A Blog About Women Who Were Homefront Heroines: the WAVES of World War II
Here Come the WAVES previewed at the WAVES boot camp training facility at Hunter College and at the Naval Air Station in San Diego before the film’s premiere in New York City. The reason? The film was shot on location at the two facilities (as seen in the film still above) with WAVES acting as extras.
May all of your holidays be safe and and happy.
This 1940s-era Christmas card comes from the collection of Liana Galvin.
This year, we decided to have our annual holiday greeting tied to the “Hollywood Holidays” theme we’ve been working on the last couple of weeks. The reason? This is the 70th anniversary of the release of Bing Crosby’s hit White Christmas. The song topped the charts in the weeks leading up to Christmas in 1942, and would go on (according to the Guinness Book of World Records) to be the biggest selling song of all time.
The song was first performed in a radio show in 1941, and was a part of the movie Holiday Inn, which was released in July of 1942.
WAVE Helen Gilbert remembered being in training camp as the holidays approached in 1942:
The first Christmas in Wisconsin, it was very sad. We were all homesick. We were just a bunch of young girls who wanted to go home. I remember Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. Every time it went on we were just sobbing. It was crazy, but we lived through it and finally graduated.
May your days be merry and bright and all your Christmases be white.
Publicity poster for the Hollywood feature film Here Comes the WAVES, which premiered Christmas week, 1944.
It was Christmas week, 1944, that the feature film Here Come the WAVES (film still above) premiered in New York, but WAVES got a sneak peek before the premiere.
The film features Betty Hutton, playing twin sisters who join the WAVES, and Bing Crosby, as the celebrity who joins the Navy in order to help the war effort.
The Frank Capra classic was released in 1946, the year after the war ended. But World War II plays a big theme in the film – the Jimmy Stewart character can’t go to war because of a childhood injury, but his brother does and becomes a war hero.
The 1945 romance features Barbara Stanwyck as a single-gal New York-dwelling food journalist Elizabeth Lane (think Martha Stewart if Martha Stewart couldn’t cook) and Dennis Morgan as Jefferson Jones, the hero sailor she’ll host for the holidays on “her” Connecticut farm.
Arrange it, are you crazy? Where am I gonna get a farm? I haven’t even got a window box!
Elizabeth Lane learning she’ll be hosting a sailor at “her” farm for Christmas.
This Ginger Rogers/Joseph Cotton film was released on January 5, 1945. In it, a soldier just released from the mental hospital (Cotton) meets a woman on leave from the state penitentiary (Rogers) on a train. She invites him home for the holidays.
Zachary Morgan (Cotton) after singing a Christmas carol with Barbara Marshall’s (Rogers) family:
I haven’t felt so easy in a long time. This is the best Christmas dinner I ever had. Yesterday, I was a stranger here. I mean, I felt like a prisoner inside myself. Now, just to be in a home like this, with people like you, maybe someplace I can come back to next month, or next year…
In this 1944 film (released in June), Deanna Durbin plays young femme fatale Abigail Martin (also known as Jackie Lamont) who discovers the wealthy man she married is not what she expected.
At one point, Durbin (as Abagail), sings:
I’ll be loving you always, / With a love that’s true always, / When the things you’ve planned need a helping hand / I will understand always, always. / Days may not be fair always, / That’s when I’ll be there, always, / Not for just an hour, not for just a day, / Not for just a year, but always.
… and friends, Christmas, 1940s. Thanks to our friends at Mothic Flights and Flutterings for finding this one for us.
Hinges of History 