The Army began running ads, pasting flyers and posters in public places, and issuing press releases. An article in a Minnesota newspaper noted the recruiting effort and reported that “more than 100 Twin Cities girls have gone. Phyllis La Due is one; she wrote to her parents that she has found many St. Paul girls at Arlington Farms and the work is ‘exciting.’”
The Army launched training courses at cooperating colleges, including Winthrop College in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The instructor, Ruth W. Stokes, head of the Math and Astronomy Department, wrote her superiors urging them to budget another math teacher, to help meet the demands of the “secret war course.” Stokes’s letter gives a sense of the frenzied nationwide competition for female math majors:
The Ballistics Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground asked for [Winthrop’s] entire class of 14 majors. David Taylor Model Basin Engineering Laboratory asked for all the class and further suggested that the U.S. Bureau of Ships could employ all the girls Winthrop could train, for engineering assistants. Langley Field offered employment at $2400 to the first 6 of my students who applied.… I had a telegram and a letter last week from Rear Admiral H. S. Howard, literally begging me for as many as six girls with majors in mathematics.… Of the 34 senior students I had in the Cryptography class last spring, 33 were offered employment with the Signal Corps, at the initial salary of $1970. The one not accepted was of foreign parentage, Syrian. In the last year the mathematics department at Winthrop College has trained and placed in essential war work more than 50 young women.
Arlington Hall also did its best to lure WACs from other Army units. A pamphlet was printed for military women, which made working at Arlington Hall sound like a spa vacation. Titled Private Smith Goes to Washington—the popular James Stewart movie had premiered in 1939—the cover featured a young woman in an Army uniform with a handbag and suitcase and, in the background, the Washington Monument and Tidal Basin with cherry blossoms in bloom. Inside was a photo of Arlington Hall with its lovely facade, an American flag flying high. “Arlington Hall has been acclaimed as one of the most beautiful buildings in the South,” the pamphlet enthused, describing it as being “five miles down a beautiful, swift, tree-lined road from Washington, the Nation’s Capital.”
Emphasizing the glamour of the work, the pamphlet traced Private Smith’s journey, saying that she “alights from the bus, crosses the lovely stretch of walk, opens the great door and walks into the subdued bustle of Arlington Hall. This is no ordinary Army post. There is an atmosphere of excitement and mystery here which starts her blood tingling even as she crosses the threshold.”
More photos were scattered enticingly through the pamphlet, which touted the barracks (“bathtubs and showers”), the food (“tempting, nutritious dishes”), the clothing (“smartly tailored dress uniforms”), and the career opportunities. It praised the PX, the beauty parlor, the exciting moment of mail call. It noted that a WAC’s basic pay was the same as a man’s: $50 a month plus food, lodging, clothing, medical and dental care, and benefits including life insurance. There was a quote from a private. “The $50 I get every month is all velvet—all mine! When I was a civilian, I never had that much left after all my bills were paid.”
The pamphlet attracted about a thousand WACs to Arlington Hall—where they got the “stinkinest jobs that there were to have,” in Wilma Berryman’s view. (Women made up most of the seven thousand civilian employees at Arlington Hall, for a civilian-to-military ratio of about seven to one.) The WAC barracks were so primitive that women had to shovel coal into potbellied stoves to heat them. Some WACs were billeted in horses’ stables at a nearby Army post. The women living in the stables were called “Hobby’s Horses,” in homage to Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby, the Texas newswoman who headed the WACs. Many were put to work in the Arlington Hall machine room. Some were placed on security duty, made to sit in chairs and guard doors. One WAC took her job so seriously that she barred a general from entering Wilma Berryman’s office on official business. When he protested, telling the WAC who he was, she shouted, “I don’t care if you’re a colonel; you can’t go in there!”
Stinking though some of the jobs may have been, the U.S. Army—unlike the Navy—did allow its military women to be deployed overseas. Some WACs were trained in cryptography and sent to the war theater to encode American messages. They went to France, Australia, and New Guinea, where they worked in bunkers, basements, and fenced-in compounds.
Others were trained as radio intercept operators, manning clandestine receiving posts at Two Rock Ranch, a coastal station in California, and Vint Hill Farms, the intercept station set up in a red barn at a farm in northern Virginia. It was a welcome career opportunity, but one that, for some, came at a psychic cost. Norma Martell, one of the WACs assigned to Vint Hill, had grown up in West Virginia, the eleventh child of a subsistence farmer. She won a full scholarship to a nearby college, but her family could not raise the $7 bus fare, so she did not go.
After joining the WACs, Norma found herself arriving at Vint Hill on the same day the men working there were departing. “All the men in that unit went overseas and died on the beaches within a month,” she recalled in a 1999 interview. Traumatized by what became of the men she helped free for service, she embraced pacifism and became a Quaker. Her work was so secret that she couldn’t confide her guilt to anyone—not her parents, not her friends, not a therapist, not a pastor, not then and not ever.
Some WACs got assignments that were challenging and important, but in a much less painful way. In May 1945, two WACs working at the Vint Hill intercept station—their last names were Regan and Solek—were assigned to test Arlington Hall security by seeing if they could penetrate the code-breaking compound and steal classified information. The two resourceful women were put up at a nearby hotel and told to apply for a job. They did not know anything about the layout, nor how the system worked. They came to the front gate wearing civilian clothes, said they wished to apply for work, and were admitted and given visitors’ badges. They acquainted themselves with the compound, went to the PX and started chatting, learned what badges gave entry into certain buildings, altered their visitors’ badges accordingly, stole more badges from some coats lying around, and proceeded to wander around taking classified documents from desks and drawers. They turned in everything to an intelligence officer at the end of the day. The next day they did exactly the same thing. Nobody reported the badges or documents missing. The escapade found its way into the Washington Post, which noted the breach in a gossip item headlined SECRET WAR DOCUMENTS PROVE ABOUT AS HARD TO GET AS A COLD.