Just before 8 am, in the air above Battleship Row, radio silence was broken by three words—“Tora! Tora! Tora!”
Captain Mitsuo Fuchida had just signaled to the Japanese Fleet that the Americans were unsuspecting, and the attack on Pearl Harbor was to begin. A mere ninety minutes later, the attack had sank five battleships, a gunnery training ship, three destroyers, obliterated 188 planes, and caused significant damage to an additional three battleships, three light cruisers, two destroyers, two repair ships, two seaplane tenders, two repair ships, a destroyer tender, and a heavy cruiser. The toll on human life was even more catastrophic. 2,403 Americans were killed, including 68 civilians and another 1,178 were wounded.[1]
The Attack on Pearl Harbor jettisoned the United States into total war. Defense production and other preparations had been going on since 1939, including the reintroduction of the draft. Seven months before the attack, Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers introduced HR 4906 “A Bill to establish a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for Service with the Army of the United States.” Rogers was the first woman to be elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 1925. Her experiences in the Red Cross and the Women’s Overseas Service League during World War I motivated her to focus on ensuring privileges and protections for service members, especially women who suffered from not having military rank.
Rogers stated her motivations when introducing the WAAC Bill “My motives? In the first World ‘War, I was there and saw. I saw the women in France, and how they had no suitable quarters and no Army discipline. Many dietitians and physiotherapists who served then are still sick in the hospital, and I was never able to get any veterans’ compensation for them, although I secured passage of one bill aiding telephone operators. I was resolved that our women would not again serve with the Army without the protection men got.”[2]
HR 4906 established the purpose and limits of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, capping the Corps at 25,000 members, clarifying that its members would only be engaged in noncombatant service and that the WAAC would be “not a part of the Army but it shall be the only women’s organization authorized to serve with the Army, exclusive of the Army Nurse Corps.” Additional pages were needed to specify matters such as pay and benefits, awards and medals, pensions, and more.
Despite support from Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, the bill foundered with pushback from Congress, G-1 Division, and the Bureau of the Budget. In fact, a mere five days before Pearl Harbor was destroyed a memo from the Bureau of the Budget said, “There appears to be no need for a WAAC inasmuch as there will never be a shortage of manpower in the limited service field.”[3]
However, the following days would prove the Bureau of the Budget horribly wrong.
This is the first in an ongoing series that will explore the history of the WAAC and related topics in a day-by-day manner to correlate with the 80th anniversary of the US in WWII.
[1] “A Pearl Harbor Fact Sheet – Census.gov,” accessed December 6, 2021, https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/pearl-harbor-fact-sheet-1.pdf.
[2] Mattie E. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps (Off. of the Chief of Military History, Dep. of the Army, 1954).
[3] Ibid.
Lipstick & War 
Leave a comment