WAVES

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WAVES is the abbreviation for the women who were accepted for voluntary emergency service in the United States Naval Forces, the US Navy , during World War II . This service had the official name Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service , in common parlance and also officially abbreviated as WAVES ( often in the singular : WAVE ).

A WAVE

The acronym WAVES (German: Wellen) can also be interpreted as an English noun and arouses associations, for example, with water waves . The word Emergency refers to the special circumstances during the Second World War and suggests that women would not be allowed to continue their work in the Navy after the end of the war .

history

Recruitment poster for WAVES

WAVES began serving in August 1942 when Mildred H. McAfee became the first woman in US naval history to be hired as a female officer . She received the rank of Naval Reserve Lieutenant Commander (corresponds to the German rank of Corvette Captain of the Reserve) and became the first director of WAVES. This happened two months after the WACS ( Women's Army Corps ) - that is the counterpart to the WAVES at de Army of the United States  - had been established and the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to the Congress of the United States was able to convince a similar organization also with the Install naval forces.

A WAVE operates the US high-speed variant of the Turing bomb

After only one year, the WAVES comprised around 27,000 women soldiers. Most of them worked as secretaries. Others did their job, for example as nurses, news helpers, warehouse keepers, scientific and technical assistants or even in the particularly sensitive area of cryptanalysis , especially for operating the American high-speed variant of the British Turing bomb , which was used to "crack" the German Enigma encryption.

No African American women were accepted as WAVES until 1944 . Only then was there a quota system according to which an African American woman was admitted every 36 whites.

When the Women's Armed Services Integration Act came into effect on June 12, 1948, women were admitted to military service. Although the WAVES was officially dissolved, the acronym remained in use until the 1970s.

Directors

The first director of WAVES Mildred McAfee (* May 12, 1900 † September 2, 1994)
• Captain Mildred McAfee Horton (1942–1946)
• Captain Jeanne T. Palmer (1946–1946)
• Captain Joy Bright Hancock (1946–1953)
• Captain Louise K. Wilde (1953-1957)
• Captain Winifred Quick Collins (1957–1962)
• Captain Viola B. Sanders (1962–1966)
• Captain Rita Lenihan (1966–1970)
• Captain Robin L. Quigley (1970–1972)

song

Like the male sailors in the US Navy , the WAVES had their own song:

WAVES of the Navy
WAVES of the Navy,
There's a ship sailing down the bay.
And she won't slip into port again
Until that Victory Day.
Carry on for that gallant ship
And for every hero brave
Who will find ashore, his man-sized chore
What done by a Navy WAVE.

Text and music for this song and others sung by the WAVES can be found in Marching to Victory .

See also

literature

  • Jean and Marie-Beth Hall Ebbert: Crossed Currents: Navy Women from WWI to Tailhook . Brassey's, Washington, DC 1999, ISBN 978-1574881936 .
  • Joy Bright Captain, US Navy (Retired) Hancock: Lady in the Navy A Personal Reminiscence . The Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD 1972, ISBN 0-87021-336-9 .
  • Winifred Quick Captain, US Navy (Retired) with Herbert M. Levine Collins: More Than A Uniform: A Navy Woman in a Navy Man's World . University of North Texas Press, Denton TX 1997, ISBN 1-57441-022-9 .
  • Jeanne Maj Gen, USAF (Ret) Holme: Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution . Presidio Press, Novato, CA 1972, ISBN 0-089141-450-9 .
  • John AN Lee, Colin Burke, Deborah Anderson: The US Bombes, NCR, Joseph Desch, and 600 WAVES - The first Reunion of the US Naval Computing Machine Laboratory. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2000, pp. 27ff. Accessed: May 21, 2008. PDF; 0.5 MB ( Memento from February 21, 2007 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

Commons : WAVES  - collection of images, videos and audio files