It's My Country Too

by Jerri Bell, Tracy Crow

  Off watch, I climbed to the flying bridge and watched a tumble of seagulls trailing nets four miles off our port beam. The lookout stepped back from the Big Eyes and whistled, “Wow. Commie.” In the stiff wind, my ponytail lashed my face as I took a turn magnifying the red hull, yellow sickle and hammer, and Cyrillic letters announcing a Kamchatka Peninsula homeport. The chill down my spine came from more than blown sea spray.

  • • •

  Twenty-first-century ports possess lucrative terrorist targets: power plants, storage tanks brimming with oil, chlorine, and poisons jokingly called methyl-ethyl-death. Thru-port vessels, trains, and trucks drive the global economy. Charleston was also an outload port from which tons of military materiel departed 24/7, bound for U.S. operations in the Middle East.

  Could the chicken ship be collecting information about the outloads? I stowed my camera and joined the boarding teams in the shadow cast by the Russian ship’s superstructure. My team conducted crew interviews, inspected ships’ charts and logs, and interviewed the vessel’s master.

  He was older than I and spoke fluent English. I guessed he once trained as a Soviet naval officer. I questioned him closely. Why were they hauling a low-value commodity like chickens? He shrugged. Russia’s economy, fisheries collapse, inefficient managers in St. Petersburg. He did not know. I asked about the ship’s antenna field. He shrugged again. I asked to see the radio room. Reluctantly he unlocked it then stood aside with palpable discomfort as I surveyed machines older than Mellon’s 1980 Navy hand-me-downs. The equipment was ancient, analog, and dustily disused.

  Back on the bridge, spring sun poured through the windows. He watched me with heavily-lidded, marine-blue eyes. I looked at him more closely. He was neither tall nor short, stout nor thin, enthusiastic or indifferent. He seemed resigned. I felt in company with someone I once knew but could no longer place. I asked if he had sailed in the Bering. “Of course.” He almost smiled. “Ship is from Kamchatka.” I nodded, thanked him, and went ashore.

  The wind had picked up. A passing gray-hull threw a broad, deep wake from its heavy load of Humvees, assault helicopters, and machine guns. The Russian caught its wake first and began to rock. A moment later Dallas began to move. I framed the scene mentally: the two old girls falling in step. And the gray-hull bound for Kuwait and its cargo headed beyond, to Afghanistan.

  7

  Women’s Integration and the Korean War

  “I Had To Make the Girls Go Off Duty”

  In the early morning hours of September 26, 1950, 1st Lt. Jonita Bonham awoke from a three-hour catnap at Tachikawa Air Force Base, west of Tokyo. She and her teammates had just completed two hundred and forty-five nearly consecutive hours aloft, and had evacuated more than six hundred wounded American soldiers from Korea back to hospitals in Japan in a C-54 cargo plane converted into an airborne emergency room. Bonham, at twenty-eight, had served in World War II and in the Philippines and Japan during the postwar occupation. Although she had accepted a discharge, when the Korean War erupted she volunteered for service as a flight nurse in the Air Force.

  Bonham drank two cups of coffee and joined the other members of her medical team, Capt. Vera Brown and a male corpsman, for a predawn flight. Their C-54 would carry fifty replacement troops to Kimpo and return with more wounded. The pilot suggested that Bonham and Brown get additional sleep, but the women chatted through takeoff into a stormy sky. The plane turned east over the Sea of Japan.

  Half a mile from shore, the engine stalled. The C-54 plummeted to the ocean. The impact broke the plane into three parts. It began to sink.

  Bonham regained consciousness underwater, in total darkness, still inside the plane’s fuselage. She fought her way to the surface and kicked clear of the sinking aircraft. Around her, men battled wind and waves to stay afloat. Those who had drowned or died on impact floated around them. Bonham grabbed a floating barracks bag as it drifted by.

  In the darkness a man’s voice called, “There’s a life raft here! How do you inflate it?”

  Bonham called back, “Yank it out of the case and it will inflate itself!” Moments later, she saw the raft and swam to it. She grabbed the trailing rope with one hand and the nearest soldier with the other. She guided the soldier to the rope. Then she reached for another man. Saw a second raft. Grabbed another soldier. Seventeen men climbed into the raft; Bonham remained in the cold water until every survivor she could see had entered one of the two rafts. Only then did she allow the men to pull her aboard.

  The pilot and copilot were dead. Captain Brown, the senior flight nurse, was missing. Knowing that she was responsible for the safety of the survivors, Bonham took charge. She ignored a broken left wrist and pain that suggested other serious injuries. She directed the soldiers to lash the two rafts together. Some of the men panicked and wanted to try to swim ashore. She reminded them of the danger from sharks and the likelihood of being swept out to sea by the storm, and then ordered them to remain in the rafts until help arrived.

  Controllers at Tachikawa did not realize that the C-54 had gone down. Several other aircraft flew overhead but did not see the two rafts due to poor visibility. Japanese fishing vessels sighted the rafts after daybreak. Bonham managed to remain conscious while the men attached the rafts to a fishing boat, which towed them safely to shore.

  Bonham spent nine months in the hospital recovering from a broken right shoulder, broken left wrist, broken cheekbone, and a skull fracture that required three surgeries. The Air Force awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross, its second highest decoration for valor.

  Initial plans for the women’s components of all the armed forces created in the Second World War had called for the discharge of all women six months after the completion of hostilities. By the middle of 1946, most women who had served in the WAC, WAVES, Marine Corps Women’s Reserve, and SPARs had demobilized. But facing the expansion of Soviet influence in the postwar period, the Navy requested in January 1946 that Congress authorize the establishment of a women’s component. The Army did the same a month later. Supporters included Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, Chief of Naval Operations Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Admiral Nimitz stated that “the Navy’s request for the retention of women is not made as a tribute to their past performance. We have learned that women can contribute to a more efficient navy. Therefore, we would be remiss if we did not make every effort to utilize their abilities.” Eisenhower argued that “the women of America must share the responsibility for the security of this country in a future emergency as the women of England did in World War II.” MacArthur called women his “best soldiers.” They, and the directors of the women’s components, felt that retention of women would reduce the need for a peacetime draft and create a corps of trained personnel who could be mobilized rapidly in the event of a conflict. But others opposed creation of a permanent women’s component. One congressman claimed that legislators received daily complaints from enlisted men who didn’t want to take orders from women; some military leaders and congressmen debated how best to keep women from serving in combat.

  Representatives Edith Nourse Rogers and Margaret Chase Smith, working independently to avoid the perception that they aimed to create a so-called women’s bloc in Congress, first sponsored legislation to authorize permanent commissioned status for military nurses in 1946. Congress failed to act on Rogers’s bill prior to adjourning. Representative Smith revived the bill the following year, and President Truman signed the Army-Navy Nurses’ Act on April 16, 1947.

  Legislation to create permanent women’s components in the line faced greater opposition. Thanks to Rep. Margaret Chase Smith’s contacts in the armed forces and her understanding of the intricacies of legislative process and committee work—in events described below—President Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act on July 12, 1948.

  Although both Rogers and Smith believed that women should receive equal rank, authority, pay, and
benefits for doing the same jobs as men, they never intended the two laws to integrate women fully into all areas of the armed forces or to advance abstract ideas of women’s rights. They aimed rather to reflect and codify the terms of women’s service established in practice in the Second World War, and to ensure America’s ability to mobilize women rapidly in a future national emergency. The laws also reflected the contemporary understanding of women’s abilities and roles in society. Although the Women’s Armed Service Integration Act granted permanent military status to all women, regular and reserve, Congress set a cap on women’s participation at 2 percent of the regular component of each service. The highest rank a woman could hold was colonel (Navy captain); only one woman, the women’s component director, could hold the rank—temporarily, for a maximum of four years. Upon completion of her term as director, a woman either resigned her commission or reverted to the paygrade of O-5. Except in the newly formed Air Force, each service maintained separate promotion lists for men and women. These provisions prevented women from becoming top-level military decision makers and limited their influence on policy to some, but not all, aspects of women’s matters.

  The law set the minimum enlistment age for women at eighteen, with parental consent required before age twenty-one. Men could enlist with parental consent at seventeen and independently at eighteen. A woman could claim a husband and children as dependents only if she could prove that she contributed at least half of the family income, while a man automatically received dependent benefits for wives and children even if their wives were employed outside the home. The law explicitly prohibited women from assignment to naval vessels other than transports and hospital ships, and from flying aircraft engaged in combat missions. Finally, the law granted the service secretaries the authority to prescribe women’s duties and occupations, and to terminate their service “under circumstances and in accordance with regulations proscribed by the President.” This provision permitted the services to expel women who became pregnant or who acquired minor children through adoption or marriage.

  These restrictions, and the prevailing expectation that women should return to domestic life after the war so that returning servicemen could find work in the civilian sector, kept the number of women serving in the armed forces low. When the North Korean army crossed the Thirty-Eighth Parallel and invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, twenty-two thousand women (about 1 percent of the total military force and only about half the authorized number) were on active duty. Fifteen thousand of those serving were in the health professions and seven thousand in line assignments.

  Only one Army nurse, Capt. Viola McConnell, was stationed in Korea. She organized and supervised the evacuation of 643 American dependents and foreigners who were ill or infirm on the Norwegian ship Rheinholt, which had only twelve berths available. Four evacuees were women in advanced stages of pregnancy; one had a skull fracture; and 277 evacuees were children under a year old—several of them seriously ill. Only one of the seven men evacuated assisted McConnell; the other six were elderly, ill, intoxicated, or unwilling to help. Seven civilian nurses and a civilian missionary physician worked with McDonnell until the ship arrived in Japan two days later; McConnell immediately requested to return to Korea. The Army awarded her the Bronze Star with oak leaf cluster for her wartime service.

  Although 46,000 women had served by the war’s end in 1952, only some 650 nurses saw service in Korea. WACs, WAVES, WAF, and women Marines remained stateside because of concerns for their safety until late in the war, when a few were assigned to billets in Japan and elsewhere in the Pacific. A handful served in support billets in Europe but did not participate directly in the war effort.

  Korea rapidly became the “forgotten war.” Congress never issued a formal declaration of war; most who fought overseas reintegrated into society as quickly as possible and seldom talked about their wartime experiences. The women who served during the Korean War era knew that many in America perceived them as girls who were “not nice,” or they felt that their service had not been significant. None published memoirs. The National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, holds a few unpublished recollections. Nurse Jean Kirnak became a journalist and wrote some short articles about her service experiences. A few women from the other service components contributed oral histories to various archives or gave interviews about their wartime service.

  Senator Margaret Chase Smith

  (1897–1995)

  U.S. Air Force

  Margaret Chase entered politics in Maine in her late teens. She married a much older Republican newspaper owner and politician, Clyde Smith, who eventually was elected to the House of Representatives. Upon his death, she took his seat and was reelected to represent Maine numerous times. She developed close ties with the Navy through Maine’s shipbuilding industry, served on the House Naval Affairs Committee, and inspected Navy facilities during the boom years of World War II on a subcommittee investigating vice (specifically prostitution) around naval bases.

  Smith cosponsored the WAAC bill with Edith Nourse Rogers in 1942–43. Late in 1944, a tour of Pacific theater bases convinced her that Navy nurses needed regular permanent status. In 1947 she introduced legislation that led to the Army-Navy Nurse Act.

  In May 1946, the House Naval Affairs Committee met to consider a permanent women’s component for the Navy. Naval Affairs chairman Carl Vinson (R-Georgia) felt that women needed only a permanent women’s reserve, subject to unlimited active duty at the discretion of the secretary of the Navy. Smith amended the proposed legislation to create a permanent women’s component, but Vinson refused to call a vote on the bill and the Seventy-Ninth Congress adjourned without resolving the issue.

  The Senate heard testimony on creation of a permanent women’s component for the armed forces in summer 1947. Senior military leadership enthusiastically supported the proposal. The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act reported out of committee on July 16, 1947. It passed the full Senate on a voice vote a week later. However, House Armed Services Committee Chair W. G. Andrews (R-New York) and Representative Vinson refused to consider the bill in the House for six months.

  Smith learned that in off-record executive sessions, unnamed members of the Navy Department and Andrews had reached an agreement to jettison the bill. The subcommittee once again amended the bill so that women would serve as reserves subject to indefinite recall to active duty. Andrews put the amended bill on the Consent Calendar, implying falsely that it had been uncontroversial and unanimously approved. Smith objected. This forced the bill onto the House floor for lengthy and heated debate. The excerpt below is taken from her testimony to members of the House.

  From “Women in Armed Forces—Regular Versus Reserve: Extension of Remarks of Hon. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine in the House of Representatives, Tuesday, April 6, 1948”

  Mrs. Smith of Maine. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Shaper] has charged me with the responsibility of killing S. 1641 [the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act].

  If a bill as important as this is to be considered only on the Consent Calendar, then I unhesitatingly accept that responsibility.

  In the first place, I would call the attention of the House to page 48 of the Consent Calendar . . . wherein it describes S. 1641 as “An act to establish the Women’s Army Corps in the Regular Navy and Marine Corps and the Naval and Marine Corps Reserve and for other purposes.”

  The Members of the House will note that the words “Regular Army” and “Regular Navy” are predominant in the description of the bill. This is grossly misleading as this bill in the form it was reported out by the Committee on Armed Services in no respect establishes the Women’s Corps in either the Regular Army or the Regular Navy. Make no mistake about it, it is a temporary one-year Reserve bill.

  The Senate voted to give women Regular status as well as Reserve Status in passing S. 1641.

  The House Armed Services Committee refused to give Regular status.

  Th
e House bill definitely dodges the issue. The issue is simple—either the armed services have a permanent need of women officers and enlisted women or they do not. If they do, then the women must be given a permanent status. The only possible permanent status is that of Regular status—not Reserve status, which at most is temporary. There is no such thing as a service career for a Reservist.

  This issue was squarely met by the Senate, which granted the request of the armed services to give women Regular, as well as Reserve, status in the armed services—and rejected the attempts to deny women Regular status.

  This legislation does not give women any security in their military service because it discriminates against women, and it will result only in not getting women of desirable caliber for the armed services.

  I am convinced that this is extremely unwise legislation. I am further convinced that it is better to have no legislation at all than to have legislation of this type. I am, therefore, unalterably opposed to it and I objected.

  I would point out in answer to the charge . . . that I have killed the bill, that there is nothing to prevent the Committee from seeking a rule on the bill so that the House can fully discuss the bill—and so that amendments to the bill may be offered. Therefore the responsibility is clearly that of the House Armed Services Committee—for it is up to the Committee to request a rule— and that means specifically the chairman of the subcommittee, the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Shafer] and the chairman of the full committee, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Andrews].

  When there is such a radical difference between the Senate version and the House version, it is extremely surprising that an attempt would be made to get this legislation railroaded through on the Consent Calendar.