Tom Brokaw

by The Greatest Generation

  Holm began to bang up against the ceiling when she finished another Pentagon tour and asked permission to attend the Officers College to study management. “No woman had ever been considered and when I asked the two-star general in charge he said, ‘You have no future in the Air Force. I’m not going to waste a quota on you.’ Well, I thought, that’s it for me.”

  Instead, someone higher up in the chain of command had a better idea. Holm was appointed director of the women in the Air Force and immediately set out to make some long overdue changes. She worked to overturn the Air Force policy of automatically discharging women with children, arguing that the Air Force had no right to make a judgment about a woman’s ability to raise her children by pointing out, “We do not meddle in this fashion in the private affairs of male personnel.” She made sure married WAFs (Women in the Air Force) received the same pay and housing allotments as their male counterparts.

  “It was 1965,” she says, “and the women’s movement was beginning to hit the fan. What was going on in the country was beginning to be reflected onto the women in the military. Even the smallest gain was an effort; I had two-star generals laugh at me.” For a time Holm was so discouraged that she almost retired, but then she got a new boss, Lieutenant General Robert Dixon, who rescinded the standing discharge orders for Air Force mothers.

  Holm went to Vietnam and argued with base commanders to accept women in support roles. “Some of these commanders had such a paternalistic attitude. They kept saying, ‘What if a woman gets hurt?’ But they ran out of nurses, so the first Air Force women to go over were nurses.”

  There was a breakthrough for women, however. In 1968 President Johnson signed legislation lifting the restrictions from the 1948 act integrating women into the service. For the first time women were not restricted to a numerical quota, and the lid was off on promotions. “It opened up opportunities to women that had been arbitrarily closed before, but no one took it seriously as a threat to the generals and admirals,” Holm recalled.

  Nonetheless, Holm was on a fast track to that most coveted rank, general. By 1971 she was the Air Force’s first female one-star, a brigadier general. Two years later she was director of the Air Force Personnel Council and received her second star: Major General Jeanne Holm. “It meant one of the male one-stars wasn’t going to be promoted. For the most part, I got a lot of letters congratulating me, but there were a few guys who were ruffled.”

  She was also developing a new generation of women officers for the Air Force. Wilma Vaught, now a retired brigadier general, remembers, “When I went into the service in 1957 I was told, ‘Don’t try to influence your assignments, just do as you’re told.’ What I didn’t realize was that General Holm was up there looking out for me and for several other women with good records. She made sure we got the assignments and schools that would help us move up. She was always so happy to see women promoted and succeed. She was always on the front lines, making speeches and addressing women’s concerns when other people would not.”

  When General Holm retired in 1975 she wasn’t out of uniform long before she was called to duty again. President Ford asked her to come to the White House to work on women’s issues. Her primary assignment was to prepare an initiative instructing the Justice Department to review all federal laws and policies that discriminated against women.

  After her White House assignment she became a familiar figure on Capitol Hill as a member of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. General Holm was a vigorous advocate of assigning women to combat roles, pointing out that modern wars require brains more than brawn. She posed the questions “To what extent can and should women be involved in defense?” “What are women’s rights and obligations?” “Should they be allowed to fight?”

  Holm testified on the issue of sexual harassment in the military. This from a woman who was once asked if her good looks didn’t contribute to her success in the military. She’d responded, “Did you ever see an ugly general?” In her appearance before the House Armed Services Committee in 1992 General Holm opened with a defense of the qualities of the men and women serving side by side in the military. This was after Operation Desert Storm, when so many women served with such distinction in every kind of role, including critical assignments in the combat zones.

  She then went directly after those who, in her words, “still haven’t gotten the word or just don’t want to get it.” That included a Navy admiral who’d attended the infamous Navy fliers’ Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, where sexual harassment was a crude corridor sport for many of the men in attendance. She recounted how twenty years earlier women in the service were forced to handle similar situations on their own, knowing that if they reported them, they’d be branded as troublemakers.

  Now she said, “To change people’s behavior requires strong, committed leadership at the top, conveying a message to everyone that sexual harassment or other improper conduct will not be tolerated. It requires more than publishing high-sounding phrases such as ‘zero tolerance.’ ” She went on. “It requires setting standards of conduct and enforcing those standards vigorously.”

  Mary Hallaren fully supports that judgment. She believes the problem is not with the troops, but with leadership.

  General Holm continues to monitor the issues affecting women in the military and to celebrate their achievements. Their role remains a work in progress, but Holm is persuaded that the demands of modern warfare will only enhance the place of women in the service of their country. General Holm finds that possibility as exciting and rewarding now as she did more than a half century ago, when she left her home in Oregon to become a truck driver in private’s stripes.

  Mary Hallaren, at the age of ninety-two, still follows the struggles of women in the various military establishments closely. She was pleased when the Supreme Court forced the Virginia Military Institute to accept women. Referring to VMI’s leaders, she said, “They’ll grow up after a while. They’re afraid of the competition. The women will teach them a few things. Give them a little time and there will be no question about that.”

  The Little Colonel, ninety-two years old, knows something about what women can do when given the chance. She went into the military to serve her country during a war, and when that fight was finished she began anew, this time serving her country in a new capacity, as the godmother of women in the American military.

  Marion Rivers (extreme left), wartime fashion show

  Three Women and How They Served

  MARION RIVERS NITTEL

  “A full-blown spirit of patriotism was in every heart.”

  CLAUDINE “SCOTTIE” LINGELBACH

  “I want to tell my grandchildren I was more than a pinup girl in the Great War.”

  ALISON ELY CAMPBELL

  “You had to do your part.”

  MARION RIVERS’S LIFE was centered on her family, her job, and her small city of Attleboro, Massachusetts, until the war caught up to America. Then the company for which she worked, General Plate Division of Metals and Controls Corporation, was immediately forced to convert from making rolled gold plate for jewelry to producing technical instruments for military purposes.

  She remembers the pride of all the employees when the company was awarded a large E for excellence and the Army and Navy organized a ceremony to present a banner to be flown outside the plant. “I can still see that flag,” Marion says, “snapping on the flag-pole whenever I entered and left the building.” She believes it was the last time “in the history of our country when a full-blown spirit of true patriotism was in every heart.”

  CLAUDINE “SCOTTIE” SCOTT shared that spirit of patriotism during her freshman year at the University of Kansas in the autumn of 1940. “It was a fun, exciting time,” she says, “but by the following fall, the campus had changed considerably. All of the boys were gone.” Scottie decided to enlist in the Navy’s female auxiliary, the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), and when the student newspaper, The Daily Kansan,
asked why, she recalled a cartoon of two WACs walking down the street, one saying to the other, “I want to tell my grandchildren I was more than a pinup girl in the Great War.”

  Scottie wanted to be in on the action as well. As she says, “My generation was highly patriotic. Back when I was in junior high the words ENTER TO LEARN, GO FORTH TO SERVE were carved at the entrance to the school. Those words affected me in many ways. I served.”

  She applied for a commission in the WAVES. Not only was she commissioned, she was assigned to the prestigious duty of serving on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She was an administrative assistant and a courier, delivering highly classified papers to the White House every day. “I went to a basement room—the War Room—and they’d open the door only six inches to take the report from me. It was a log of the fighting going on all over the world.”

  ALISON ELY was doing graduate work in California. She was from a prominent Oregon family, and when Pearl Harbor was attacked her parents wanted her to return to Portland. She had other ideas. She got a job at an Oakland, California, shipyard, saying now, “You had to do your part.”

  IN ATTLEBORO, just outside her company’s plant, Marion Rivers came to know the war effort through the troop trains that often stopped on a nearby siding, headed for Camp Myles Standish, a major point of embarkation for Europe.

  Claudine “Scottie” Lingelbach, wartime portrait

  Claudine and Dale Lingelbach, c. 1945

  Scott, Scottie, and Coach Roy Williams—the inscription reads, “Scottie, you’re special and always will be to me”

  When the trains stopped, the women in the plant would be summoned to a conference room to assemble baskets of fruit, candy, gum, and cigarettes for the GIs. Marion and the others would first head for the ladies’ room “to remove our silk stockings, which were as scarce as hen’s teeth—shredding those stockings would have been catastrophic.” Bare-legged, they scuttled up the cinders on the steep railroad bed. The GIs, she remembers, cheered as she and the other young women distributed the baskets, laughing and waving at the young men who were headed for the unknown. “Later we’d be back in the office, covered with coal dust,” Marion says, “but we loved it.”

  America in the forties was a nation of railroad tracks and trains. Railroad stations in small towns and cities were crowded with men in uniform, their wives and sweethearts giving a last embrace before the trains departed for a distant port and for the war in Europe or the Pacific. Later, those same trains returned with the young men, now greatly changed. They brought home the wounded and they bore the caskets of those who didn’t make it. Marion remembers later in the war, when the trains materialized again in Attleboro, this time headed in the opposite direction. These trains had no troops cheering. The young women didn’t scramble up the steep embankments with baskets of fruit and candy. The shades were drawn on the returning trains. “They didn’t stop,” Marion recalls. “These were the wounded coming home.”

  ON THE WEST COAST, Alison Ely was getting an entirely different view of the war. In the shipyard, she was assigned to the administrative offices, but that was boring and tedious. This highly educated daughter of Oregon affluence asked to go to work on the assembly line and stuck with her request even though the executive in charge grumbled, “All she’ll ever do is get married.”

  She was assigned to work on the urgent construction of huge oil tankers. Her job was keeping track of the welding process, which meant mastering a complicated set of blueprints and diagrams. Her training was cursory at best. Forced to improvise her under standing, she often took other women workers into the ladies’ room, where they labored together over the schematics until they figured out the intricate requirements.

  Alison Ely Campbell, wartime portrait

  Alison Ely Campbell, July 1998

  IN WASHINGTON, Scottie’s interest in the fighting went well beyond the messages she carried from war room to war room. Her boyfriend from the University of Kansas, Dale Lingelbach, was a second lieutenant with the Army’s 9th Infantry in England. She knew he was scheduled to be part of the Normandy invasion.

  Because she knew the plans for D-Day, when she was asked if she’d ever like to attend a White House press conference, she chose that day, June 6, 1944. She remembers it was in the Oval Office and President Roosevelt’s little Scottish terrier, Fala, was running free through the small crowd assembled there. She also remembers FDR, then in the last year of his life, “dressed in all white, with white hair and a very ruddy complexion.”

  Earlier that day FDR shared with the nation his prayer for the success of D-Day. In a radio broadcast he said, “In this poignant moment I ask you to join with me in prayer; Almighty God: our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set on a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. . . . They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph. They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest—until the victory is won.”

  It was a long and heartfelt prayer and it is difficult in this day of instant communication from the battlefield to appreciate fully the absence of information about just what was happening there on the beaches of Normandy. Perhaps it was just as well, for D-Day was chaos, a bloody hell. The anxieties of those at home were high enough just listening to the somber and candid prayer of the president and the stream of news bulletins on the radio.

  My mother remembers going to a hairdresser that morning and finding the young woman distraught, near collapse in tears. Her fiancé, she explained, was a paratrooper and she was sure he was taking part in the invasion. In fact, he was, and he survived. Several weeks later he sent her his parachute and told her to have a wedding dress made from it.

  About the same time, Scottie was notified that her boyfriend, Dale, had been seriously wounded by German artillery as his unit pushed across Europe. When he was shipped home, they were married in September 1945, at the Richmond, Virginia, hospital where he spent two years recovering from his wounds. Scottie had loved her wartime assignment -, but she wanted to be married and raise a family.

  IN MASSACHUSETTS, Marion Rivers and her friends spent long hours at the factory and then joined the rest of Attleboro in providing a home away from home for the troops from nearby Camp Myles Standish. They invited them to their homes for holidays or a Sunday meal; occasionally there would be an ice skating party on a local pond. “Once a week several buses filled with young women and our ever present chaperones would take us to wonderful dances on the base. Big-name bands on their way overseas to entertain the troops would play,” Marion remembers.

  On one occasion a familiar young man insisted on dancing with Marion, all the while saying, “Betcha don’t know who I am.” Of course she did. It was Mickey Rooney.

  Other memories linger in a darker corner. Once at a dance the young women were asked how many could type. Marion volunteered. “We were taken to the camp hospital where all the beds and stretchers were filled with the wounded. They were being shipped to hospitals near their homes and we rolled typewriters from bed to bed, taking information off dog tags, talking to the men, placing phone calls for them. I have never forgotten the sight of so many broken bodies. I wondered how many of them had been on those trains going off to war when we ran up the railroad banks with our baskets of fruit and candy. That evening turned into twenty-four hours, and I think I remember every moment.”

  ALISON ELY married midway through the war and left the shipyard to follow her husband, John W. Campbell, to training camps before he shipped out for the Pacific. It was the beginning of a life of learning to fend for herself, including getting to the hospital on her own when their baby was due, with no other family around.

  WHEN SCOTTIE’S HUSBAND, Dale, was released from the hospital,
they moved to Schenectady, New York, where he had a job with General Electric. Before long they decided they wanted to return to the Midwest. They moved to Carthage, Missouri, a small, quiet town, and he went to work for the Smith Brothers company, the famous cough drop concern.

  It was a pleasant, prosperous life. They had two children: a girl, Cynthia, and a son, Randy. Dale was promoted to vice president. The future looked bright, but at the age of forty-five, Scottie’s carefully ordered world came apart. Dale contracted melanoma and died. Scottie faced a world not very friendly to single women.

  She had difficulty obtaining credit after Dale died simply because she was a widow. Sears gave her a hard time. So did a pharmacy where she tried to open a charge account. She was stunned and angry. She learned not to tell businesses of her marital status. “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. You can give up or decide to do something with your life. I had a degree in business administration but I knew I would never rise higher than secretary, so I thought, Where can a woman make the most money?”

  This was 1968. Job opportunities for women had yet to catch up with the rising tide of feminism. Like many women of her generation, Scottie is strong and self-reliant but a little reluctant to be closely identified with the women’s movement. She speaks for many in her age group when she says, “I’m not a radical person because I believe that has done more to turn people off.” At the same time she’s quick to add, “But I’ve always believed in equal access to jobs.” Still, she was practical enough to realize that her choices were limited to what were considered to be women’s jobs in a community the size of Carthage.