World War II began with the German invasion of Poland in 1938; in December 1941 after the bombing of the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, the United States would declare war and enter as an ally to Britain and France beginning with fighting in the Pacific. Men were called to fight, and women wanted to join the fray as well, and would enlist in various capacities. The most famous military organization for women to join was the WAAC, the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. As an auxiliary unit, the WAAC served in a variety of positions in order to free up the men for combat; the WAACs served as telephone operators, secretaries clerks, typists, stenographers, cooks, and more . In 1943, according to Elizabeth M. Collins of Soldiers, the magazine of the U.S. Army, the WAAC became the WAC, the Women's Army Corps, and allowed women to become soldiers. The WAAC and the WAC played huge roles in the military, as they allowed women, white and black, to join the military and serve in various capacities. However, also according to Collins, the WACs were not afforded the same benefits as regular soldiers—if they were injured, they would not be given the same care as a soldier; and if they were captured they would not be given the same rights and protections as a captured soldier . In One Woman's Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC, by Charity Adams Earley, she wrote about her own experience in the WAAC and then in the WAC in the 1940s. She would become the first African-American commanding officer of a battalion (the 6888th) and the first African-American commanding officer of the WAAC. Although autobiographical, it was important to include this book in the historiography of WWII because it shows the human experience of the war; it also highlights some of what the African-American WAAC recruits experienced and had to deal with in regards to racism and discrimination in the military. Women in the military had to endure sex discrimination as well, as Collins discussed in her article in regards to women being treated differently than the male soldiers if they were injured or captured. These stories help to advance the historiography of women's roles and experiences in World War II.
In her monograph To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race, Brenda L. Moore tells about the African-American women who served in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) during World War II. Specifically, this monograph informs readers about the historic 6888th, which was the first African-American WAC to serve overseas. There were racial issues during the WWII era in the United States, and the U.S. government was pressured by the NAACP and other groups to deploy African-American women overseas to the European theater in 1945 along with their white counterparts; segregation was still prevalent in the U.S. military, so an all-black WAC regiment was created. The women of the 6888th served for many reasons, including patriotism and to challenge the system of racism they found themselves in; like other women who have served in the military in the past, sometimes disguised as men and sometimes not, other reasons for joining the WAAC and WAC included following a husband, brother, or father to war . The women of the 6888th served as postal directories in Birmingham, England, sorting backlogged and current mail to make sure the letters and packages arrived to where they needed to go. This was an important role to fulfill, as the letters and packages were addresses to soldiers, governmental officials, the Red Cross, and others; along with this fact, some of the generals realized the low morale of the troops who were not receiving letters from home due to this backlog and no one to process the mail. It was believed that it would six months or more for the backlogged mail to be sorted and sent where it was intended to go, but the 6888th would accomplish this feat in only three months, clearing over 65,000 pieces of mail every eight-hour shift . Many women in the WAAC and WAC enlisted to better themselves, particularly the women of the 6888th. Brenda L. Moore states that upon being sent back to the United States after the 6888th was no longer needed in Europe that many of the women remained in the active armed services; others immediately became a part of civilian life again; and everyone believed that their service in WWII would lead to such opportunities as education, full-time employment, and health case as a result of defending the U.S. Constitution . The WAC as a whole would be disbanded in 1978 when women in the U.S. Army would be integrated with men in all but the combat positions .
The works of Charity Adams Earley, Brenda L. Moore, Judith A. Bellafaire, and others help to establish the importance of the WAAC/WAC and the 6888th in American history, and even in world history. Women have had a major impact of World War II, and the works of these women highlight the importance of women in the military at a time when it was sorely needed. Each of these works contributes to the historiography of women's history, gender history, and military history by highlighting the stories of people who are often left behind in the catacombs of the past.
Women in the U.S. military in World War II had more options than becoming a WAAC or WAC, women could also become WASPs. In The U.S. WASP: The Trailblazing Women Pilots of World War II by Lisa M. Bolt Simons, Simons writes about the women pilots during World War II. These women flew military aircrafts in non-combat situations, which freed up male pilots for military service. Although the purpose they served was for a non-combat role, these women played an important role in the ferrying of aircrafts and cargo from base to base, and their job could be dangerous nonetheless. The Women's Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) was founded to free up more men for combat positions, similar to the founding of the WAAC and later the WAC, as well as notable positions in the military. The WASPs ferried airplanes from base to base, dropping off packages and mail, and other tasks that required the use of flight for time constraints. The U.S. military realized that there were not enough men to become pilots as was needed, but two women pilots, named Jackie Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love, knew that women were capable of flying planes just as well as men were and founded the WASPs . In 1941, Jackie Cochran went to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to volunteer her services and to request that female pilots serve in the war effort if the U.S. was to enter the war; Roosevelt loved the idea, but the U.S. military was not ready for it; Cochran also went to General Henry Arnold twice, who told her to ferry planes in Britain, she took his advice and brought 25 women with her . As a result of this small corps of pilots, women pilots would be welcomed into the military; serving in various non-combat air force roles. The WASPs were not treated the same as male military pilots were—there were no benefits of education or employment, and if they were killed while ferrying ships in the U.S. or in Europe, they had to pay to have their bodies returned home which was something the men did not have to do. Simon's work highlights the important role these women played in World War II, and it add to the historiography of women's history and military history because these women were forgotten in history and history needs to know the story of these brave women.
Women had had a hand in wars in the United States even as the United States was fighting to become its own nation, separated from English rule. Women played roles in the American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War I, so women playing roles in World War II should come to no surprise. Women loved their country just as much as men did, and the women of the WAAC and the WAC were all volunteers; they were not drafted into the war effort as many of the men were but were there willing for various reasons. Some women traveled to the European Theater of the war and worked there to fulfill the WAAC and WAC roles previously mentioned, some were sent to the Pacific Theater, and some remained on the home front and served with the National Guard. However, women did more than serve in the WAAC and the WAC. Women also played a role in espionage.
Espionage played a huge role in World War II, and often women were at the forefront. From code breaking to parachuting into enemy territory and working as a spy, women worked to advance the war effort from behind the scenes. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy describes the experiences endured by the women codebreakers, cryptographers who intercepted and translated coded messages from the Axis Powers and others who meant to do harm to the Allied Powers. The young women that were sought after to be code breakers were well-educated—usually in their early-20s and graduated from the top colleges in the country; others were school teachers who were well-versed in various subjects; others were very skilled in various secretarial roles; and others were able to speak, read, and write multiple languages—which contributed to why they were chosen to be the code breakers. The code girls were recruited from the "Seven Sisters" colleges (including Mount Holyoke, Barnard, Smith, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, and Radcliffe), and code breaking would make advancements during this war, as women in the United States and men and women in Europe trained in their colleges on how to intercept and break codes. These advancements that the first group of code girls made in intercepting and breaking the codes used by the Axis Powers. Mundy wrote this book using interviews she was able to get with some of the code breaking women. A good source of information for anyone who wants to learn more about the many roles women played in World War II, it highlights the efforts of women who remained in the home front during the war and what they were able to accomplish. The female code breakers were recruited by government officials in Washington, D.C., and their positions would eventually be traded from the U.S. government as an entity to the various branches of the military. Mundy's work shows how this secret army of women helped to advance the war effort and helped to bring success to the Allied Powers.
The women code breakers worked behind the scenes, so to speak, to advance the war effort, but other women were not happy to work behind the scenes and became spies. In American Women Spies of World War II by Simone Payment, she describes the lives of several American women who became spies for the Allied Powers. The U.S. did not initially want to establish a spy network, trusting in its allies to pass along any information that was necessary to share, but with the intricacies and imperativeness of the war, the U.S. found it was necessary to establish a spy network during World War II, and would establish the Office of Strategic Services in 1942 . Payment writes about the women of the OSS, some are well-known even by today's standards, and some have been previously unknown but their stories were found by digging in archives and special documents. Some of these women include: Virginia Hall, Claire Phillips, Aline Griffith, Elizabeth "Betty" Pack, Josephine Baker, and Mary Bancroft. Of these women, two are amongst the well-known, and they are Virginia Hall and Josephine Baker. Virginia Hall was known as the "Limping Lady" because she had an artificial leg. She had lived in Europe after attending college, where she studied French, German, and Italian, and operated behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France, after being recruited by the British SOE (their equivalent of the OSS) as an agent where she went undercover as a reporter for the New York Post . With this guise, she was able to spy on the German's activities and was able to pass along German movements and coordinate parachute drops. Josephine Baker was a famous dancer and singer in the 1920s and 1930s, and she would eventually move to France to perform; in France, she would become a member of a French resistance movement against the Nazi occupation where she would go so far as to hide messages in invisible ink on her sheet music. Both of these women, according to Payment and other historians, risked their lives to aid in the Allied war effort.
Women in World War were WACs, WASPs, and spies, but they still did more to advance the war effort by working on the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project was scientific research and development with the end goa to produce the first atomic bomb. In her book The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, Denise Kiernan wrote about the women of Oak Ridge, Tennessee who were enriching uranium for the nuclear bomb, but their job was so secretive that even they did not fully know what they were doing. Oak Ridge was a town created in 1942, it did not appear on any maps until after World War II had ended, there were about 75,000 residents in the town, and it used more electricity than New York City. All around the town were signs with a patriotic image and a message reminding those who resided in the town to not speak about the work they were doing; signs like these were typical of the war period on the home front, appearing in towns and cities all around the United States. Denise Kiernan interviewed ten women who worked at Oak Ridge during World War II and conducted extensive research to be able to tell about the women with secret jobs in a secret town. In Oak Ridge, the men and women there felt like they were doing their part to bring the war to the end; the scientists and engineers directly involved with the Manhattan Project knew the work they were doing would bring the war to an abrupt end, but the women who left everything they had known to come to Oak Ridge took various positions in order to advance the war effort and their own careers in the fields they had studied for. The women of Oak Ridge, according to the overall point of Kiernan's book, worked for a variety of positions for the combined efforts of the government and the military in relation to the top-secret Manhattan Project—they worked as janitors, pipe inspectors, secretaries and stenographers, transcriptionists, statisticians, mathematicians, chemists, and physicists all under lead scientists who would eventually invent, test, and deploy the two atomic bombs that would bring the Second World War to its end—the Gadget and Little Boy. Denise Kiernan, in partnership with Simon & Schuster, the publishing company for The Girls of Atomic City, made a video on YouTube where she talked about some of the details that both were and were not mentioned in her book; one point she drives home throughout the book is how secretive the work being done in Oak Ridge was, stating numerous times that the women involved knew what their jobs were but did not know what the over-encompassing project was. Denise Kiernan writes about several women throughout her book and their experiences with how secretive the project was. One such woman was Celia Szapka, who was a secretary for the Manhattan Project first in Manhattan and then in Oak Ridge. Readers are introduced to Celia as she's on a train on her way to Tennessee. As she looks out her window, she has one question: "Where was she going? Already many hours long, Celia's trip felt more endless because her final stop remained a mystery" . For the women like Celia, the project was so secret they did not even know they were going to a new town that would be given the name of Oak Ridge. Originally from Shenandoah in Pennsylvania, Celia was described by Kiernan as someone who was always up for an adventure, and her trip to Oak Ridge was not the first trip she made for a job where she was unsure of exactly what she would be doing. Celia left Pennsylvania for work in Manhattan as a secretary before taking the job in Oak Ridge. One quote that sticks out the most in regards to Celia's introduction in the book is, "She quickly learned that all the women on the train had been told that their new jobs served one purpose only: to bring a speedy and victorious end to the war. That was enough for her" . For some of the women who were making their way to Oak Ridge, they were unconcerned with what they would be doing despite having questions about where they were going; they knew that their work would benefit the U.S. war effort, that their work would bring an end to the war, and knowing that was enough for them. However, in the aforementioned video, Kiernan states that the people of Oak Ridge did not learn the true nature of the project until August 6, 1945 after the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan . It was then that the women realized that they were enriching uranium and that they learned the purpose of what they had been doing. Despite the devastation the bombings of Japan wrought, the women, the people of Oak Ridge, did their part to bring an end to the war.
Finally, servicewomen served the war effort as battlefield nurses. In And if I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II by Evalyn Monahan and Rosemary Niedel-Greenlee, the authors describe the lives of the women U.S. Army nurses during World War II. These women voluntarily left their homes and left their colleges to serve as battlefield nurses; they served in Africa, Italy, France, and other war-torn areas where they were needed. Monahan and Neidel-Greenlee rely on interviews with veteran battlefield nurses in order to gain knowledge of their experiences during World War II, and there are bits and pieces of letters throughout the book from these women to various family members. Many of the nurses were young--in their late teens and early 20's, so their wartime experiences were some of their first experiences away from home. One such woman the authors write about is First Lieutenant Frances Nash, who was stationed in the Philippines. "When Nash and other army nurses arrived in Manila harbor in 1940, they looked more like debutantes than military nurses. They left the ship in chiffon dresses accessorized with matching or complimentary high heels, white gloves, and large-brimmed picture hats. Their trunks were free of khaki, since there was no military uniform for the military nurses of the day. Instead, they were packed tight with floor-length evening gowns, fashionable dresses for dinners and cocktail parties, as well as a range of outfits suitable for a variety of social occasions" . The women believed that the impending war would be swift, and they would see hardly any action. However, three hours after the bombings of Pearl Harbor, Japan attacked various army bases in the Philippines as well. As the military hospitals were close to the military bases where the Japanese were air striking, the army nurses were the first to arrive on the scenes, having run from the hospitals to the bases to perform their duty . On December 24, 1941, the nurses were being evacuated from Manila to Bataan; Nash was told by her commanding officer that she would be left behind with several others and would be evacuated at a later time, and to prepare to be captured if the Japanese moved on Manila quicker than the U.S. anticipated; while she remained in her military hospital, Nash destroyed papers she believed the Japanese would find valuable, until she and the others left behind were ordered to evacuate to Bataan as well . Monahan and Greenlee describe hospitals being attacked by Japanese air raids; they describe the nurses being sent wherever they were needed--be it Africa, Italy, or even the beaches of Normandy. Throughout their book, through reading about the women who served as army nurses and readings bits and pieces of their letters to hoe, the reader gets a sense of just how important these women were to the war effort. They worked to bandage up the wounded soldiers, they assisted the surgeons in the operating rooms, they ran onto the battlefields to collect the dead and dying and do what they could. These women risked their lives just the same as the men did, and did so knowing their families would not be awarded the same benefits for their deaths as the families of a male doctor or soldier would.
The women of World War II, in particular the women who wanted to serve their country so much they joined the military or worked for governmental or military projects, were a special breed of women who are often left out of the narrative when it comes to the history of World War II; however, these were women who dedicated their lives to the war effort, and to try to ensure that the United States would be successful.
These historians and others who works are mentioned throughout this piece all worked to advance the historiography of women's history and military history by sharing the stories of the women who aided the American war effort in World War II. Although some of these sources were autobiographical, adding these sources into this paper was necessary because they also played a role in adding to this historiography of women's history and military history. History often forgets the women, and although General Henry Arnold promised once the WASPs were disbanded that the government (and history) would not forget them, the collective psyche of those who created U.S. and world history texts did forget about those women. All of the historians and the autobiographies utilized in this piece had played a role in advancing the historiography of World War II as a whole.
Bibliography
Collins, Elizabeth M. "20 Facts About the Women's Army Corps", http://soldiers.dodlive.mil/2016/05/20-facts-about-the-womens-army-corps/, accessed October 20, 2017.
Earley, Charity Adams. One Women's Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995).
Fargey, Kathleen. "6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion", (Center of Military History, 2014), https://history.army.mil/html/topics/afam/6888thPBn/index.html, accessed October 21, 2017.
Moore, Brenda L. To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race. New York: New York University, 1996.
Simons, Lisa M. Bolt. The U.S. WASP: The Trailblazing Women Pilots of World War II. North Mankato, MN: Capstone Press, 2017.
Liza Mundy, Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II (New York: Hatchett Book Group, 2017.
Payment, Simone. American Women Spies of World War II. New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 2004.
Kiernan, Denise. "History in Five: The Manhattan Project's Secret City", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSf3GOMziOg, accessed November 1, 2017.
Monahan, Evalyn and Niedel-Greenlee, Rosemary. And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II. New York: Anchor Books, 2007.
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