The rest of December seventh has been described by too many in too much detail for me to reiterate. I remained on the island until three months later when I returned by convoy to the United States. None of the pilots wanted to leave but there was no civilian flying in the islands after the attack. And each of us had some individual score to settle with the Japs who brought murder and destruction to our islands.
When I returned, the only way I could fly at all was to instruct Civilian Pilot Training programs. Weeks passed. Then, out of the blue, came a telegram from the War Department announcing the organization of the WAFS (Women’s Auxiliary Flying Squadron) and the order to report within twenty-four hours if interested. I left at once.
Mrs. Nancy Love was appointed Senior Squadron Leader of the WAFS by the Secretary of War. No better choice could have been made. First and most important she is a good pilot, has tremendous enthusiasm and belief in women pilots and did a wonderful job in helping us to be accepted on an equal status with men.
Because there were and are so many disbelievers in women pilots, especially their place in the army, officials wanted the best possible qualifications to go with the first experimental group. All of us realized what a spot we were on. We had to deliver the goods or else. Or else there wouldn’t ever be another chance for women pilots in any part of the service.
We have no hopes of replacing men pilots. But we can each release a man to combat, to faster ships, to overseas work. Delivering a trainer to Texas may be as important as delivering a bomber to Africa if you take the long view. We are beginning to prove that women can be trusted to deliver airplanes safely and in the doing serve the country which is our country too.
I have yet to have a feeling which approaches in satisfaction that of having signed, sealed and delivered an airplane for the United States Army. The attitude that most non-flyers have about pilots is distressing and often acutely embarrassing. They chatter about the glamour of flying. Well, any pilot can tell you how glamorous it is. We get up in the cold dark in order to get to the airport by daylight. We wear heavy cumbersome flying clothes and a thirty-pound parachute. You are either cold or hot. If you are female your lipstick wears off and your hair gets straighter and straighter. You look forward all afternoon to the bath you will have and the steak. Well, we get the bath but seldom the steak. Sometimes we are too tired to eat and fall wearily into bed.
None of us can put into words why we fly. It is something different for each of us. I can’t say exactly why I fly but I know why as I’ve never known anything in my life.
I knew it when I saw my plane silhouetted against the clouds framed by a circular rainbow. I knew it when I flew up into the extinct volcano Haleakala on the island of Maui and saw the gray-green pineapple fields slope down to the cloud-dappled blueness of the Pacific. But I know it otherwise than in beauty. I know it in dignity and self-sufficiency and in the pride of skill. I know it in the satisfaction of usefulness.
For all the girls in the WAFS, I think the most concrete moment of happiness came at our first review. Suddenly and for the first time we felt a part of something larger. Because of our uniforms which we had earned, we were marching with the men, marching with all the freedom-loving people in the world.
And then while we were standing at attention a bomber took off followed by four fighters. We knew the bomber was headed across the ocean and that the fighters were going to escort it part way. As they circled over us I could hardly see them for the tears in my eyes. It was striking symbolism and I think all of us felt it. As long as our planes fly overhead the skies of America are free and that’s what all of us everywhere are fighting for. And that we, in a very small way, are being allowed to help keep that sky free is the most beautiful thing I have ever known.
I, for one, am profoundly grateful that my one talent, my only knowledge, flying, happens to be of use to my country when it is needed. That’s all the luck I ever hope to have.
Mary C. Lyne
(1916–2001)
U.S. Coast Guard Women’s Reserve
Mary Catherine Lyne of Shenandoah Junction, West Virginia, graduated from Madison College (later James Madison University) in 1940. Although she had studied high school education, she wrote for and edited the award-winning school newspaper The Breeze under the pseudonym “Mike Lyne,” worked on the “Schoolma’am” yearbook, and participated in college literary societies. She was working as an editorial assistant at a trade organization when the United States entered the war; in 1943 she joined the first class of SPAR officers and served in a New York City public information unit responsible for coverage of the Coast Guard in national magazines. She was discharged in 1947 as a lieutenant. After the war she wrote for the U.S. Public Health Service and then the State Department, where she pursued a twenty-year career as a newswriter in the Near Eastern, South Asian, and African branches of the U.S. Information Agency. She retired as the chief of the Publication Section of the International Press Service Africa Branch. A fifty-year member of the National Press Club in Washington DC, she co-authored several books. The excerpt below is taken from Three Years before the Mast: The Story of the U.S. Coast Guard SPARS, which she co-authored with fellow lieutenant Kay Arthur.
Battle of the Sexes
Men, all men, regarded as one great big awkward group, protested longly and loudly that they didn’t care for “women in uniform.” We knew that, and didn’t expect them to care for us collectively. What man cares for women as a group anyway? Individual men cared for individual women in uniform, and that was all that mattered to us.
Men’s prejudice often took the form of what in civilian life would be called slander. Attacks upon the morals of SPARs were common, and where there was little basis in fact for the charges, tales were invented and improved upon in the telling. Others, less aggravated and more literate cases, blew off steam by drafting letters to magazines and newspapers, secure in their knowledge that the general public, all too suspicious of any innovation, would applaud. Either we had to grin and bear it or fall into the trap of becoming embittered ourselves.
The Men
And how did the men take this infiltration of women? The attitude toward us ranged from enthusiastic reception through amused condescension to open hostility.
We felt that one important factor in determining a man’s attitude was his own desire for sea duty. If he were eligible and wanted to shove off, he was not inclined to frown with disfavor upon his deliverer, even if she appeared in SPAR clothing. On the other hand, it was natural that the swivel-chair commando should rail against the presence of the little lady who had come to release him for the briny deep. Fortunately the proportion of the latter was low compared with the Coast Guard as a whole.
Men with axes to grind because of personal disappointments seldom took a shine to us either. Perhaps the greatest reason for resentment in this category involved ratings and rank. If they had not been advanced as rapidly as they thought they should have been, seeing a SPAR go ahead of them was adding insult to injury, and they refused to believe that they were not being discriminated against. In some cases this feeling may have been justified; in others, it was pure bilge.
There was many a man whose ego was punctured when he found his place could be so easily taken by a woman. There was many a man who believed that women should not venture beyond the rose-covered door of the oven. And there were men who, resplendent with ribbons and beyond reproach, were pointed out to us as “a man who doesn’t like SPARs.” No reason. These were the really fascinating individuals who stalked in solitary splendor and made the same impression upon us as a virile civilian bachelor who “doesn’t like women.”
Not all the objections to us were personal or petty. Some were purely objective. Many men sincerely failed to see the necessity for SPARs in the Service; others felt the expense was unjustifiable, and so on. There was nothing surprising in any of the objections. Any woman who tries to become part of a man’s world even in a time of a great national emergency is automatica
lly placing herself at the beginning of an obstacle course.
Often the fault was our own. Just as in civilian organizations, friction between men and women working together in the military can be caused by minor irritants, easily avoided.
A little tact will go a long way with a man. Wise indeed was the SPAR officer, married to a male chief who answered the barbed inquiry of an acquaintance: “Does he have to salute you in the office?” with “Oh yes, indeed. But when he gets me home, he beats me.” Some SPARs even wore their raincoats when out walking with gentlemen of lower rank “so the seniority wouldn’t show.”
On the whole, if we did our part and proved equal to the job, the men, both regulars and reserves, were willing to give us our due. And we, in turn, gave our heartfelt thanks to those men—no small group—who, from the beginning, backed us with their unqualified support, taught us the ropes, encouraged us, worked with us harmoniously and made us feel that we belonged and were doing a job, even as they. We will always remember them with the deepest appreciation.
6
Unconventional Operations, Espionage, and the Cold War
“We Had Observed So Much”
Just hours after Claus von Stauffenberg and some German military officers tried to assassinate Hitler in July 1944, U.S. Army Pvt. Barbara Lauwers rode across the Italian countryside in a Jeep. The next day, prim and correct in her WAC uniform, she introduced herself in fluent German to eighteen carefully screened prisoners of war in the camp at Aversa. From among those dissidents, deserters, impressed laborers, and conscientious objectors, she chose sixteen men who met her exacting standards. Her colleagues issued American army coveralls to the men and loaded them in a truck for transport to a two-story, tile-roofed villa near Rome. There, Lauwers created false identities and cover stories for the men that closely matched their true backgrounds. For the next four days she trained them on their new mission.
Operatives issued the men forged identity papers and passes, German uniforms and field gear, pistols, rifles with forty rounds of ammunition each, compasses, quality watches, thousands of Italian lira of mixed denominations, Italian cigarettes for barter— and thousands of propaganda leaflets printed with an “official” denunciation of Hitler’s policy of destroying the German army for the sake of the Nazi party. Then the men followed OSS officers across the German lines in two waves: the first at midnight, the second at dawn. They crossed the Arno River, made their way three miles into German-held territory, and began nailing the leaflets on trees and scattering them in buildings, on vehicles, and in the streets. All sixteen returned safely two days later, carrying vital intelligence about German defensive positions and troop movements. Operation Sauerkraut—intended to undermine the morale of the German army by circulating rumors, fake orders, and leaflets about growing unrest among German military leaders—was a success.
“Zuzka” Lauwer, who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1941, spoke five languages (English, German, Czech, Slovak, and French) fluently and held a doctorate in law from Masaryk University in Brno. Her husband joined the Army after Pearl Harbor; Lauwer became an American citizen on June 1, 1943, and joined the WAC a few hours later. She and two other women singled out in basic training were ordered to the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a new unconventional warfare organization subordinate to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Lauwer became the only woman in the Rome branch of the OSS’s Morale Operations Division.
Early in 1945, Lauwer learned that several hundred Czech and Slovak soldiers impressed into the German army to do menial service tasks were serving at the Italian front. She designed a morale operation targeting her former countrymen. She created dual-language leaflets in Czech and Slovak urging the soldiers to desert, cross over to the Allies, and fight to reclaim their homeland from the Nazis. OSS infiltrators crossed the front lines to distribute her leaflets, and the BBC broadcast the message along the Italian front. On the morning of April 29, 1945, more than six hundred Czech and Slovak soldiers marched across to the Allied side while their band played the Czechoslovak national anthem. They carried Lauwer’s leaflets in their pockets.
Lauwer received a promotion to corporal and a Bronze Star for her work.
In the later years of the Second World War, the WAC became a recruiting ground for the OSS, the forerunner of both the modern Central Intelligence Agency and Special Operations Command (SOCOM). OSS counted around 4,500 women among its thirteen thousand employees. OSS gave some civilian employees “assimilated rank”—military precedence and circumscribed command authority. Nine hundred of these women deployed overseas during the war, most in clerical roles. Those with unique language or other required skills served in the Secret Intelligence (espionage), Morale Operations (psychological warfare), or X-2 (counterintelligence) divisions. OSS trained a very small number, probably fewer than forty, to parachute behind enemy lines, coordinate with local partisans, sabotage infrastructure and factories, and arrange for the escape of downed pilots.
The most famous of these, civilian Virginia Hall, came to the OSS after serving early in the war with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in France. Hall had lost the lower part of her left leg in a prewar shooting accident, and she acquired a wooden leg she called “Cuthbert” that left her with a permanent limping gait. Early in the war, while America remained neutral, Hall worked for SOE undercover as a New York Post reporter. But when German troops entered Vichy France in November 1941, she became an enemy alien. Known to German intelligence only as the “Limping Lady,” she fell under suspicion and was forced to escape to Spain over the Pyrenees Mountains on foot in severe winter weather. When her amputation site became painful, she sent a message to SOE Headquarters: “Cuthbert is giving me trouble but I can cope.” A colleague unaware of “Cuthbert’s” identity replied: “If Cuthbert is giving you trouble, have him eliminated.”
Hall continued to work for SOE in Madrid, finding safe houses on the Allied escape routes and serving as a courier for SOE. But she wanted to return to France, and in November 1943 she transferred to the OSS.
Hall reentered France by boat prior to D-Day and worked as a courier and radio operator—the most dangerous position on an infiltration team, requiring constant relocation so that German radio detection equipment would not find her and her suitcase-sized radio. In a one-month period after D-Day, she transmitted thirty-seven intelligence messages to London describing German troop movements. With the help of a three-man “Jedburgh” infiltration team, Hall organized, armed, and trained three battalions of Forces Françaises d’Intérieur (FFI) to conduct guerrilla warfare and sabotage operations to slow the German retreat. Her teams destroyed four bridges, derailed freight trains carrying supplies to the German army, severed an important rail line in several places, downed telephone lines, captured nineteen members of the pro-German militia, killed 150 Germans, and took 500 more prisoner.
The British government awarded Hall the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for her service; President Truman awarded her the Distinguished Service Cross, second only to the Medal of Honor. She declined to have the president present it, saying that she was “still operational and most anxious to get busy.”
President Truman disestablished the OSS in October of 1945, but rising Soviet influence in Eastern Europe and Soviet intelligence-gathering activities convinced him of the need for continued intelligence operations. OSS’s functions were divided between the military departments and the Central Intelligence Group (later the Central Intelligence Agency) in 1946. Hall remained in the CIA at a headquarters desk job for nine more years, retiring as a GS-14. Despite her record and desire to continue in clandestine operations, the CIA failed to use her expertise. Many other women of the OSS also continued to work in one of the postwar intelligence activities.
Women in the armed forces were no longer desired for clandestine operations, and institutional memory of the women of OSS faded. Over the course of the Cold War, however, thousands of women in uniform fil
led military intelligence billets. They translated documents, managed the flow of classified material, analyzed reports, processed sensitive signals, broke codes, studied the profiles of leaders in Eastern Europe and China, interpreted intelligence photography and video, trained pilots to recognize enemy assets, and monitored Soviet submarines in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Many of their stories remain classified and some will never be told. A few are presented here.
Stephanie Czech Rader
(1915–2016)
Women’s Army Corps/Office of Special Services
Stephanie Czech, the daughter of Polish immigrants and a Cornell University graduate with a degree in chemistry, was one of the first eighty women to enter the Women’s Army Corps in 1943. After she received her commission, OSS recruited her because of her proficiency in Polish.
Czech began clandestine work in October 1945 under cover as an embassy secretary. She traveled throughout Poland to collect information on Soviet troop movements and the activities of the Soviet intelligence services, and to build an espionage network that would play a significant role in subsequent decades of the Cold War. The American naval attaché in Warsaw had disappeared without a trace in southern Poland where Czech also operated; he was never found. Czech, operating in civilian clothing, could expect a similar fate if detained by the Soviet forces occupying the country.
The chief of station in Berlin asked Czech to carry top-secret documents to the embassy in Warsaw even though a superior in Paris had negligently compromised her cover.
Returning to Warsaw on January 15, 1946, she saw Soviet security agents at the German-Polish border checkpoint. She quickly handed the classified material to a man walking next to her—someone she knew would be unlikely to raise suspicion—and told him to whom it should be delivered in Warsaw. When she reached the checkpoint, the Soviets detained her briefly. The classified material arrived safely at the embassy.
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