It’s Thank a WAC, WAVE, WAF, and WASP Veteran Week
A soldier named Robert Shirtliffe was wounded in a Revolutionary War battle
The doctor treating his wounds discovered Robert was not a man. When Deborah Sampson recovered, she was immediately discharged from the Army. Some say Sampson, bound out as an indentured servant when she was 10, was the first American woman to disguise herself as a man so she could serve in wartime. Others say she was only the first to get caught pretending to be a man.
Fort Washington’s 3,000 American soldiers were under attack by an army of 9,000 German soldiers hired by the British
Molly Pitcher disguised herself as a man and joined the army with her husband. Inside the fort, she brought pitchers of water (get it?) to thirsty soldiers. When her artilleryman husband was killed during the battle, she took over the cannon he was manning and continued to fire. Historians say the name Molly Pitcher is a collective generic term just like G.I. Joe, and was applied to the hundreds of women who served alongside male soldiers.
The Civil War
The official U.S. Army website says that during the Civil War, more than 400 women successfully pretended to be men so they could fight as soldiers with both the Union and Confederate armies. Other women served as smugglers and spies. Dorothea Dix organized and equipped the Union Army’s hospitals and oversaw 6,000 women who served the Army’s medical needs.
Six nurses who were also Catholic nuns supported a team of surgeons aboard the first U.S. Navy hospital ship
Originally a Confederate ship, the 786-ton Red Rover was captured by Union forces. It was converted to a hospital ship and assigned to the Western Flotilla on the Mississippi River from Illinois to Mississippi.
20,000 American soldiers were struck by a typhoid fever epidemic in 1898 while fighting the Spanish-American War
Some of the sanitation problems that caused the fever were solved when the Surgeon General directed the digging of latrines so they did not leak into the drinking water. Twenty thousand American soldiers were disabled and 1,500 died, leading to the formation of a permanent Army Nurse Corps.
More than 25,000 women served overseas during World War I
First came the women working for the Red Cross, YMCA, and Salvation Army. Then came 20,000 nurses and hundreds of bilingual telephone operators, called the “Hello Girls.” When the war ended, the Army didn’t need the “Hello Girls” anymore, so it shipped them home without fully acknowledging their contributions.
Women served in the Navy, too
More than 10,000 women served in the U.S. Navy as nurses, accountants, stenographers, and more during World War I. Four hundred of them died from the Spanish Flu epidemic.
World War II and the Home Front
With 16 million men in the military, nine million women entered the labor force. Three million of them took jobs in factories making airplanes, bombs, and weapons.
In the early days of World War II, the U.S. created the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps
The WAAC’s slogan was “To free a man to fight.” They worked alongside men in military intelligence, cryptography, translation, maintenance, supply, transportation, and 400 other non-combat roles, including clerk, typist, driver, and cook. All told, 140,000 women served actively in World War II, more than 60,000 of them nurses in the European war against the Germans and the Pacific war against the Japanese. In 1943, ‘auxiliary’ was removed from their name, calling them WACs and making them part of the Army.
Women who joined the Naval Reserves were called WAVES
Lots easier to say than Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.
The U.S. Army Air Corps lasted until 1941
That’s when the U.S. Air Force became a separate branch of the military. Esther McGowin Blake served in the Army Air Corps for four years before she became the first woman to join the U.S. Air Force. Blake enlisted in the WAF (Women’s Air Force) on July 8, 1948, the first day regular Air Force duty was authorized for women.
WASPS
Women were trained as fliers, too. The Women’s Airforce Service Pilots’ mission was to deliver military aircraft to bases within the U.S. These 1,100 woman pilots were civilians who flew 60 million miles in bombers, fighters, and cargo planes during World War II. Their National WASP WWII Museum is located in Sweetwater, Texas.
This week is Thank a WAC, WAVE, WAF, and WASP Week
Make sure thank a female veteran for her service to her country. She may have been a private or a general, a clerk or a pilot, because nearly every role is open to her, save one. She cannot be a combat soldier, but what female veterans did helped push open the door for the women of today.
Bonus
Try as they might, those who never served in the military cannot possibly understand what it’s like to have your life ripped away from you. When the U.S. went to war, soldiers, sailors, and flyboys spent years on the other side of the world. They were isolated from their families, friends, jobs, and neighborhoods for years. While those who served their country endured experiences from hardships to nightmares, life went on for those back home. Try to imagine what it would be like in a world (without cellphones or Zoom or Skype) to have your whole world turned upside down, putting you in harm’s way.
If stories about American military veterans interest you, read about the history of black men in the military and this first-person account of four years in the Air Force.
The Best Years of Our Lives
Pauline Kael, movie critic for the New Yorker, described the film as “soggy banalities that drag on.” Kael never served in the military. She was unable to understand the tragedy of being a victim of far-off wars fought to save democracy so people like her can be free to trash a powerful and emotional film.
Bosley Crowther, movie critic for the New York Times, never served in the military either. He wrote “It is seldom that there comes a motion picture which can be wholly and enthusiastically endorsed not only as superlative entertainment, but as food for quiet and humanizing thought. Writer Robert Sherwood and Director William Wyler have achieved some of the most beautiful and inspiring demonstrations of human fortitude that we have had in films.”
The film won seven Academy Awards. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a rating of 98 out of 100. Turner Classic Movies runs it every year around Veterans Day.
The story is about three veterans returning home from World War II
Each discovers that his life and the lives of those close to him have irreparably changed while he’s been away. Each faces enormous emotional, social, and economic challenges.
- A banker before the war, the soldier discovers his children have grown up while he was a lowly infantryman fighting in Europe. And he’s developed a new social conscience.
- A soda jerk before the war, the B-17 bombardier was a highly decorated officer in the Army Air Corps who has to go back to work at the soda fountain because there are no jobs for bomb-droppers. To make matters worse, his wife has been playing around with lounge lizards and black marketers while he was away serving his country.
- The young sailor was a high school athlete who was below deck on a Navy ship when it was torpedoed and sunk by the enemy. He lost both his hands in the explosions and the flames. His next door neighbor is his sweetheart. As an extra, his saloon-keeping and piano-playing Uncle Butch is none other than Hoagy Carmichael.
Harold Russell was the only non-actor in the cast
He got the role because while he was an Army parachute instructor, a faulty fuse ignited a stick of TNT and he lost both his hands in the explosion. Russell is the only person ever to win two Academy Awards for the same role. Later in life, he sold his Best Supporting Actor Oscar to pay for his wife’s medical expenses.
Each year Chili’s honors veterans with free lunches
Navy veteran and friend Marty Owens and I go every year.
