WAVE boots (new recruits) learn to march in formation in their street clothes. The first thing a boot would receive is her Navy hat, which the women are wearing.
The c. 1943 photo comes from the National Archives.
Tag Archives: boot camp
Ready for Bed
WAVE recruits Joy Shrader, Winifred Smith and Estelle Slominski (left to right) heading to the showers before bedtime during boot camp at Cedar Falls , Iowa, early 1943. Boot camp would move to Hunter College in the Bronx by February of that year.
The photo comes from the National Archives.
Getting Fit
WAVES do exercises on the lawn of Hunter College, which was used at the Navy’s boot camp for women during World War II.
The photo comes from the National Archives.
On Their Way
WAVE recruits Mary Elizabeth Crockett (left) and Mary Elizabeth Nelson (right) are leaving San Diego for boot camp at Hunter College, the Bronx, New York, in November 1943.
The photograph comes from the National Archives.
Review, In Formation
At boot camp in the Bronx, New York (AKA The USS Hunter), WAVES march in formation – there are actually two platoons moving side by side in this November 1943 photograph.
It comes from the National Archives.
Trial Run
WAVES at the Hunter College boot camp get a chance to try out the Link Instructor first hand, c. 1943. The machine was used to train pilots during World War II. In this photo, you see a WAVE in the cockpit holding a mic, and in the background a second WAVE giving her “instructions” from the controller desk.
The photograph comes from the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Last Cedar Falls Boot Camp
By February of 1943, the WAVES would move their enlisted training facility to Hunter College in the Bronx, New York. Here, WAVES in the last boot camp at Cedar Falls, Iowa, in early 1943 listen to a lecture.
The photograph comes from the National Archives.
Quarters
WAVES (left to right) Jane Rosenbaum, June David and Thelma Stretch do their laundry and write letters in their quarters at Cedar Falls. 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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Shots!
The Navy gave each boot a battery of shots (all the women we’ve talked with remember them). That experience is featured in both photographs and comics like this image.
It comes from Marjorie Sue Green’s booklet From Recruit to Salty WAVE! The Ordeal of Seaman Green held by The Betty H. Carter Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.
Hinges of History 