WOMEN AS
RADIOMEN IN WWII
The Navy trained women to serve as Radiomen as part of
the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES)
program. The idea
was that a woman serving at a Naval shore or air station would
free a man for fleet duty. Recruiting appealed to
women’s patriotism, and offered equal pay and a chance to
travel.
Some WAVES Radiomen told their stories:
Barbara Tanner Aldrich:
“I enlisted in December of 1942…in Boston, Massachusetts.”
“I was then ordered to Hunter (College)”
“I was hoping to go into cryptography. There was no call for
any cryptographers at the moment, so finally they sent me to
radio school (at the University of Wisconsin). Two days after I left
they had a call for cryptographers.”
“…at 0800 there was code. At 0900 there was
procedure. At
1000 there was code.
At 1100 there was drill. Then we ate on the
first bell. At
1330 there was code.
At 1430 there was typing. And 1530 seems
to be free. At
1630 there was a lecture. And at 1900 there was
code.”
“They sent me to New York City, the Eastern
Sea Frontier”
“We monitored the radio for the Eastern Sea Frontier
and we sent and received messages on
teletypewriters…”
“When I left I was a (Radioman) first
class.”
-Barbara Tanner Aldrich, in an oral history conducted
by Dr. Evelyn Cherpak, Naval War College, 1997
Emily Stone
Cocroft:
“I went with every intention of applying for officer
training and was told I would have to wait…so they said, ‘but
we are recruiting for the first enlisted class…’ I had got my self all
geared up to do this so I said, ‘yes, sure.’ “
“Well, the regular training course (at the radio school
at Univ. of Wis.) was two months,
and then we had to have two months extra for
communications.”
“We had, of course, a test at the end to see how fast
you could do the code.
I got it up to twenty-two words a minute, a third class
rating. Otherwise
you didn’t get a rating.”
“I got Naval Air Station, North Island, San
Diego…”
“The chief was really in charge of our office and he
had a really hard time adjusting to the WAVES. He’d had these
seventeen year old sailors before that he could just boss
around. We were
much better at the work.
I think a lot of the girls were more emotional about
things. He had a
hard time with that…”
“We didn’t really use the Morse Code after all our
training…teletype had just come in and they used that. There was something
called the “Fox” schedule which got sent out from Washington
all the time to all the navy stations and you had to sit there
and take that down (in Morse Code).”
“…I applied (for a commission) as soon as they opened
it up. I was
almost the last class at Smith. (U.S. Naval
Midshipman’s School, Women’s Reserve, Smith
College)”
“…it was really quite much of a repeat of Wisconsin… We had to learn how to
operate the coding machines, which were
classified.”
“(I worked in) the federal building downtown (San
Francisco), which is communications
headquarters for the whole 12th Naval
District.”
“It was just coding. A desk where you
routed messages and that was…very busy, finding where the
messages came from and where they should go. If they said Top
Secret, you were supposed to get somebody higher up to come
finish it.”
-Emily Stone Cocroft, in an oral history conducted by
Dr. Evelyn Cherpak, Naval War College,
1996.
