 additional female soldiers in two years. By then, however, the needed number had reached 1.5 million. Despite the overwhelming demand for women in the military, the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) bill, which granted women equal status in the service, was not passed officially until the summer of 1943.

Margaret D. Craighill became the first woman commissioned into the Army Medical Corps at the rank of major. The Army Nurse Corps had been established under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Florence Blanchfield, the first woman to hold a permanent commission in the Army. During the ninety-day conversion period following WAC’s passing, more than 60,000 women were given the option of remaining on as soldiers or going home. By this time, women were serving both stateside and abroad, in Japan, Iran, India, and parts of Africa.

Formed in September, 1942, the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) became a bourgeoning branch of the Army during this time partly because of efforts by pilots Jacqueline Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love. Cochran quickly established the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) in the Army Air Forces, and by November 28, the WAFS flew its first mission. Close to 400 women graduated from the program in 1943, which led Cochran to merge the WAFS and WFTD to form the Women Airforce Service Pilots in August, 1943. By the time that program disbanded in 1944, 120,000 women were serving in 401 of approximately 600 formerly off-limits military occupational specialties (MOS), as air-traffic controllers, instructors, and trainers of carrier pigeons and dogs.

After World War II, Army chief of staff Dwight D. Eisenhower supported integration through 1946 and 1947, and while full integration was granted in 1948, women remained in service in what was unofficially dubbed the “interim Army.” In 1947, Lieutenant Colonel Mary A. Hallaren, a strong proponent of integration, was appointed the director of the WAC.

The Navy’s WAVES

The Navy did not initially agree to allow women into its fold, but early in 1942, it recognized that it was severely understaffed and, by necessity, began admitting women. The Naval Women’s Reserves was calledWomen Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES). The WAVES program took an entirely different approach to recruiting, opting for an academic route to recruit a class of potential naval officers rather than the comparatively uneducated group accumulated by the Army. The president of Wellesley College, Mildred McAfee, was commissioned lieutenant commander in the Naval Reserves to head the WAVES program. The Navy’s recruitment goals were also more realistic that the Army’s; the Navy opted to enlist 75,000 female soldiers and 12,000 female officers. These women were recruited to work in the United States; not until November, 1944, when the war had nearly ended, were WAVES deployed overseas.

By 1945, 86,000 American women were WAVES. Women made up more than one-half of all naval personnel at Navy headquarters, and this trend continued throughout top naval offices nationwide. Though it faced strict objections to retaining women past wartime, the Navy promoted war veteran Joy Bright Hancock to assistant chief of naval personnel for women in 1946 to decrease the number of women in what became a Navy-wide reduction of three million service personnel. She accomplished that mission, some say too efficiently, for the Navy soon began seeking ways to retain a dwindling naval corps. In 1948, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that created permanent jobs for women in the Navy. During the last years of the decade, the Navy secured sufficient, although low, numbers of women.

Women in the Coast Guard and the Marines

In September, 1942, the U.S. Coast Guard elected to accept women under a program titled SPAR, an acronym from its motto, “Semper Paratus—Always Ready.” The Coast Guard’s SPAR program followed the organization and recruitment principles established by the Navy but recruited even fewer women: 10,000 enlisted and 1,000 officers, one in four of whom served in aviation. By mid-decade, the Coast Guard had achieved this goal; by June, 1946, SPAR was demobilized.

The U.S. Marine Corps was the branch of the American armed forces most reluctant to accept women. It established the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve (MCWR) in February, 1943. Both the Coast Guard and the Marines recruited women from other branches of the service to form the core of their own female programs. Nearly one-third of female Marines served in aviation; at one air station, 90 percent of the parachute workers and 80 percent of all air-traffic controllers were women. In total, there were 18,000 women Marines by mid-decade. By the end of the war, Marine Corps women held 87 percent of enlisted jobs at Marine headquarters and often up to one-half of the on-post positions. The MCWR disbanded in the years after World War II, and the Marine Corps did not integrate as quickly as the other branches of the military did.

The Women of the Air Force

After the 1948 integration legislation passed and only nine months after the Air Force fought and won independence from the Army, the Women in the Air Force (WAF) set the goal of full integration, uninterested in status as a “petticoat” corps separate from the Air Force. By summer, WAF had attracted only 168 officers and 1,433 enlisted women, well below the 2 percent ceiling the Air Force enacted to maintain low female-to-male ratios and to recruit an elite force of women that trumped the Navy’s WAVES. In early 1949, the first female officers attended Officer Candidate School, the foremost coed advanced-training program in any service.

Impact

At the end of World War II, the U.S. armed forces contained 12 million service personnel, 280,000 of whom were women. More than 350,000 women had served altogether. In 1945, several top-ranking and program-founding women resigned, including Hobby, Ruth Cheney Streeter, McAfee, and Dorothy C. Stratton, ostensibly setting the pace for a rapid demobilization and disbandment of all women-in-service programs. In 1948, Congress passed the Women’s Armed Services Act, which created permanent positions for women in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. Although provisions were imperfect—for example, women could not surpass a certain rank or enter certain MOS positions—feminists considered it a victory for female soldiers and women’s rights. The threats of the Korean War and the Cold War caused a short pause in recruitment and retention in most branches. It was women’s lack of interest in the programs—not an exclusion of the gender—that caused a reduction in women’s enlistment toward the end of the 1940’s.

Bibliography

Cook, Bernard A. Women and War: A Historical Encyclopedia from Antiquity to the Present. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2006. Broader in scope than just the 1940’s, this allows for easy comparison of women’s roles, attitudes, and rights among wars and cultures.

Hartmann, Susan M. The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940’s. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Describes the educational, military, political, industrial, and legal roles of women within and outside the U.S. military during this decade.

Holm, Jeanne. Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution. Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982. Parts one and two of this informative social history contextualize women’s military history in the attitudes, customs, and personalities of the era; told from an insider’s perspective.

Meyer, Leisa. Creating G.I. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’s Army Corps During World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Specifically about the WAC, examines the moral codes, racial prejudices, and societal dismissal of female soldiers, particularly black women and lesbians.

Yellin, Emily. Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Personal account; offers a subjective perspective, conveying how women felt, thought, and interacted with their society.