A Blog About Women Who Were Homefront Heroines: the WAVES of World War II
The junior class in anatomy gets facts on figures from instructor Pharmacists Mate First Class Dorothy Payne. The trainees are gathered about the model for a few questions at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, MD.
The 1943 photograph comes from the National Archives.
WAVES check on the pulse and reactions of a group of aviation cadets in the pressure chamber at U.S. Naval Training Center, Pensacola, FL.
The c. 1944 photograph comes from the National Archives.
WAVE Jean Selby, who was an illustrator at the Walt Disney Studio, now makes celluloid for training films at the Navy’s Photographic Lab, Anacostia, Washington, DC.
The photograph comes from the National Archives.
WAVES on duty at the Naval Air Station, New Orleans, Louisiana, c. 1944.
The photograph comes from the National Archives.
In late 1944, the WAVES finally got approval to allow women to go “overseas.” This included the now-US states of Alaska and Hawaii.
Previously, women were only allowed stateside berths.
This article from the WAVES Newsletter explained how women could apply for the service post. It comes from the Schelsinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University.
Taking a look at a page out of the WAVES Newsletter, it shows how the Navy uses its photographs to talk about the work of Air Gunnery Instructors. We saw this image earlier in the week. The women are working on .50 caliber machine gun turrets, and needed to learn how to shoot the guns in order to take over in training men in the skills needed for war.
According to the article
The instructor of these WAVES will see its results in the war zones.
The clipping comes from the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
This image demonstrates the importance of partnership between the WAVE gunnery instructor and her pupil, who will later fly missions overseas. Here is WAVE Instructor Gladys Cox and Rex E. Bisbee, who graduated at the top of his class.
The photo comes from the National Archives.
The Navy’s description of this photo from the Naval Air Gunners School in Hollywood, Florida:
‘Telephone girls’ at a deadly switchboard wear head-phones hooking them to their pupils as the tell the latter the ‘wrong numbers’ they get in firing at targets on the high-speed range. The turrets are identical to the ones the future gunners will occupy on warplanes.
The photo comes from the National Archives.
WAVES Florence Johnson and Rosamund Small walk out to the target range at the Naval Air Gunners School in Hollywood, Florida. They were among the first WAVES to qualify as instructors of electrically-operated 50 caliber machine gun turrets in April of 1944.
The photo comes from the National Archives.
This is the second two page spread the Old Gold dedicated to the work of the Navy at Iowa State Teacher’s College. The yearbook focused in this section on the WAVES’ daily routine.
The yearbooks come from the archives and special collections at the University of Northern Iowa.
Hinges of History 