Back in Washington, the first group got a mixed reception. Their bosses were glad to see them, but Bea Norton felt the Marines guarding each room took “pernicious pleasure” in making the women salute over and over. Blanche DePuy sensed veiled resentment that women were in uniform alongside men, an attitude that felt “obnoxious.” Her father was a colonel in the Army, so she was used to military nonsense. The resentment, she felt, was not harmful, but neither was it well concealed. Nancy Dobson from Wellesley was asked by a male officer to sew on a button—a task every Navy man knows how to do for himself—and rebuked when she sewed it upside down.
But other women were gratified by their new status. In her office in the Japanese unit, Fran Steen found that even as an ensign—the lowest officer rank—she was the top officer. There was nobody who outranked her. Her hair was slightly longer than it should have been, but there was nobody to order her to cut it. The men were being shipped out that fast, and the women code breakers were coming in.
Jaenn Coz, a bored librarian, was working in California when she happened to see a mail truck emblazoned with a poster saying that Uncle Sam wanted her to join the U.S. Navy. The idea appealed to her, and she went to her local enlisting station. Now that the WAVES had been created, any and all women who met recruiting qualifications could sign up. There was no need for a shoulder tap or a secret letter. The U.S. Navy’s basic requirements for female officers were a college degree or two years of college plus two years of work. Regular enlisted women, who made up the bulk of WAVES recruits, could get by with a high school degree. This opened up opportunity to women who had not had the advantage of college. Once again, more women than expected answered the call: While naval officials had anticipated there might be ten thousand WAVES in total, by the time all was said and done, more than one hundred thousand women would serve.
Women joined up for all sorts of reasons—because they didn’t have any brothers and wanted to represent their family in the war effort; because they did have brothers and wanted to bring them home. At the outset there was a cap on the number of officers, so women were often overqualified for their ranks. Many college women enlisted as ordinary seamen, just to get in.
Depending on their qualifications—and the status of the quota—the WAVES were funneled into officer or enlisted training. Green recruits underwent physical exams along with aptitude and intelligence tests—math, vocabulary, even essay writing—as well as interviews and vocational exams, and were sent on for specialized training. A WAVES enlistee might end up rigging parachutes, training carrier pigeons, working as a “weather girl,” operating a radio receiver, or learning the standard yeoman’s duties of clerking and bookkeeping. But more than three thousand enlisted women who tested high for intelligence and loyalty as well as typing and secretarial skills would be quietly informed that they were headed to communications training and then on to Washington, D.C., to perform work of an unspecified nature. They too had been selected as code breakers.
Troop trains now carried women across the country. WAVES member Ethel Wilson enlisted in Columbia, South Carolina, and soon found herself on a train to Stillwater, Oklahoma, where the campus of Oklahoma A&M had been converted to the site of a basic training school for enlisted women. The train traveled from Columbia to Washington, D.C., from Washington to Chicago, and from Chicago to Shawnee, where the women were put on a bus. She would never forget the sight of the train running alongside the Mississippi River. The banks had flooded and the land was deluged. From her window it looked as though the train was running on top of the river, rooster-tail flying, like they were going through pure water.
The country unfolded before them. Women from rural areas were astonished to ride through cities where people pulled clotheslines back and forth between apartment buildings. Georgia O’Connor joined the WAVES out of curiosity, attracted by the smart uniforms, the hope of adventure, and the desire to see whether she could pass the tests. She thought the WAVES were good-looking women and felt proud to be among them. Ava Caudle joined because she had grown up on a North Carolina farm so remote that the most exciting event of the month, she later recollected, was the arrival of the bookmobile. As a girl, she had never seen a movie. Out of high school the only job available to her was as a cosmetologist. All of these women were selected to work in the code-breaking operation. Many would find themselves doing the same work the college-educated women were.
Myrtle Otto enlisted even before her own brothers did. “I had such a yearning to do something,” she said. En route to Cedar Falls, Iowa, where another basic training camp was established at Iowa State Teachers College, she got on a train that left Boston’s South Station and traveled north to Canada; down through Kalamazoo, Michigan; to Chicago; across the Mississippi; and on to Iowa. It was the first time she’d ridden in a sleeper car. At Cedar Falls, the women were issued uniforms. Enlisted Navy women had to wear heavy lisle stockings that made their legs look as thick as logs. The cotton lisle was so stiff that—when the women kneeled and stood up—the shape of the knee remained in the stocking. As they stood for inspection in the freezing Iowa cold, their noses ran and they were not allowed to wipe them. They took showers by numbers, one girl at the first bell, another one at the next, with three minutes to dress after you showered. It was hard to tug a girdle up a wet body in three minutes, so sometimes the women wouldn’t wear anything at all underneath their uniforms as they marched from the showers back to the barracks. It got so cold in Cedar Falls that when the women would put bottles of Coke on the windowsill to chill, the liquid would freeze overnight and pop the bottle top off, and the Coke would expand upward and freeze like a fountain.
A number of the WAVES selected as code breakers met resistance from their families when they enlisted. Ida Mae Olson was born in Colorado and attended a tiny country school where she was the only student in the fifth grade. During the Dirty Thirties her family lived on a farm in eastern Colorado, north of Bethune, where dust storms blew endless thistles that caught in the fence. Her father would stack the thistles and feed the cows with them, because there was no other food to be had. She was working as a nurse’s aide in Denver when her roommate enlisted. She couldn’t afford the rent on her own, so she enlisted too. Her mother objected that “only bad women join the service. You know, wild women.” Ida Mae joined up anyway, and her mother came around. “When I would come home on leave, she’d take pictures of me in uniform. She’d be so proud.”