In 1941, both the Army and Navy had several hundred women serving as nurses. During the war, both services recruited many more. By mid-1942, the Army alone had 12,000 nurses. In 1943, the U.S. government began paying for nursing education to expand the supply of trained nurses.
By the 1940s, nursing was regarded as a female occupation, even as it professionalized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In traditional gender roles, women were "caregivers" that fed, cleaned, and monitored the sick or wounded, while leaving science-based medicine to male doctors. Within militaries, among combat troops, male emergency medical technicians, called "corpsmen" or "medics" (such as Eugene Sledge's friend, "Doc" Caswell) administered first aid and stabilized wounded soldiers before they were carried out of combat. Neither the U.S. Army nor Navy envisioned nurses on battlefields, and expected casualties to be evacuated to field hospitals in safe rear areas. In World War II, these distinctions broke down.
Since trained medical personnel were in short supply, nurses took on new responsibilities. Doctors and nurses worked with new medicines, technologies, and methods that became available just before and during the war. This included blood plasma transfusion, and penicillin, the first modern antibiotic.
Many nurses served stateside, or in rear-area hospitals. But others were exposed to the dangers of combat and inhospitable landscapes. Army and Navy nurses were captured along with the troops in the Philippines in 1942. In November 1942, the first Army nurses in North Africa came under artillery and sniper fire, and had to wear combat uniforms. Modern weapons such as aircraft and long-range artillery bombarded areas behind battlefronts, and occasionally U.S. Army and Navy field hospitals and hospital ships were hit by enemy fire. In all theaters, a few nurses were killed and wounded by enemy fire.
As much as combat troops, nurses saw the destruction wreaked on towns, countrysides, animals, soldiers, and civilians. They treated horrible wounds caused by modern munitions, such as shrapnel wounds and burns. In 1945, Army nurses with U.S. forces in Germany treated liberated inmates of the Dachau Concentration Camp, many too weak or sick from torture and neglect to survive even with the much better care U.S. forces provided. Not surprisingly, many nurses were probably psychological casualties themselves.
In the South Pacific, especially, diseases such as dengue fever, dysentery, or malaria were four times more likely to debilitate troops as any combat wounds. These pathogens attacked nurses as often as combat troops.
Both the Army and Navy used transport aircraft to transport wounded from forward-area field hospitals to more extensive healthcare away from the front. These planes typically had a female nurse aboard who monitored and cared for the patients. Since most young men in the 1940s had never flown in an aircraft, flight nurses had to help them overcome anxiety or even airsickness, too. Nurses periodically had to perform emergency aid aboard a noisy, cramped airplane, if a patient took a turn for the worse mid-flight.
Sometimes transport aircraft came within range of enemy fire, and aviation accidents were common. Seventeen Army flight nurses were killed during the war. One group of flight nurses survived a plane crash behind enemy lines, in Albania, and with the help of partisans, traveled 800 miles through German-occupied Eastern Europe, to reach allied lines.
During the war more than 70,000 nurses served in the Army and Navy. As a result of combat and accidents, 201 Army nurses lost their lives. The experience of Army and Navy nurses changed the nursing profession. Nurses acquired new leadership, organizational, and medical skills only available in wartime. After the war, Americans were coming to see nurses as skilled medical professionals, as well as traditional "caregivers."
In 1942, the U.S. Army began recruiting female auxiliaries to take up non-combat jobs, so that more male recruits could be sent to combat units. They were organized as the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, or WAAC, an acronym that came to mean both the corps of women, as well as individual women ("a WAC" or "a group of WAACs").
Initially, Congress and the Army envisioned relatively conservative roles for women in the Army. WAACs did not have ranks or pay equivalent to male soldiers. Nor were they eligible for veterans' or death benefits afforded to men in service. Under no circumstances were WAAC officers allowed to command men. The WAAC was only to last the duration of the war. Many WAACs were typists, clerical workers, or stenographers, or otherwise held "pink collar" jobs similar to women's roles in the civilian workforce. The WAAC's Director and highest-ranking officer, Oveta Culp Hobby, took a traditional line in promoting women's army service. "The gaps our women will fill are in those noncombatant jobs where women's hands and women's hearts fit naturally," Hobby explained. "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."
This was only partly true. WAAC service opened new, albeit temporary opportunities for women. This included new occupations, but also just the chance to be full-time, non-combat soldiers. Army leadership was sufficiently impressed with WAAC performance that in 1943, the WAAC program was converted to the "Women's Army Corps," or WAC. Its members were given the choice of leaving, or enlisting as soldiers in the Army. But in either case the women could no longer be auxiliaries. 25% of WAACs left the service; the rest opted to accept rank and legal status akin to male troops.
As the war went on, WACs increasingly did jobs that were different than they could practically get in peacetime, and allowed them to demonstrate their intelligence, moral and physical courage, toughness, leadership and organizational skills. This included driving and repairing trucks, repairing weapons and machinery, weather forcasting, and organizing supply deliveries for combat units. Some WAACs collected and analyzed intelligence information about German forces, and directly supported higher-level planning in the final campaign of the war, in France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany.
Perhaps the most glamorous Army jobs (for men and women) were in the Army Air Force (USAAF), where over 40% of WAACs served. Aircraft were still relatively new, exciting, and incorporated much of the newest technology of the day. In January 1945, about half of USAAF women served in traditional roles such as office clerks. But the rest did a variety of other jobs, included aircraft maintenance and repair, packing parachutes, preparing weather forecasts, directing aircraft from control towers, and analyzing reconnaissance photos taken over enemy territory. A few women had flight assignments, not as pilots but as specialists doing such things as aerial mapping and photography. There were very few equivalent jobs available to women in civilian life before or immediately after the war.
Similar to the Army, the Navy began recruiting women to serve in capacities other than nursing in 1942. Women that joined the Navy were identified by an acronym, "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service," or WAVES. Their jobs ranged from clerical tasks to repairing aircraft and weapons. Similar to WACs, WAVES were basically war-service volunteers, but unlike the army these women were never auxiliaries. They had the same ranks as male sailors and officers and after February 1943, had to complete a basic training regime. Altogether, perhaps 104,000 women served as WAVES in World War II.
Marine Corps leadership initially hoped to avoid letting women into the Corps. But by the end of 1942, and especially after the gruesome Guadalcanal campaign, it became clear that the Marines needed as many people as they recruit. Soon after the first female recruits entered the Marines, training was shifted to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, a traditional Marine Corps base. While it wasn't identical to the basic training of male marines, it was rigorous and included weapons training. Unlike WACs or WAVES women who joined the Marines had no special title. In late 1943 Commandant Holcomb, then convinced that women made valuable marines, explained that "[t]hey don't have a nickname, and they don't need one. They get their basic training in a Marine atmosphere at a Marine post. They inherit the traditions of Marines. They are Marines."
As with WAACs, from the beginning the Navy and Marine Corps described their programs for enlisting women as efforts to free men from non-combat or rear-echelon roles. IN 1944, President Roosevelt himself suggested that by recruiting women, the Navy made available enough sailors to man the fleets of amphibious landing ships participating in the invasions of Normandy and Saipan.
Also similar to the Army, many women did jobs similar to female employment in civilian society, most notably stenography and clerical tasks. But others found new job opportunities unavailable to them in peacetime: armorers, radio operators, mechanics, truck drivers, weather forecasters, computer operators, and so on. Like the Army Air Force, the Navy and Marine air arms also included large numbers of women as support personnel.