Stepsister Corps

The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps will be a year old next week. It has been a hard year because it was the first, with the administrative aches and growing pains of any big, new organization. Director Oveta Culp Hobby announced that enrollment had reached 58,100 by mid-April. That unvarnished figure meant, at first sight, that the Corps had achieved little more than a third of its quota (150,000) at the three-quarter mark of its authorized enrollment term ending July 1.

But this same 58,000 was more than double the initial mark of 25,000, upped sixfold after the Army had discovered the usefulness of its women auxiliaries. And every woman jill of them was a volunteer, who had endured the cheap jokes and poor public reactions of the WAAC's early weeks. WAACs were sure that if enrollment had not proceeded according to plan the fault lay with the plan--and with U.S. women and kinsfolk.

Slow Retreat. The trouble with the WAAC has been the trouble with the people: a slow retreat from apathy and prejudice--in the home and in the Army--toward the necessity and importance of women in the war.

The Army has learned the desirability of its soldiers in skirts, not merely as ersatz men, but for their own sakes and skills. The four specific jobs (communications, administrative specialists, motor transport, cooks and bakers) for which the WAACs were first enrolled have grown to more than 140. Examples: code clerk, toolroom keeper, truckmaster and cartographer.

Slow Assignment. Requests on file from commanding officers for WAACs to replace men total 500,000 (375,000 from Air Forces alone). Generals of overseas theaters of operations have asked for 18,810 to date. But only a few WAACs have the thrill of copying secret orders in a general's office; only a few hundred have gone overseas. Of the rest, most have been busy at routine but necessary jobs, training other WAACs to train more WAACs. The Army welcomed them when they showed what they could do--one replacement group of 56 replaced 128 men in postoffice, personnel and records work. But the Army was not ready for even a 58,000 enrollment. There are WAACs, duly sworn in, who still wear civilian clothes because they have no uniforms. By June 1, however, the Army expects to turn out every woman in full kit.

For a while half the WAACs grew restive in the training camps, bottlenecked by inadequate facilities in the Army's special schools. Then the Army speeded up its training program, has opened up seven new schools in the past four months. Recruits are coming out of training at the rate of 1,000 a week, and there are about 15,000 now in the field.

Stepsisters to the Army, the WAACs do not have the privileges of the women of other services which are integral parts of Navy, Coast Guard or Marine Corps. They get no dependency allotments, no Government life insurance or retirement pay for disability incurred in line of duty. They cannot write "free" on the corner of their letters home.

Slow Law. The Rogers Bill, long delayed but due soon for a vote, will make the WAACs full-blooded members of the Army, give the girls their rights. No law is needed to give the girls one Army privilege they have been quick to grab: the WAACs can gripe like veterans.

Biggest difficulty of the WAAC, which affects recruiting the most, is one neither Congress nor the Corps can cure. That is the attitude of the public, which has stopped thinking of Japs as funny little fellows, but which still fails to take seriously the need for women in war. To help change a public opinion clouded by a poor press, by mistaken glamor and misplaced publicity, the WAAC fortnight ago picked a new advertising agency.

Preliminary studies showed that the main resistance to WAAC recruiting is not among women, but among the men in every woman's life--American men are notoriously softheaded about their women. WAACs remembered Britain's ordeal before women warriors were recognized, wondered if anything less than the hard urgency of military necessity could break this sentimental slavery.

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