Army & Navy – Distaff, Dismissed!

For U.S. women in uniform, the war was all but over. A hard-working but sometimes glamorous career was almost ended. Women’s auxiliaries of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard were being closed out or trimmed down to skeleton peacetime size.

Almost half the Coast Guard’s 10,000 SPARs are already out of uniform; the rest will be gone by midsummer. The Coast Guard plans no permanent women’s reserve.

The Marine Corps is scarcely more enthusiastic: half the 18,000 “Lady Leathernecks” have gone back to civilian life. Little more than a corporal’s guard will be kept on after September—enough to do the paper work for an inactive reserve.

Under present law, all women’s auxiliaries will go out of business six months after the end of the war emergency. But both Army & Navy have been preparing legislation to let them keep small active organizations of WACs and WAVES and a larger, inactive reserve. Meanwhile, the cutback goes on.

While a cold, 20-knot wind whipped across the “deck” of the U.S.S. Hunter —actually the campus of Hunter College branch in The Bronx—the school where 80,000 WAVES were trained was ceremoniously decommissioned last week.

At Fort Des Moines, Iowa, the Army was padlocking the door of its greatest womanpower factory: 72,000 WACs had been trained there. Among the small permanent party charged with closing the place by Feb. 15, there were a few girls who would be willing to stay in a permanent Women’s Corps. But most of the girls wanted to get out, either to finish schooling or to start a family.