American women have served and died from the first

 

 

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — American women have served and died on the nation's battlefields from the first. They were nurses and cooks, spies and couriers in the Revolutionary War. Some disguised themselves as men to fight for the Union or the Confederacy. Yet the U.S. military's official acceptance of women in combat took more than two centuries.

New roles for females have been doled out fitfully, whenever commanders have gotten in binds and realized they needed women's help.

"The main driver is that it's been militarily necessary," says retired Capt. Lory Manning, a 25-year Navy veteran who leads military studies for the Women's Research & Education Institute. She points, for example, to creation of the Army Nurse Corps in response to the struggle against disease in the Spanish-American War.

Some milestones on the way to this week's lifting of the ban on women in ground combat jobs:

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FROM THE FIRST

They didn't wear uniforms, but the Army hired women as nurses, cooks and laundresses during the American Revolution. Women were also spies and saboteurs. They carried George Washington's messages across enemy lines to his generals.

Many "camp followers" went to war with their soldier husbands, sometimes bringing children along. Some stepped into the places of fallen men in battle. Other women disguised themselves as young men to join the fighting.

A few hundred women secretly served as Civil War soldiers, historians estimate. There are records of some who were discovered only after they were wounded or killed.

For her service as a Civil War surgeon, Dr. Mary E. Walker was awarded her era's Medal of Honor. Harriet Tubman led a group of former slaves who spied on Confederate troops in the South and helped the Union Army free more slaves. A Virginia woman, Elizabeth Van Lew, ran one of the war's most sophisticated spy rings for the Union. Clara Barton's experiences tending battlefield wounded led her to found the American Red Cross.

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NURSES NEEDED

Despite their record as volunteers and contract workers, women were denied a place within military service until 1901, when the Army Nurse Corps was created. Navy nurses followed in 1908.

What prompted the creation of the Nurse Corps? The devastating toll of typhoid, malaria and other diseases that killed far more soldiers than the fighting during the Spanish-American War.

Overwhelmed by the tropical diseases, the military rushed to find more than 1,500 female contract nurses to serve at military hospitals and aboard ships. Twenty-one nurses died in the line of duty. After the war, the Army's surgeon general called for creation of a permanent nurse corps with reserves at the ready for future wars.

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OVER THERE

The world wars brought large-scale proof that women could handle many of the military's noncombat jobs. They were recruited to "Free a man to fight!"

For the first time in World War I, women other than nurses were allowed to enlist in the Navy and Marines. They worked as telephone operators, accountants, draftsmen, clerks. Some went to Europe. Still, only about 35,000 women, the majority of them nurses, served among nearly 5 million U.S. men. They were promptly sent home after the armistice.

They were the advance troops for the wave of women to come in the next world war, including the Navy's WAVES and the Army's WACS. There were even civilian pilots — the WASPS — who repositioned planes and towed gunners' targets but were denied Air Force status.

The demands of a huge military buildup and a diminishing pool of male draftees crumpled resistance to enlisting large numbers of women for World War II.

More than 400,000 women served, at home and overseas, stepping into nearly all types of noncombat jobs. Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Wilma L. Vaught, a teenager then, remembers women's eagerness to help.

"America was attacked," said Vaught, president of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation. "Women felt, 'This is my country, I've got to help defend my country.' They wanted to be part of it."

World War II was the turning point that earned women full-fledged military status. In 1948, after fierce debate, Congress approved allowing women to serve in the regular forces of all branches of the service all the time, not just in war.