Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501100015
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARTHA BRYSON HODEL ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It was 1943, and the world was at war. But Marie Telford Gartner's first battle, and the hardest, was with herself.
A second-year teacher in Connecticut, Gartner had never ventured far from the small coastal town of Madison where she grew up. Two brothers were in the Army, one of them overseas. War news was everywhere.
For months, Gartner wondered if the war had a place for her. Then one day, dragging her younger sister along for moral support, she visited a Marine recruiter in Boston.
``I thought to myself, `You'd better do it or you're never going to do anything,''' she recalled recently. ``If I left, I knew I wouldn't come back. So I signed up and then all the way home I worried about how I was going to tell my mother.''
That personal watershed for Gartner mirrored a turning point for an entire generation of women.
About 11,000 American women served during World War I, virtually all of them nurses. But it took World War II, and the 350,000 women who volunteered, to establish a permanent place for them in the U.S. armed forces.
Most women remained on the homefront, although Army and Navy nurses went all over the world. Eighty nurses serving in the Philippines, Guam and Bataan, for example, were captured by the Japanese and spent most of the war in prison camps.
``About 60 percent to 70 percent of all women in all the branches of service were doing administrative, clerical kinds of things,'' said D'Ann Campbell, a history professor at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., who has made women's role in the military her field of study.
``They wanted women for these necessary chores to release more men for the battlefield,'' Campbell said.
European Allies needed women early. Great Britain began drafting women for military and civilian duty in 1939. By 1942, virtually every British woman between the ages of 18 and 60 was serving, including Princess Elizabeth, who later became Queen Elizabeth II, and the daughter of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Both were assigned to anti-aircraft units.
In the French underground, as many as 40 percent of resisters were women, Campbell said.
``You cannot fight a total war, the kind of war that Britain and France were fighting, without every man, woman and child,'' she said. ``How easily women were accepted was a matter of how much they were needed.''
But except for nurses, women had no permanent role in the U.S. military before 1942.
Prior to that, nurses who served received appointments to the Army or Navy Nurse Corps. Considered neither enlisted nor commissioned personnel, they had no rank and their pay was only slightly better than that of an enlisted man.
Author Mary Lee Settle, now living in Charlottesville, Va., tried repeatedly to enlist. Twenty pounds underweight and nearly blind in one eye, she was even turned down by the civilian women's branch of the U.S. Merchant Marines, where she hoped to put her knowledge of Morse Code to use.
``I was a premature anti-fascist,'' Settle said. ``I tried to join up before America got into the war.''
In 1942, Settle finally went to England, where she enlisted in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, a branch of the Royal Air Force. She spent much of her enlistment working as a radio-telephone operator.
``War isn't all noble fighting in the hedgerows. A lot of it is just sitting around,'' said Settle, who recounted her experiences as an Aircraft Woman 2nd Class in the book ``All The Brave Promises.''
In March 1942, Congress created the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, giving women temporary military status that was to last as long as the war.
By the end of July 1942, the Navy began accepting women into the WAVES, short for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. The Coast Guard and the Marines soon followed and, by June 1943, the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps had become the Women's Army Corps.
But acceptance took a little longer, and many a woman endured male jokes about khaki underwear. And it wasn't until after the war was over, in 1948, that Congress made women a permanent part of the military.
``Many of the men didn't like us invading their male chauvinist organization,'' recalled Gartner, who now lives in Jessup, Md. ``They had a not-very-nice nickname for us that they used when they thought we couldn't overhear. They called us `BAMs' for `Broad-*** Marines.' ''
Some blame the slow acceptance on the government's publicity campaign, which emphasized that each woman who enlisted would free up a man to fight. Some male soldiers viewed women as a threat to a safe billet.
By the end of 1943, just as the government was gearing up its campaign to enlist women, the number of female enlistees began to fall. According to Campbell, the decline was at least partly the result of a nationwide smear campaign that portrayed female soldiers as sexually promiscuous.
The government finally enlisted the FBI to determine if the rumors were being planted by Nazi agents. Instead, the FBI found that most originated with American servicemen.
An Army survey in June 1945 indicated that nearly half of male soldiers felt women could do more working as civilians in a defense industry. It also found a third believed joining the Army was ``pretty bad'' for a girl's reputation and 20 percent thought it was very bad.
Asked if they would advise their girlfriends to join the Women's Army Corps, 64 percent said they definitely would not and another 20 percent said they probably would not, according to the survey.
Audrey Foley Zeisler enlisted in the Marines in Brooklyn, N.Y., in February 1945 at the age of 23, after an adored older brother was killed in the Marshall Islands in 1944.
``There was a fellow I'd gone out with before I enlisted,'' recalled Zeisler, who now lives in Reno, Nev. ``I wrote and told him I'd joined the Marines. And oh, he was just highly indignant. He said, `Why under the sun would you do such a thing?'''
Zeisler thought that even her older brother might not have approved.
``He was what they call `macho' now and he probably would have frowned on it, because women were supposed to stay in their place,'' she said.
At the peak, 271,600 women served in the U.S. military, 170,000 of them in the Army. About 350,000 American women volunteered for service during the war.
The most obvious need was for nurses. By the end of the war, the American Journal of Nursing reported that 43 percent of all active registered nurses in the country had volunteered for military service.
One was Helen Pavlovsky Ramsey, a chief surgical nurse at New York City's Bellevue Hospital, who enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943.
``I determined that if the soldiers were going to fight for our freedom and democracy, the least I could do was help take care of the wounded,'' said Ramsey, who now lives in Charleston, W.Va.
Ramsey's unit was sent to England in February 1944 to develop a hospital on Southampton Harbor for casualties from the Allies' D-Day invasion of France.
She wound up in charge of an operating room and earned a commendation.
by CNB