The creation of the WAAC

On 15 May 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Public Law 554, passed by the 77th Congress, establishing the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). The same day, by executive order, he brought the corps into being and set its first ceiling: 25,000 women. The next day, 16 May, the corps’s director, a thirty-seven-year-old Texan named Oveta Culp Hobby, was sworn in in the office of the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. For the first time in the history of the United States, women other than nurses could work for the Army in an organised body and in uniform.

The name of the corps is sometimes given as the “Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps”. This is a small but significant error: the official name was the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The word order was not accidental. It echoed the British Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps of the First World War and stressed that this was an auxiliary body working with the Army, not a part of it.

The long road to the act

The idea was not new. In 1917 and 1918 the US Army had employed women in France as telephone operators, typists and drivers, but it had done so on an ad hoc basis, under civilian contracts. The Navy and the Marine Corps took women into service with full military status at the time; the Army did not. Proposals for a women’s corps, put forward as early as 1918 and again between the wars, were shelved by the War Department every time. The Army’s only women’s body remained the Nurse Corps, which had existed since 1901.

The cause was taken up by Edith Nourse Rogers, a Republican congresswoman from Massachusetts, who as a volunteer in the First World War had seen at close quarters the work of American and British women in France. On 28 May 1941 she introduced a bill for an auxiliary corps. The War Department received it coolly. An internal memorandum of its personnel division stated openly that since such a body could not be avoided, it had to be organised in such a way that the Army could run it in its own way. The bill found an ally, however, in the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall. He foresaw that shortages of equipment would be followed by a manpower crisis, and he considered it wasteful to train soldiers as telephone operators or typists when in civilian life those jobs were done almost exclusively by women.

Until December 1941 the bill was stuck in committee. Only the attack on Pearl Harbor and the rapid expansion of the Army, which in March 1942 also brought a sweeping reorganisation of its commands, changed the mood. Rogers introduced a new version of the bill, with an upper limit of 150,000 women, and in April 1942 Marshall wrote to Congress that he regarded its early passage as a matter of considerable importance. The House of Representatives passed the bill in March 1942 by 249 votes to 86, rejecting an amendment that would have given women full military status. The debate was stormy: opponents warned of the break-up of the American family and asked who would do the dishes and the washing when women went into the army. The Senate approved the act on 14 May by 38 votes to 27, and the next day the President signed it.

“With” the Army, not “in” it

The act stated that the corps served “with the Army”, not in it. The difference had concrete consequences. Members of the corps received food, uniforms, quarters, medical care and pay, but they were not entitled to overseas pay, government life insurance, death benefits for their families or veterans’ benefits. They had their own ranks: privates were called “auxiliaries”, non-commissioned officers “leaders”, and officers “third, second and first officers”. These ranks gave no authority over men, and until the autumn of 1942 they carried lower pay than the corresponding military ranks. Nor was the corps fully subject to military law, which later proved a source of disciplinary and organisational trouble.

The WAAC’s task was to take over clerical work, communications, transport, supply and kitchen duties from soldiers, so that the men could go to the front. Its model was the British Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women’s auxiliary service of the British Army, whose efficiency had impressed Marshall. The British, however, had already gone further: since 1941 members of the ATS had held military status, and in December 1941 Parliament had introduced the conscription of women. In April 1942 even the sixteen-year-old heir to the throne, Princess Elizabeth, registered for war service. In the United States conscription of women was out of the question, and even voluntary service still met with resistance.

Oveta Culp Hobby

The first director of the corps was Oveta Culp Hobby, born in Texas in 1905, the daughter of a lawyer and state politician. From the age of twenty-one she served for several years as parliamentarian of the state House of Representatives, advising it on rules and procedure, and later helped run the Houston Post, a daily owned by her husband, the former governor of Texas William P. Hobby. In the summer of 1941 she came to Washington to head the women’s interests section of the War Department’s press bureau, and from then on she took part in preparing the corps. As director she received the pay of a major. Hobby was a demanding organiser: she wanted the corps to be an elite, with high standards of education and character, because she knew that every mistake would be used by the opponents of women in uniform.

Fort Des Moines

Applications far outnumbered places. On 20 July 1942, at Fort Des Moines in Iowa, a former cavalry post, the first 440 officer candidates, among them 40 African American women, and 125 enlisted women began their training. The African American women attended the same classes as the white candidates but, in keeping with the Army’s rules of segregation, were housed separately. One of them, Charity Adams, became in 1945 the commander of the only battalion of African American WACs sent to Europe. On 29 August the first group of the corps’s officers graduated. The women learnt drill, regulations, first aid, map reading, air-raid and gas defence and company administration. Most of them went on to clerical work, but many became telephone operators, radio operators, drivers, mechanics or army postal workers.

Demand for auxiliaries exceeded expectations. In the autumn of 1942 the War Department raised the corps’s target strength to the statutory maximum of 150,000, and in November Congress brought their pay into line with that of soldiers.

Other services

The other armed services followed the Army, and on better terms. On 30 July 1942 the Navy’s women’s reserve, the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), was created, with full military status from the outset. In November 1942 the Coast Guard’s women’s reserve, the SPARS, was formed, and in February 1943 the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. In 1943 civilian women pilots were brought together in the Women Airforce Service Pilots, which ferried aircraft from factories to airfields.

Place in the war

The dual system, in which women worked with the Army but did not belong to it, soon proved awkward. On the initiative of Rogers and Hobby, and this time with Marshall’s support, Congress passed an act under which on 1 July 1943 the WAAC was converted into the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), part of the Army with full military rights. Members of the corps could transfer to the new body or return to civilian life; according to the official history, about a quarter left. Hobby became a colonel in the Army and after the war, in 1953, the first Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare in the cabinet of Dwight Eisenhower.

The road was not easy. In 1943 a whispering campaign swept the country, portraying women in uniform as promiscuous. War Department investigations showed the rumours to be groundless, but they damaged recruitment. Even so, American women in Army uniform served in North Africa from early 1943, and later in Italy, England, France, India, Australia and New Guinea. According to American figures, some 150,000 women passed through the WAAC and WAC during the war, while about 350,000, including nurses, served in all the uniformed services of the United States over the same period.

Compared with the other belligerents, this was a cautious mobilisation. Britain conscripted women into auxiliary service, and the Soviet Union sent hundreds of thousands of women to the front, including as snipers, pilots and tank crew. American women’s services remained voluntary and far from combat. Yet the act signed on 15 May 1942 opened a road from which there was no turning back: the WAC survived the war, became a permanent part of the Army in 1948, and was disbanded in 1978, when women were integrated into regular units.