Women At War - WACS

With a great focus within our hobby placed fairly squarely on the male portrayal, we sometimes do forget that fact that women played a huge part in shaping our history also, just because they were not generally on the front line, they certainly had a major presence ensuring that the war machine kept running. From volunteers to paid labour, their roles were varied, from farming through to munitions, to the delivery of aircraft to intelligence. The portrayal in our hobby does lend itself to the classic ‘pin up’ the morale booster to the troops that is continued even today in the far reaches of the earth where conflict never seems to stop.

I stumbled upon a website today, whilst the UK decided that once again it could not open for business as we had a few inches of snow, and I wanted to share with you some superb wartime photos of the WACS Women’s Army Corps.

The corps was formed in 1942 and was known as the WAACS, (Women's Army Auxiliary Corps). During the conflict around 15,200 women served within these Corps and provided a number of roles to support the war effort.

This was not without opposition and after some research it was evident that men were very against women in uniform, not surprisingly so owing to the other attitudes and prejudices against women in general at the time, however owing to the sheer shortage of manpower, not an intended pun, but the army needed to make some very serious decisions in order to fulfill a variety of roles within its ranks.

Most WACS were based in the US; however there are notable units that travelled across the world in all theatres of war.

Training for these women was intense, basic training lasted approximately 176 hours and consisted of 23 courses, the women learned close order drill, to map reading with a final aptitude test to qualify for service. Once basic training was completed then the WAC could specialise and an option of further training was available and the options here were varied. After three months service the US army offered each WAC the option to apply for Officer Candidate School, a further 246 hours of training over five weeks learning the finer intracises of military organisation.

WACS of course was just one route a women could enlist for during WWII, one could have enrolled within the WAVES (Naval), USMCNR (Marine), SPARS (Coastguard), WASP (Pilots), ARC (Red Cross), PHS (Public Service), NNC (Naval Nurse), ANC (Army Nurse).

Do you re-enact any of these services? Do you have any connection with Veterans mentioned in this article? If so, we would love to hear from you for our magazine.

http://www.blitzkriegbaby.de/
www.historylink101.com