The FReeper Foxhole Remembers The Women's Air Raid Defense (1941-1945) - Mar. 9th, 2005

Aviation History Magazine | May 2002 | Ron Gilliam

[SAMWolf]

Lord,

Keep our Troops forever in Your care

Give them victory over the enemy...

Grant them a safe and swift return...

Bless those who mourn the lost.
.

FReepers from the Foxhole join in prayer
for all those serving their country at this time.

.................................................................. .................... ...........................................

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The Women's Air Raid Defense: Protecting the Hawaiian Islands

In the dark days after Pearl Harbor, many of the islands' young women joined the Women's Air Raid Defense to help prevent another disaster.

A torrential tropical rain was falling on the evening of January 12, 1942, as a small convoy of cars drove through the main gate of Fort Shafter, headquarters of the U.S. Army's Hawaiian Department. The buildings there were bullet-pocked and fire-blackened from the December 7 air raid by the Japanese. At the end of the road to the Signal Corps yards on the mud flats, an Army Air Forces officer and a dozen young women, saddle shoes and bobby socks visible beneath their raincoats, emerged from the cars. After checking in at a sentry box, they gingerly filed over 50 yards of slotted duckboards to a tall wooden "penthouse" perched atop a low concrete warehouse -- Building 307. Another guard checked their identity badges before allowing them to climb the exterior wooden staircase to enter a blackout vestibule shrouded in rain-damp Army blankets. Then, after hanging up their rain gear, steel helmets and gas masks, they stepped into a cavernous, well-lit room.

Women's Air Raid Defense (WARD) staffers on the job in Oahu's information and control center in 1943. On the right is the radar plotting board, which displays data received from radar stations around the island. Workers positioned markers on the large "shuffleboard" at the center of the room to keep track of contacts.

The room was nearly filled by a huge table -- a plotting board -- with the familiar outline of the Hawaiian Islands superimposed by a grid pattern. Around it, Signal Corps plotters sat or stood, talking intermittently with distant radar operators, code-named "Oscars," over telephone headsets. Using implements like shuffleboard sticks, the plotters -- known as "Rascals" -- were placing and moving small plastic markers on the board to indicate the locations and status of their Oscars' radar contacts. Overseeing the action from a balcony running around two sides of the room sat the senior controller, the officer in charge. With him were military and civil aviation liaison officers, who correlated the markers with their service's flights. If they could not identify a given track, the senior controller would have the pursuit officer, a fighter pilot, scramble interceptors to visually identify the "bogy," and, if it was an enemy plane, shoot it down.

One by one, during lulls in activity, the young women stepped up to the plotters, adjusted their headsets and waited until they heard, "Rascal, this is Oscar, can you read me?" All around Oahu that night, radar operators were astonished when a self-assured female voice replied, "Oscar, this is Rascal. I read you loud and clear." Women's Air Raid Defense plotters had just taken over the night shift at "Little Robert," the Air Defense Command's information and control center (ICC). For the first time, American women had officially replaced male soldiers in a war zone and were directly participating in the defense of American territory.

Little Robert had been built by Signal Corps troops in the autumn of 1941 as the hub of the Aircraft Warning Service. Radar contacts, ground observers' sightings and Wheeler Field's interceptor status came into the ICC via a buried telephone cable running around the island. The system was tested on September 27, with Army pursuit planes satisfactorily intercepting "attacking" carrier-based Navy aircraft. The radars had detected and tracked both Japanese attack waves on December 7, and even two cruiser-launched scout planes that had reconnoitered Pearl Harbor and the Lahaina Roads alternate fleet anchorage just before the raid, but an effective air defense operations system was lacking. Once the shock resulting from the attack had subsided, the Army created the Air Defense Command to control the 14th Pursuit Wing and the Anti-Aircraft Artillery Brigade, plus available Navy and Marine fighters and anti-aircraft weapons. Brigadier General Howard C. Davidson, the commander of the 14th Pursuit Wing, was appointed Air Defense commander, and the ICC became his operations center.


Fort Shafter

Davidson also had to give up ICC staff from Oahu -- where air raids were expected at any time -- to create aircraft warning units for Samoa, Fiji and New Caledonia. The role of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in Britain's air defense centers was well known, but conservative congressional opposition in 1941 had blocked establishment of an American equivalent. (Created in mid-1942, the Women's Army Corps eventually staffed 27 aircraft warning units.) Davidson appealed to the War Department for an emergency executive order creating a WAAF-like organization for Hawaii. Executive Order 9063 was approved on Christmas Day.

General Davidson telephoned a Honolulu couple he knew, asking for their help in finding some bright, trustworthy and reliable young women. Alexander and Una Walker were kamaainas (lifetime Hawaii residents), and Una knew many local women through her Red Cross work. When Davidson called back an hour later, they had a list of 20 names for him.

The day after Christmas, Davidson met with Mrs. Walker and the 20 young women at the huge pink Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Being kamaainas like the Walkers, the women shared the trauma of December 7 and had personal as well as patriotic reasons for volunteering. To Nancy Hedemann and others, "It was the defense of our home which came clear, then service to your country." Pat Morgan, from a New England medical missionary family that had arrived in Hawaii in 1828, had found the raid "at once exciting and terrifying" and felt they "were all consumed with an urge to do something violent."


General Howard C. Davidson, 1942

General Davidson addressed them in an upstairs meeting room, overlooking white beaches strung with barbed wire. Due to tight security, there was little specific he could tell them, only that they would be doing critical secret work for the Army, replacing men for duty in forward areas. They should be between 20 and 34 years of age and childless, be able to pass a physical examination and an Army Intelligence background investigation, be willing to work any shift and abide by special regulations. They would be appointed to the civil service, with pay of $120 per month, and would be furnished uniforms and quarters at Fort Shafter, with officers' mess privileges. "[We] would be considered officers," Hedemann recalled, "so that in the event of capture by the enemy, [we] would be treated according to the…international law regarding prisoners of war."

For an organizational name, Davidson suggested Women's Air Defense. The women inserted the word Raid to make a more euphonious acronym, and thus the WARD was born. Administratively, it was known as the WARD Detachment, Company A, 515th Signal Aircraft Warning Regiment (Special), reporting to the commanding general, 7th Fighter Command (formerly 14th Pursuit Wing). The WARD was transferred to the Army Air Forces in 1943. The WARDs-to-be were to report to the Army-requisitioned Iolani Palace on January 1 for formal induction and training, and were asked to bring any interested friends who met the standards.

Davidson soon realized that the population of eligible kamaainas was too small. He also learned, however, that some military wives wanted to stay in Hawaii, in spite of air raid alarms and invasion rumors, and he obtained authority to take anyone going into the WARD off the evacuation lists. About half of those who gathered at Iolani Palace on New Year's Day were military wives. Many had witnessed the horrors of the December 7 raid close up. Joy Shaw, wife of a captain at the Marine barracks, remembered driving behind "a truckload of bodies stacked to the top like logs, naked, blackened by oil, smoke and blood, boys from the various ships." To Kathy Cooper, 19-year-old Navy daughter and wife, Hickam Field had looked from her parents' home "like a great sea of flame about a mile long." She felt at that moment that "If a Japanese pilot had walked into the house, I would have tried to kill him."

[Professional Engineer]

It seems `eagle nebula` sent a bunch of freep mails to all the TX freepers. Anywhere from 5 to 7 copies of the same thing, asking for legal help for a "friend" of his.

[snippy_about_it]

Wow. Sounds frantic.

Anyway, I liked your quick wit response to your wife. We've sure got a funny bunch here. ;-)

[snippy_about_it]

I think I'll sleep tonight

Oh sure, you'll be able to sleep but I'll be up all night wanting to know what this is all about!

I may resign myself to thinking it has something to do with the times and the China/Japan/Mongolia thing. Maybe the poor Mongolians didn't know what to do, attacked from all sides. LOL. Who knows.

I am hoping Iris7 has a better clue too or Phil. I need sleep. ;-)

[w_over_w]

Okay sweets . . . we'll see what they say and I have another contact. Goodnight.

[SAMWolf]

We've been having summer weather for about a week. Everything is blooming right now.

[SAMWolf]

Ok. Maybe he just made it popular?

[SAMWolf]

I love math, physics, geometry, locating and analyzing those vectors, arcs etc sounds like playtime to me.

ARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!! My worst subjects. I did better at History and Geography. :-)

[PhilDragoo]

DJ MacWAAC working turntable at Aukland rave

SCR-270

Experimental "Susan Hayward"-type Radar

SCR-270

1907 Indiana enacts the nation’s 1st involuntary sterilization law based on eugenics.
Intended "to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists."

That would be this guy:

[Iris7]

During WWII there were a very, very many places for a good woman. Bletchley Park was mostly women. Lots of radio operators were women. Firing long range guns in those days used ten place log tables, maybe twenty, I forget. Rotation of the Earth was a real factor, depended on latitude and direction of fire, natch.

Nowadays the Air Force will take a good person with a math degree in a second. Gobs of operational analysis going on. War is going into space right quick. Got to think in terms of delta V and orbit change. Going to get rough. ICBM interception, separating spoofers from decoys from warheads.

Never, ever, enough good people. A "ready, willing, and able" is always welcome.

[Iris7]

Well, google failed me on this one. "When in worry or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." Sounds and meter come from a Germanic language, through Middle English, not Latin nor Semitic, and old Greek is Greek to me. Maybe from the Eurasian steppe or even farther back. Most of our swear words come from Germanic languages.

I became convinced that salty language in the Navy style has endured for millennia. The true swab who can't speak the language would have as his first spoken word "Sh__" and his second "moth__ ______". The third is "Aye Aye, Sir."

[SAMWolf]

Morning Phil Dragoo

DJ MacWAAC working turntable at Aukland rave

Experimental "Susan Hayward"-type Radar

That would be this guy:

You're on a roll Tonight!! A definate RadarSpankenTruppen candidate!

[E.G.C.]

BTTT!!!!!!!

[alfa6]

I heard of the Aviators Rule courtesy of Heinlein as well, only it had to do with a story from one of the compilations that were published towards the end of his carrer.

IIRC he was standing radio watch on a carrier, early 30s during a fleet exercise when a flight of planes could not find home. Apparently the flight leader was following the Avaitors Rule in order to get a bearing home.

I suspect that this is one of those hoary old sayings whose origin will probably never be pinned down.

BTW ol RAH was a Kansas City native mostly. Born in Butler Mo and moved to KC at an early age, graduated from Central High School around 1921 and then went to Annaplois.

Regards

alfa6 ;>}

[Wneighbor]

Never, ever, enough good people. A "ready, willing, and able" is always welcome.

hehehe... I checked after 9-11, they don't want me now.... when I was of an age, I was raising kids. Now the kids are grown and I'd be perfect for one of those mathmatically related jobs but ~sigh~ ya know, they think I'm too old!

(and i gots another birthday in 12 days)

[snippy_about_it]

The true swab who can't speak the language would have as his first spoken word "Sh__" and his second "moth__ ______". The third is "Aye Aye, Sir."

You know my mother was Navy and she always said I had the mouth of a sailor. LOL.

[snippy_about_it]

Susan Hayward Radar. LOL.

[snippy_about_it]

Hey, I've got another one of those birthdays in 9 days.

[Colonel_Flagg]

Good morning, Foxhole!

Thanks for the read this morning - how you manage to keep coming up with such interesting subjects is a wonder to me. I appreciate the welcome break I get each day!

Hope you're off to a great start today!

[Iris7]

I read that story. The aviators were reading "the back of the loop", and so traveled at right angles to the loop bearing to see if the loop angle closed to port or stargboard (left of right hand side). Turned out they were too far away to get back by dark as I recall. No VHF radio direction finding, only MF, so they couldn't find the ship after dark unless they saw the searchlights.

As I recall these were float planes because they put down in the water. Don't recall Navy amphibs used on carriers about 1934, maybe Alpha6 knows.

[Iris7]

Yeah, they won't look at me either. They just want the young, dumb, enthusiastic, and obedient. Got a bunch of young officers who don't want a subordinate old enough to be their father.

Perhaps their fear is justified. Out come a batch of orders, the usual sort of stuff, and the old buck sargent takes the young captain, colonel, whatever aside and tells him, "Sir, you don't want to do that."

The young officer knows that the old boy knows what he is saying, so he has to say to the troops either "I just now figured out my orders are full of (stuff), forget about them", or he can tell the old sargent "Did I hear you say that you want to be a private?" to which the old boy will answer, "No Sir, I just don't want to kill the lads for no reason."

The young officer tells the old timer, "Get lost, PRIVATE." The old timer responds, "With all due respect, Sir, I demand a Court Martial."

See?