In the Classroom

Here, WAVES are in the classroom during one of the first boot camps at the Iowa State Teacher’s College (now Northern Iowa University) in Cedar Falls. The facility would become a yeoman training center after the opening of the Hunter College boot camp in February 1943.

The photograph comes from the National Archives.

Cedar Falls

Shortly after the “combined” training facilities opened in Stillwater, Madison and Bloomington, the Navy decided a separate boot camp to train WAVES recruits would make more sense. The women could learn the Navy basics at boot camp and then move on to the other facilities for their specialized training.

Iowa State Teacher’s College (now Northern Iowa University) in Cedar Falls was selected as the first boot camp and women entered for training in the fall of 1942. The campus, however, did not have the room that the Navy would eventually need, so by February 1943 it was shifted to a yeoman training school alongside Oklahoma A&M in Stillwater. Hunter College in the Bronx, New York, surrendered its campus to the Navy for a WAVES boot camp facility through the end of the war.

This photograph of WAVES marching indoors at Cedar Falls comes from the National Archives

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Madison, WI Part 3

The dramatic modernistic building in the background of this shot of WAVES marching is the “new” Union Theater located on the University of Wisconsin campus along the shores of Lake Mendota. The theater opened in 1939, and a decade after it’s opening the Madison Capital Times wrote:

The whole panorama of a nation at war and peace had been reviewed there.

The photograph comes from the National Archives.

Stillwater, OK

Yeomen (Navy parlance for secretaries) trained initially at Oklahoma A&M University in Stillwater (Iowa State Teacher’s College in Cedar Falls would later become a yeoman training facility after the Hunter College Boot Camp opened in February of 1943). In this photograph, an unidentified WAVE salutes while standing at attention at the Stillwater training camp.

It comes from the National Archives.

Bloomington, IN

The initial training schools which opened in October of 1942 combined boot camp and specialty training in one place. Indiana University at Bloomington was selected for storekeepers (accounting and bookkeeping in Navy parlance).

The newspaper clipping from October 9, 1942, is from a story about 31 Iowa women leaving from Des Moines for Navy WAVES training. Fourteen of them headed to storekeeper training at Indiana University. It comes from the University of Iowa Digital Libraries.

Enlisted Training

In October, 1942, enlisted women also began training to become WAVES. Initially, three schools were set up on college campuses: Madison, Wisconsin, Stillwater, Oklahoma, and Bloomington, Indiana. Each would eventually become a specialty training center after the Hunter College boot camp was established in February 1943. University of Wisconsin, Madison trained radio operators. Oklahoma A&M University (now Oklahoma State University) was a training facility for yeomen. Indiana University at Bloomington trained storekeepers (interestingly, the school’s records indicate that the WAVES didn’t arrive until mid-1943 but the Navy and individual correspondence with women who trained there tell a different story).

This photo shows women arriving at the Madison, Wisconsin radio training school It comes from the National Archives.