The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) “Women in Armed Forces,” which was founded on May 15, 1942, is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday: a 3-cent stamp issued in 1952 honoring “Women in Our Armed Services.”.
Before World War II, women were generally only allowed on the battlefield as nurses or as volunteers as communications specialists or dieticians. Though they served with the Army, they didn’t have any official status, so they had to pay for their own food and lodging and they didn’t receive any disability benefits or pensions when they returned home. This troubled Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers – a Republican who was the first woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts and who until 2012 had been the longest serving Congresswoman, a distinction now held by Marcy Kaptur of Ohio. (Random aside: her district included my home town of Lexington and she introduced legislation creating the Minuteman National Park near my home.)
By early 1941, Rodgers began working to get women the same protection and benefits as men if, as seemed likely, the US went to war. Though key officials initially resisted the idea, support for it grew after the US entered the war in December 1941. Nevertheless, Rodgers’ and other supporters scaled back their goals. While the proposed bill provided food, uniforms, living quarters, pay, and medical care for up to 150,000 women, it didn’t make them part of the Army; it gave women less pay than men of the same rank; and it didn’t make them eligible for overseas pay, government life insurance, veteran’s medical coverage, or protection if they were captured by enemy troops. Even with these provisions, the bill aroused fierce opposition from many members, such as Clare Eugene Hoffman, a conservative Republican from Michigan, who asked: “Who will then do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the humble homey tasks to which every woman has devoted herself; who will nurture the children?”
Nevertheless, the bill passed and was signed into law on May 15, 1942. Secretary of War Henry Stimson immediately made Oveta Culp Hobby, WAAC’s first director. Hobby, who was married to former Texas Governor William P. Hobby, had been editor of a newspaper in Houston, served for five years as a parliamentarian of the Texas legislature written a book on parliamentary procedure, and, just prior to her appointment, had served as chief of the Women’s Interest Section in the Public Relations Bureau at the War Department, where she had helped shepherd the WAAC bill through Congress.
She immediately began recruiting women to serve as clerical workers, teachers, stenographers, and telephone operators. She explained: “The gaps our women will fill are in those noncombatant jobs where women’s hands and women’s hearts fit naturally. WAACs will do the same type of work which women do in civilian life. They will bear the same relation to men of the Army that they bear to the men of the civilian organizations in which they work.”
Over 35,000 women from all over the country applied for less than 1,000 anticipated positions in the initial WAAC cohort. The first batch of officer recruits were an average age of 25 years old, most of whom attended college and worked in an office or as a teacher. One in five enlisted because a male family member was serving and they wanted to help him get home faster. The first cohort, which arrived at the WAAC Training Center at Fort Des Moines in July 1942, included were 125 enlisted women and 440 officer candidates (including 40 Black women who were placed in a separate platoon). After training, the women were to a 150-woman teams assigned to army units, where they initially were allowed to work as clerks, typists, drivers, cooks and medical care. However, within one year of the WAAC establishment, over 400 jobs were open to women.
Many of the first graduates went on to set up training programs for the next recruits. The first auxiliary units and their officers to reach the field went to Aircraft Warning Service (AWS) units, which needed help because the U.S. Army Air Forces could not rely on volunteer civilians to man stations 24 hours a day. By October 1942 twenty-seven WAAC companies were active at AWS stations up and down the eastern seaboard. WAACs manned “filter boards,” plotting and tracing the paths of every aircraft in the station area. Some filter boards had as many as 20 positions, each one filled with a WAAC wearing headphones where they would take the rare telephone calls reporting aircraft sightings. Later graduates were formed into companies and sent to Army Air Forces (AAF), Army Ground Forces (AGF), or Services of Supply field installations. Initially most auxiliaries worked as file clerks, typists, stenographers, or motor pool drivers, but gradually each service discovered an increasing number of positions WAACs were capable of filling.
About 40 percent of the WAACs worked with the Army Air Forces where, by the end of the war, more tham half of them were working in such jobs as weather observers and forecasters, cryptographers, radio operators and repairmen, sheet metal workers, parachute riggers, link trainer instructors, bombsight maintenance specialists, aerial photograph analysts, and control tower operators. Over 1,000 WAACs ran the statistical control tabulating machines (the precursors of modern-day computers) used to keep track of personnel records.
In other parts of the Army, WAACs worked as boat dispatchers, classification specialists, as secretaries and clerical workers on hospital ships, as glass blowers making test tubes for the Army’s chemical laboratories, as field testers for equipment such as walkie-talkies and surveying and meteorology instruments. The over 1,200 WAACs assigned to the Signal Corps (ASF) worked as telephone switchboard operators, radio operators, telegraph operators, cryptologists, and photograph and map analysts.
In 1943, WAAC’s success – and the recognition that women would be needed overseas as the war proceeded – led to its replacement, the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), which, unlike WAAC was an official part of the Army and offered equal pay, privileges and protection. Ultimately, more than 150,000 American women served in the Army during World War II (and the WAC continued as a separate entity until the later 1970s). And the success of the WAAC and WAC led to similar auxiliaries for the Navy, and the Marines, – the WAVES, SPARS, and the US Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.
The 1952 stamp honoring women who served in all these entities, shows women in uniform from the Marines, Army, Navy, and Air Corps. In the background is the U.S. capitol. The image of the women was taken from a photograph in a recruiting folder from the Department of Defense.