It's My Country Too

by Jerri Bell, Tracy Crow

  There were other facets of housekeeping I didn’t enjoy. There were no vacuum cleaners in those days and our house was on a busy street so I was constantly sweeping and dusting. Also, there was the washing to be done for two people that must be done in a wash tub in the basement and I had to learn to soak the clothes and use a wash board to get them clean. Then I had to pack them up some rickety stairs to hang them in the back yard to dry. Why had I wanted to marry anybody? Housekeeping was not only hard work, it was boring. I longed for the old days in the office when each day brought some new challenge.

  5

  World War II

  “We Were Very Proud To Do Whatever Was Necessary”

  Off the coast of North Africa, on the night of November 7, 1942, the staff of the Forty-Eighth Surgical Hospital assembled on board a transport ship near the coast of Algeria to receive instructions for going ashore with the American invasion force. The chief nurse, Capt. Theresa Archard, and the nurses under her command were to line up on the decks when ordered, packs ready with the front of the harness open, shoes unlaced, and helmets on their heads but unfastened. If they were hit, they would have to slip out of their packs, jettison their shoes and helmets, and swim for shore. Their musette bags contained three days’ worth of D and C rations: canned hash, beans, stew, coffee, and three chocolate bars each. The women joked around, pretended they were not afraid, and tried not to think too much about what might happen to them.

  When the large guns began to shell the small town of Arzeu the following morning, soldiers poured from the ships into commando boats with their guns and equipment. Others loaded tanks for transport ashore. The nurses were ordered to the boats a few hours later. Captain Archard, in the last group to board, watched as her nurses descended the swaying ladder with full packs and untied shoes, guns roaring in the background. They disembarked in waist-deep water and waded up the beach.

  Cold, tired, wet, unarmed, and afraid, the nurses huddled behind a sandbank to take cover from sniper fire. They could hear the big guns booming in the distance and the ping of snipers’ bullets nearby. After a while, they moved down the beach to a dirty, deserted house where they tried to rest on the cold tile floors. Soon a voice called for Archard and her deputy, Lieutenant Salter. One of the doctors had taken charge of a French and Arab hospital nearby and needed four or five nurses.

  At the hospital, enlisted corpsmen held flashlights for the surgeons in the operating room, who worked without gowns or gloves. Wounded men waited in crowded stairways and halls. The nurses carefully rationed the small supply of sedatives. They worked through the night without stopping for food or coffee. The ships, still taking fire from shore, could not offload more supplies. For the next two days, the hospital staff divided their rations with the wounded men who could eat and gave their patients sips of water from their own canteens. They shared the few cigarettes they had with their patients and made cocoa from the chocolate bars.

  In a second facility half a mile up the road in a filthy, verminous, abandoned French barracks, the nurses threw out lice-infested mattresses, covered the springs of wooden cots with capes, and sluiced down the floors with nonpotable water. They treated their patients while dodging bullets aimed into the windows of the barracks.

  No nurses were wounded or killed during the North African invasion. Nevertheless, General Eisenhower decided that nurses could not go ashore with the landing force again: they would come ashore only after the beachhead was secure. A year later this precaution would prove ineffective. Several nurses were among the casualties on the beachhead at Anzio.

  In 1920 the Army (but not the Navy) granted nurses “relative” officer rank, from second lieutenant to major, in recognition of their wartime service. They did not receive equal pay or equal privileges of rank. And except for the nurses, after the First World War the American armed forces never expected to need women’s service again. In 1925 Congress rewrote the Naval Reserve Act of 1916, which had authorized the Navy to enlist “citizens”—the oversight that had permitted enlistment of women into the Navy and Marines—to limit enlistment to “male citizens” only.

  Because of the close alliance between the women’s suffrage and pacifist/antimilitary movements, in 1921 the War Department attempted to persuade women voters that a strong military was necessary. The secretary of the Army named Washington socialite Anita Phipps, the daughter of a brigadier general who had served as the director of the Pennsylvania-Delaware division of the Red Cross Motor Corps Service during the war, director of Women’s Programs. The War Department gave Phipps no military status or support, and she lacked credibility with women’s organizations. She also proved unable to respond effectively to a smear campaign linking women’s activism to Bolshevism. Despite these obstacles, in 1926 she presented a plan for a 170,000-strong Women’s Service Corps to serve as an auxiliary to the Army in time of war. The War Department rejected her plan, and in 1931 Gen. Douglas MacArthur abolished her position, saying that it was “of no military value.”

  In May 1941, Rep. Edith Nourse Rogers (R-Massachusetts) introduced a bill in Congress to establish the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). Rogers, who had inspected field and base hospitals with the Women’s Overseas League and served in the Red Cross in Washington DC during World War I, believed that if women were again called to serve during wartime they should receive the same legal status and benefits as men. The Army disagreed: in an internal memo, Brig. Gen. Wade Haislip noted that the Army had “stopped her” by promising to study her proposal “so that when it is forced upon us, as it undoubtedly will be, we shall be able to run it our way.” The bill languished in Congress until after Pearl Harbor.

  When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, dozens of Army and Navy nurses were serving in Hawaii and the Philippines. Two days later, Japanese troops captured five Navy nurses assigned to the naval hospital on Guam and imprisoned them in Japan for seven months before repatriating them. After the fall of Corregidor in May 1942, Japanese soldiers captured sixty-six Army and eleven more Navy nurses in the Philippines and incarcerated them in the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila for three years.

  By the war’s end, nearly sixty thousand women had volunteered to serve as military nurses. More than half volunteered for service in combat zones; sixteen were killed by enemy action.

  The attack on Pearl Harbor renewed congressional interest in Nourse’s proposal. Congress established the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, which did not offer women full military status, on May 15, 1942. Oveta Culp Hobby was sworn in as first director at the rank of major, and the first class of women officers graduated in August. Most had attended or graduated college and had work experience as teachers or clerical workers. On July 30, 1942, Public Law 689 established the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) with Wellesley College president Mildred H. McAfee sworn in as the first director; as in World War I, Navy women had full military status. The Coast Guard followed suit with creation of the SPARs in November 1942, and the following month SPARs entered the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut—the first women to attend an American military academy. When senators argued that establishment of women’s auxiliaries would “destroy their femininity and future standings as ‘good mothers,’” the Marine Corps located women who had served in the USMC women’s reserve in World War I to prove them wrong; they reestablished the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve in November 1942 under the direction of Ruth Cheney Streeter. Training for the Women’s Auxiliary Service Pilots (WASP), a civilian auxiliary of the Army Air Corps in which women pilots ferried aircraft military aircraft from factories to military bases and towed targets for anti-aircraft artillery students, began in 1943. All the women’s services were to be disestablished six months after the war ended.

  The Navy and Marine Corps, aware of the value of a smart uniform for recruiting and morale, engaged professionals to outfit women. Mainbocher, a former Vogue editor and fashion designer, volunteered his service to design uniforms for the WAVES. With
minor modifications, the women’s service dress blue uniform Mainbocher designed is still worn by Navy women today. Navy officials insisted that the uniforms be trimmed with light blue braid instead of traditional gold; only when women achieved permanent status was gold authorized for women’s uniforms. Capt. Anne Lentz, who had worked in a large civilian department store, designed the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve uniforms. Elizabeth Arden visited Camp LeJeune in 1943, and after examining the shade of green of the uniforms, she created “Montezuma Red” lipstick, nail polish, and rouge to match the scarlet cap cord and chevrons. By contrast, the Army Office of the Quartermaster General developed uniforms for the WAAC and contracted their production to men’s clothing manufacturers. Uniforms frequently required major alterations; shortages of women’s uniforms required improvisation with men’s items; and women lacked both cold weather gear and tropical uniforms that would protect against insects, as well as shoes that were resistant to tropical rot. Perhaps worst, civilian department stores sold WAAC uniforms: civilian workers and prostitutes seeking easier access to military clubs bought or copied them.

  By the spring of 1943, when Army officials requested that the women’s corps be granted “regular” instead of “auxiliary” status, a slander campaign against Army women was underway. Initial military investigations into WAACs’ “immoral behavior” found that civilians often misidentified drunk and disorderly civilian women dressed in uniforms or copies as WAACs. Rumors led to recruiting shortfalls. In May 1943, Director Hobby asked the Army to investigate the possibility that the rumors originated with Nazi sympathizers.

  The Army brought in the FBI when rumors surfaced that 90 percent of WAACs were prostitutes; 40 percent were being sent home pregnant from overseas assignments; virgins were not approved for enlistment; WAACs were engaged in public sex acts; and that the Army was issuing prophylactics to WAACs—normally only purchased by married women at that time—so that they could “keep the troops happy.” When syndicated “Capitol Stuff” columnist John O’Donnell published the rumor about the prophylactics on June 8, 1943, Director Hobby, Secretary of War Stimson, President Roosevelt, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt all publicly denied the rumors and demanded that O’Donnell retract his story.

  Army investigators and censors eventually discovered that the malicious rumors were originating from American servicemen, both officer and enlisted; soldiers’ wives; civilian women; and “fanatics” opposed to women working outside the home. Eighty-four percent of letters from soldiers overseas examined by the Office of Censorship contained derogatory comments about WAACs—even when soldiers had never seen or served with any. Congress ordered Director Hobby to appear with statistics on actual cases of pregnancy and venereal disease; the rates turned out to be lower than those of civilian women. Many members of Congress and Army commanders, including Gen. George Marshall, then issued statements supporting the women’s corps. But the damage was done, with lasting effects. When the WAAC was disestablished in July 1943 and replaced by the regular Women’s Army Corps (WAC) only three-fourths of WAACs chose to remain, despite receiving equal pay with men and increased benefits. Most women who declined to reenlist gave the hostility of camp commanders and soldiers who followed their commanders’ lead as their primary reason for leaving.

  Despite the rumor-mongering, women signed up to serve in more than two hundred occupational specialties—not only in clerical jobs that “freed a man to fight,” but also in finance, communications, supply, transportation, and intelligence. They repaired vehicles and aircraft, packed parachutes, analyzed intelligence photos, made maps, translated, and broke codes. Some worked on the Manhattan Project and in the “Battery X” experiment, in which WASP pilots towed targets that WAACs tracked with new anti-aircraft radars. Twenty thousand Army women served overseas: close to the front lines in Sicily and Italy; under threat of German V-1 and V-2 attacks in London; and in the tropical heat of Africa, Australia, New Guinea, Burma, and India. Navy nurses served on twelve hospital ships. WAVES, with their SPAR counterparts, served in Alaska and Hawaii and at then top-secret LORAN navigation facilities. WAVES were air traffic controllers, Link aviation simulator instructors, radio operators and repairmen, gunnery instructors, naval air navigation instructors, mechanics, aerial photographers, and targeteers for surface gunnery and naval aviation attacks. They also participated in a secret night-fighter training project. Navy flight nurses evacuated casualties from Guam, Tinian, Kwajalein, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, sometimes while fighting was in progress. WASPs not only ferried aircraft and towed targets but also tested aircraft after repair.

  From the start of the war, women of color who attended the first officer and enlisted classes petitioned Congress, the secretary of war, the president, and the First Lady to be allowed to serve to the full extent of their abilities. The Army accepted their service reluctantly and restricted their assignment. Black nurses deployed to Liberia to treat malaria cases in 1943, but they were sent to Europe only near the end of the war. Black WAACs attended racially integrated classes but were assigned to segregated units commanded by black women, where they lived and ate in segregated facilities. Most often they served in areas where black men served or there was a significant African American community. White commanders requested black WAACs for the “morale” of black troops. The Navy recruited few black women; the Marines recruited none until desegregation laws forced the services to integrate after the war.

  The Army was authorized to recruit Nisei women in the fall of 1943. It inducted some directly from internment camps. Most with language proficiency were assigned as document translators. One worked with an Australian army major to identify members of a secret Japanese society that tortured and killed prisoners of war. Two Asian American women joined the WASPs: one, Chinese American pilot Hazel Ying Lee, died in an airplane crash.

  By the end of the war, approximately 350,000 women—all volunteers—had served in the armed forces: 150,000 in the Army; 80,000 in the Navy; 20,000 in the Marines; and 12,000 in the SPARs. Some 1,100 served as WASP pilots. Around 17,000 WACs served overseas. More than 500 military women were killed in the war, including more than 200 nurses and 38 WASPs who died in accidents caused by bad weather and mechanical failure. Around 1,600 nurses received decorations, including Distinguished Service Medals, Silver Stars, Distinguished Flying Crosses, Soldier’s Medals, Bronze Stars, Air Medals, Legions of Merit, Commendation Medals, and Purple Hearts. WASPs flew 60 million miles, ferried 12,650 aircraft, towed hundreds of gunnery targets, and instructed hundreds of male pilots.

  At the end of the war, both the Army and the Navy wanted to make the women’s corps permanent. Opposition came from members of Congress; society expected women to return to their homes and release jobs to men. The League of Women Voters declined to support women veterans’ claims to veterans’ benefits, access to Veterans’ Preference, and the GI Bill; Mrs. Robert Gordon, legislative chair, argued that women veterans’ use of benefits would result in discrimination against disabled male veterans and working women who had remained in the civilian sector. WASP Director Jackie Cochran refused to serve in an organization in which she would be subordinate to WAC Director Hobby, and she argued to disband the WASP if it was not integrated into the military. Even the directors of the women’s services were reluctant to seek permanent status. They noted the reluctance of military men to accept women; treatment of women’s concerns as frivolous, not worth the bother, or seeking favoritism and special privileges; and the reluctance of women to complain of maltreatment due to feelings of powerlessness and fear of reprisal.

  Demobilization was set for September 1, 1946. Later that year, a Veterans Administration study, “The Woman Veteran,” noted that “many of the women were experiencing the same readjustment problems as the enlisted men separated around the same time . . . and that, in addition, women veterans had to deal with problems and bias against women in the military and women veterans.” Many women felt that the government and the American people failed to value thei
r contributions.

  In the years that followed, few women veterans commercially published memoirs of their service. Only as the fiftieth anniversary of VE Day and VJ Day approached did more accounts begin to appear in print. Most were self-published or published in limited print runs by university presses.

  Avis Schorer

  (1919–2016)

  U.S. Army Nurse Corps

  Avis D. Schorer, from Iowa, served as an Army nurse at evacuation hospitals in Africa and Italy from 1942 to 1946. She and twenty-five fellow nurses landed on the Anzio beachhead under constant bombardment from German artillery. They set up a field hospital, nicknamed “Hell’s Half Acre,” on the beach. The following are excerpts from Schorer’s memoir A Half Acre of Hell: A Combat Nurse in WWII, published in 2000.

  We went ashore on D-day plus five—January 27, 1944. . . . The terrain was flat, unlike the mountains near Naples. Little did we realize that our first thirty-six hours ashore would be a foretaste of what lay ahead.

  Instead of a hero’s welcome, men on shore shouted, “What the hell are women doing here? This place is hot. Take the first vehicle you can and get out of here.”

  We rushed aboard [an open truck waiting to take the nurses to the hospital site], but the sirens immediately blasted their warning—German planes overhead. Everyone jumped from the truck and pressed against the last remaining wall of a bombed building. American planes swooped in, guns blazing, and chased the intruders back to their territory.

  [Red crosses on a white background mark the hospital site, a few tents set up on the beach. The commander, Colonel Blesse, gives the nurses a pep talk and assures them that there is no need to dig foxholes.]