“I hope our men in POW camps never hear of this incident,” Kate said. “They have heartaches by the million. They’re starved and forced to work as slave labor. Just think of the anxiety they have about their families and loved ones.”
Kate joined the rest of the nurses in the crowded lateral [tunnel] and seemingly slept well from then on.
[February 1945. The nurses hear shooting close to the camp.]
I leaned toward the window. Outside it was darker than it had been, but not yet black night. I could see a little, and it looked quiet enough down the drive to the main gate with its guardhouses on either side. “I hear a rumble. Can’t you all hear it? Can you see anything?”
“I hear it,” Josie breathed. “But I don’t see anything. Could it be tanks?”
“Ours, do you suppose?” Shack asked. “Or theirs?”
“Theirs,” someone said. “They’ve come to kill us off and have done with it.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “You’re wrong again.”
“How do you know, Denny?”
“I feel it, that’s how! Hush now, let’s just listen.”
The rumble persisted, grew louder, filled the air with a clanking rattling rolling grinding roar as it advanced inexorably toward us. Relentless doom for the enemy? Or annihilation for us? Would the Japs dare? Of course they would. Hadn’t they already stopped our food entirely?
The rumble stopped. Dead silence at the gates. Dead silence in the building. Full darkness now, and not a light showing this side of the glare on the horizon. Dead silence and black darkness while our whole world held its breath.
“Where the hell is the front gate?”
A good American male voice that made me tingle all over, brought me to my feet pounding somebody’s shoulders, all of us screaming, joining our voices to others which rose all over the building.
“It’s the Americans! God bless America! The Yanks are here! Our boys have come!”
Mary Ellen “Liz” Graydon
(1918–2000)
U.S. Women’s Army Corps
Mary Ellen “Liz” Graydon served three years as a WAC during World War II. A published poet, she was a member of the Southern Poetry Association in Mississippi, the Georgia Poetry Society, and the Disabled American Veterans. She graduated from Oglethorpe University in 1975 and published two books, My Time in Rhyme—and More and Love and War: One WAC Remembers World War II. The following excerpts are from Love and War, published in 1998.
One of the most vicious rumors ever started about the WACs surfaced in late 1942 or early 1943. The rumor appeared in the newspapers and on the radio that 250,000 WACs were being sent home from overseas because they were pregnant! [There were only 16,000 WACs serving overseas at that time, and approximately 140,000 WACs total.]
Parents of the WACs went ballistic! They wrote and/or called their senators, congressmen, lawyers, and even the President of the United States, which at the time was Franklin D. Roosevelt. They demanded that the WAC be disbanded and all the girls be sent home.
To make the situation even worse, a well-known, highly visible woman made a suggestion to the Army that all the WACs be issued condoms! In the 1940s the word “condom” was not even mentioned in polite society. The public was astounded and horrified, and “the lady” had to apologize via radio, saying that her suggestion was inappropriate, but the damage was done. . . .
Who started the rumor? We never knew, but recruitment of WACs fell off for a few months, and our reputation suffered terribly as the result of an awful lie!
A columnist, John O’Donnell, claimed “a super-secret War Department policy authorized the issuance of prophylactics to all WACs before they were sent overseas.” He said Director Hobby knew about it and agreed with the policy. The charge was a lie, and O’Donnell had to retract his allegation. WACs and their families were very angry, but the harm had been done.
Congress told Director Hobby to give them statistics on WAC pregnancies and their supposed venereal diseases. Congress learned that the percentage was very small, and they turned their efforts toward praising the WACs.
I was there with the women, and I know the truth. Not one WAC became pregnant in my company during my three years of service, and if anyone contracted any disease, we were not aware of it.
The WACs were human, but they were ladies, and they wouldn’t dream of behaving in such a way as to disgrace the Women’s Army Corps.
• • •
WACs were supposed to take over the clerical duties of the men, although these were considered menial and uninteresting. But those were the jobs familiar to a large percentage of working women in the 1940s. So, if WACs could do the work and free the men for combat, we would all be doing our duty, and the war would soon be over. Right? Wrong!
Some of the men were very comfortable in their jobs and resented the WACs who would depose them. The men did not want combat and neither did their families and fiancées. They believed that the WACs were to blame for the threat of overseas duties. The women who joined the military meant change, and men did not want change. Therefore, they believed the worst rumors about the women, and passed them on (elaborately embellished) to their fellow soldiers, families, and friends.
In the 1940s, there were still many men in the United States who wanted their wives “barefoot and pregnant,” as gross as that sounds. It was a repugnant idea but true. The egos of those men must have suffered a terrible defeat when the WACs were neither barefoot nor pregnant but soon learned skills never allowed for women previously, work that had been dominated by men. . . .
Thousands of men tried very hard to stay out of the Army, Navy, or Marines. They sought help from congressmen, senators, lawyers, friends, and anyone who could secure a deferment for them. Many of them were successful and remained at their civilian jobs throughout the war. . . . However, some were drafted in spite of the “strings” that had been pulled. I do not blame anyone for avoiding death in some war zone, but it has always been the duty of every male to defend his country from the enemy. To do otherwise would have branded him a coward, and few men could live with that badge.
Some men could, however, and they wanted the women out of the WAC. They wanted to remain safe and secure on U.S. soil. If the WACs took over the menial tasks the men were doing, servicemen had no reason to remain in the States, and overseas duty was inevitable.
But, were we to blame? We volunteered for overseas service when the Army needed us, knowing that our lives could be at risk. . . . We (the WACs) wanted to serve our country anywhere the Army needed us. What does that say about some of the men?
[Graydon serves in London during the German V-1 and V-2 bombings in 1944.]
Our company of WACs gathered our gear, disembarked, and wearily climbed aboard a train bound for London. Arriving at our long-awaited destination, we went directly to our “billets” which were two five-story English houses, now joined together (on the inside) to house 150 WACs.
We carried our barracks bags up the long flight of stairs to a room on the fifth floor assigned to four WACs, and I was one of them.
Now, at last, we were ready for sleep, the windows of our rooms darkened by blackout curtains. The trip from Boston to London by ship, train, and Army trucks had left us all exhausted, and the hard Army cots felt like eiderdown.
The silence was shattered by deafening explosions. Ear-splitting sounds came from every direction. Other loud noises, which we could not identify, penetrated the night. We had heard some of those sounds before—back home in the newsreels. But something strange and different from anything we had seen or heard before was raining on London, and the antiaircraft guns stationed just two blocks away in Hyde Park were firing in staccato-like bursts of flame.
• • •
German planes, with their bombs, had been quiet over London for many weeks—had they begun again? The WACs had little time to contemplate Hitler’s war strategy. We scrambled out of our beds and ran down the five flights of stairs to the basement with the air raid
warning signal screaming in our ears. The sound was loud, alarming and frightening.
The dark basement was much too small to allow a hundred and fifty WACs to lie down, and the hard cement floor was cold and damp. In sitting positions, we huddled together for warmth and comfort, and I prayed harder than I ever had before. The thought uppermost in my mind was the fear that June 12–13, 1944, would be my last night on earth.
The booming sound of the antiaircraft guns and the screaming air raid warning signal continued, and so did the explosive sounds—screeching, thunderous, deafening, and terrifying. We heard falling objects like pieces of metal raining from the sky. Something was disintegrating, and the debris was flying through the air. Walls of the buildings shook from the impact, and bricks tumbled down the chimneys. Throughout the seemingly endless night, our stunned, frightened women remained awake, still praying for our safety and, strangely enough, for silence—silence that would reveal the end of that nightmare.
In the early dawn, news came to us from our officers that the explosions, which we had not been able to identify, were from Hitler’s first buzz-bombs: V-1 robot bombs he hoped would bring an end to the long war with Great Britain.
[Graydon summarizes the design and some of the effects of the V-1 and V-2 bombs on London.]
There were few visible signs of fear after the first weeks of our visit from Hitler’s buzz-bombs. There were no hysterics, no fainting or tears from the WACs.
[She goes on to talk about how many of the WACs learned to smoke cigarettes in the basement during air raids.]
After many sleepless nights, our Commanding Officer called a meeting to ask all of us a question, “Do you want to die in the cold basement or in your bed?” We voted unanimously to die in bed. It posed a greater threat to me because my room was on the top floor, the place where a bomb would hit first. I could easily be killed at that instant or fall through the five stories and be buried beneath the rubble. Not much of a choice. However, all of us had to work, and we needed to sleep and rest. For the remainder of our stay in London, we slept in our beds and prayed every night that we would live to see the morning.
The other girls and I closed the blackout curtains at our window each night just before dark. When we put out our one light in the room and opened the curtains, we looked with fear and also with a sense of excitement, toward the English Channel and France. We talked very little but just waited to see the buzz-bombs coming toward us. The sound was much like that of an outboard motor on a boat. A flash of flame could be seen coming from the tail. We held our breath as we waited to see if it would continue on its path. If the motor cut out directly over us, our lives were in jeopardy. A direct hit could destroy our building and the company of WACs inside. Night after night, we were quite lucky because the bombs flew over us, and we were safe for a time.
When we left London, the buildings on all four sides surrounding our billets had been damaged or completely demolished. Our “homes” stood alone, almost untouched by the enemy bombs. We all felt that God had watched over us throughout our months at 72 Upper Berkley Street.
• • •
We were soldiers in the U.S. Army, and we were trained to steel ourselves from the usual feminine emotions. We were very proud to do whatever was necessary to bring the war to an early victory over the enemy. The discipline the WACs had acquired gave us the courage to say, “Soldiers do not cry.”
Later, however, after the war was over, some veterans would learn that our discipline and our war experiences would lead to life-altering physical and mental conditions, later to be called “post war syndrome.”
Psychologists believed that veterans had held their muscles, nerves and minds as tight as steel. They were taut over a long period of time but, when the war was over, men and women relaxed completely. They were like rubber bands that had been would up so tight that sooner or later the bands had to snap, and snap they did. Some veterans developed ulcers, chronic diarrhea, spastic colitis and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Others suffered from psychological problems and were unable to adjust to civilian life after the trauma they had experienced. . . .
Back home in the United States, our citizens slept snug in their beds but complained of the shortage of silk stockings, gas, coffee, sugar, and a few other items. They still had plenty to eat, warm clothing, heated homes and hot water, alcohol to drink, cosmetics to wear, and most of the necessities of life, and they enjoyed the most important thing in their lives—peace on United States soil.
Charity Adams Earley
(1918–2002)
U.S. Women’s Army Corps
Charity Adams Earley, from Columbia, South Carolina, was the first African American officer in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. During World War II, Earley commanded the first battalion of African American women serving overseas, the 6888th Central Postal Directory. By the end of the war, Major Earley was the highest-ranking African American woman in the Army. According to Black History Now, Earley “was dressed down by a racist colonel, had her rank questioned by MPs in civilian settings, and once, at home on leave, defended her father’s house with a shotgun by her side during a tense standoff with members of the Ku Klux Klan.” The following are excerpts from her memoir One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC.
21 Mar.–5 May 1945
On my frequent trips to London, I had come to know many of the Red Cross staff members, especially those in the operations office. In fact, I had several dates with one member of the staff. He was white, and perhaps that black-white combination on dates may have been the reason for what happened next. I received a call from Red Cross Headquarters asking me to “please” come into the city next day if at all possible. It was possible, and I went.
At the Red Cross office I was presented with a piece of news that was supposed to excite me. It made me angry. The director said, “We realize that your colored girls would be happier if they had a hotel all to themselves so we have leased a hotel from the British government, and we are in the process of renovating and furnishing it now.”
“Did the white girls complain?” I asked.
“Oh, no, we just know that your girls would rather have a place of their own.”
“More important to me, I have not had one single complaint from my ‘colored girls.’ My advice is to leave well enough alone.”
“Oh, please,” the director persisted. “Won’t you let us take you out to see it?”
We climbed into a vehicle and went to the hotel. Later, I summed up my reaction to the hotel to my officers as follows. “It will make a lovely hotel, but it is as far off the beaten path as it could be and still be a nice place and in the city, and it is the most blatant segregation and discrimination I have ever encountered.”
Warning the Red Cross director, one more time, that this was a shameful waste of volunteer contributions, I returned to Birmingham. Over the next several weeks we watched and waited and planned. Finally, the call came. The hotel was ready, and would I please come see it before the women arrived? The next morning I was off to London again. I did have a vehicle and chauffeur assigned to me for official business, so I could make these one-day trips into London, as well as to other military locations on short notice. When I arrived in London, I was rushed out to the hotel for my “colored girls.” For war times, the hotel was quite nicely furnished, the kitchen was complete and stocked, supplies adequate, and staff sufficient. Everyone was beaming and waiting to know what I thought of it. I toured the entire place, room by room, before I made my comment.
“I am sorry that you have gone to so much expense and trouble. I advised you that the Negro WACs had had no problems with the white WACs, so this hotel is not necessary. I promise you that, as God is my witness, as long as I am commanding officer of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, not one member of that unit will ever spend one night here.”
Back in Birmingham I prepared to put our plan in operation. The following morning for the first and only time I shut down the eight-ho
ur shifts and had every member of the unit (the only ones excused were the ones in the hospital) assemble in the gymtorium, and I laid out the strategy. All this took place after the unit was at full strength, so there was not enough room for nearly a thousand people to be seated. I had prepared my remarks carefully.
“Since we have been here, those of you who have had passes to London have stayed at the WAC hotel for enlisted women. Not one of you has every complained about sharing a hotel with white WACs. Whether white WACs have complained about you is not my problem. Several weeks ago I was informed that the Red Cross was going to prepare a separate hotel for members of the 6888th because that organization feels that you would be happier in a segregated building. They described it as your own private hotel.
“Yesterday, I visited the hotel. It is very nice, but it is very segregated. What it does is to create a segregated hotel when we already have an integrated situation, which is working. Yesterday as I stood in that hotel, I promised that not one of you would spend a night in that hotel. I cannot force you to support me, short of not granting any overnight passes. I will not do that, but I do ask your support.
“We have worked out several options that we hope you will use. First, since transportation is free, you can take your pass to London by going in the morning and returning here in the evening to your regular sleeping quarters. For this, we will make adjustments in curfew hours based on the train schedule. Second, if you want to stay overnight in London, you may go to any hotel and pay your own bills. Third, if you want to stay overnight in London and you want approval of the family with whom you want to stay, you’ll get approval with a minimum of trouble.”
I am very proud of my service as CO of the 6888th, but one of the proudest times was when the women of that unit supported me in this action. I have never deluded myself that this support came out of love for me. What we had was a large group of adult Negro women who had been victimized, in one way or another, by racial bias.
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