Legends of the Old West - FRONTLINE WOMEN Ep. 2 | “From the WAAC to Nurses”

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

In the second episode of the two-part documentary series, filmmaker Katrina Parks follows the stories of members of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps and nurses at outposts in the American Southwest. Also featured is a segment from the stage play “Fort Huachuca” by Ailema De Sousa. Visit Assertion Films at www.assertionfilms.com and follow them on Facebook and Instagram. For more details, visit our website www.blackbarrelmedia.com and check out our social media pages. We’re @OldWestPodcast on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Lego Fortnite. Lego Fortnite is the ultimate survival crafting game found within Fortnite. It's not just Fortnite Battle Royale with minifigures. It's an entirely new experience that combines the best of Lego play and Fortnite. Created to give players of all ages, including kids and families,

a safe digital space to play in. Download Fortnite on consoles, PC, cloud services, or Android and play LEGO Fortnite for free. Rated ESRB E10+. Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news.

We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex.

Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. This week on Legends of the Old West, in honor of Women's History Month, we'll look at some of the women in the military who enlisted during World War II. Seldom in the limelight, but working on the frontlines day and night, these women confronted challenging circumstances far beyond what you might expect from a battlefield. This is Episode 2 of the miniseries Frontline Women, and I'm the host, documentary filmmaker Katrina Parks. In this episode, I'll be interviewing acclaimed authors and historians Heidi Ossolier and Jim Kristevic, playwright Ilema de Sousa, family members of women who served, and in some cases we'll hear from the women themselves. From the deserts of Arizona to the jungles of New Guinea and the battlefields in France, these women face

discrimination, war injuries, POW camps, and post-traumatic stress. And while they don't fit the usual image of a soldier, they are war heroes too. recognized their stake in the future of America. They carry no arms and their work is far behind the fighting line. But for every WAC volunteer, another soldier is released for combat duty. Another weapon turned against the Axis. To understand more about how women's roles changed during World War II, I called my colleague Dr. Heidi Oselier, author of Winning Their Place, Arizona Women in Politics, and one of the founders of the Arizona Women's Heritage Trail. Heidi explained how Representative Edith Norse Rogers, Massachusetts' first congresswoman, sponsored a bill in the spring of 1942 to form the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. What she wanted to do was free men up for combat

in the military. So men that were doing clerical work, that were radio operators, mechanics, things like that, they could be freed up to be sent to the front lines and women could take their place. These were military jobs and they were going to be an auxiliary of the military, not quite a vincle rank or status. But despite that, there were a lot of congressmen who believed this would destroy the family. You can't send women outside the home to work. But as the war rolled on, it was a two-front war, and it required that everyone, children, grandmas, all the men, had to be involved. And because of that, you have to change social beliefs in how women are viewed. So it was very, very important that the government get behind

this effort. And this is the first time in U.S. history the federal government actually encourages women to seek work outside the home. There are a lot of newsreels at this time that glamorized female service because there was such a difficult time convincing women to sign up. there was such a difficult time convincing women to sign up. Hat, uniform, and accessories worn by the WACs, all are styled by high fashion designer Hattie Carnegie. The value placed by the Women's Army Corps on meticulous grooming and feminine grace is one of the first lessons learned by the recruit. The ancient jokes about growing into a uniform or reducing to fit it do not hold up in the wax.

Each uniform is custom tailored to ensure every recruit a uniform which meets her individual requirements. They showed women in uniform having their hair done and their nails done and talking about the pretty girls and making it seem like it was a resort spa day or something in the military. The biggest impediment the military had to getting women in the WAC program was from soldiers themselves who would write home and say to their sisters, to their wives, to whoever, don't sign up. 90% of WACs are prostitutes. Half of them are pregnant or have venereal disease.

Here's Barbara Reed who became a yeoman first class in the Navy. In May of 1942, I know I was riding a bus there in Hutchinson coming home from work, and this young man whom I had known in junior college worked for the newspaper there in town and he saw me and he said, why don't you join the army? Because they had signed the bill for the women to join the army at that time. And I said, oh, no way. Colonel Ovetta Culp Hobby, who oversaw the WAC program, believed that an access power conspiracy was at work to discredit the WACs. However, when the Army Military Intelligence Service investigated, they found that male army personnel, jealous soldiers' wives, and disgruntled WACs who had been discharged early were at the root of the problem. Despite all of the negative

propaganda, 150,000 women became WACs. The reality was that women had been involved officially in the military since World War I as yeomen. During World War II, other auxiliaries formed. The WAVES, Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, and the WASPs, Women Air Force Service Pilots. Here's Barbara. I was sworn in December 21,, 1942 in Kansas City, Missouri. Root School in February of 1943 in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Yeoman School in April of 43, Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Then May the 1st, reported to Washington, D.C. My duty there was in the Bureau of Medicine Surgery. I was in charge of the Purple Heart Section. I went into that job not knowing at all what the Purple Heart was. Of course, I soon found out. World War II was the turning point, I believe, in the United States for women to become able to do things that they were before were not allowed to do. In 1943, Roosevelt signed legislation that made the WACs not a mere auxiliary, but a part of the Army, the Women's Army Corps. With an Allied invasion on the horizon in Europe, the WACs now qualified for full military

status, including benefits and rank, and pay commensurate to their male peers. As part of the war effort, women were also recruited to be nurses. Nursing was viewed as a natural extension of a woman's femininity and was already an acceptable profession, thus it met with less public hostility. Hang on, kid. Keep your eyes shut tight and drink. They're moving you back now. Don't give up. Just hang on. The road back is bumpy and maybe the pain blurs your eyes. But listen. The sound of battle grows dim.

When the dizziness stopped, when the fog cleared, an army nurse was at your side. A woman who meant safety and comfort and home to thousands of men before you. A woman who meant all those things to you. As a podcast network, our first priority has always been audio and the stories we're able to share with you. But we also sell merch. And organizing that was made both possible and easy with Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell and grow at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage.

Whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits, Shopify helps you sell everywhere. They have an all-in-one e-commerce platform and in-person POS system, so wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With the internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms, Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers. Shopify has allowed us to share something tangible with the podcast community we've built here, selling our beanies, sweatshirts, and mugs to fans of our shows without taking up too much time from all the other work we do to bring you even more great content. And it's not just us. Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. Shopify is also the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and millions of other entrepreneurs of every size across 175 countries. Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash realm, all lowercase.

Go to shopify.com slash r-e-a-l-m now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in. shopify.com slash realm. The women that sign up have to have training. And it takes a couple years to go through nursing school. Usually it's a three-year program. And they have to have certain math and science backgrounds. But the nursing cadet program was instituted early on in the war. And the government actually paid for women to go to nursing school. And they had condensed classes. And this was really a boon for all women,

but especially poor women who couldn't normally afford to go to school, and especially women of color who were often kept from those programs. Some of the women who had entered the nursing cadet program had already received training through the Presbyterian Mission in Ganado, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation. A unique nursing school primarily for Native American women had been formed under the direction of missionary Dr. Clarence Salisbury, who had been training women since the 1930s to play a role in improving health care. The women who came to the nursing school were survivors of challenging times and circumstances.

Here's Judith Ledoux sharing her mother, Ida Birdsbill's story. We're from a small tribe in North Dakota, two tribes, Mandan and the Hidatsa. The Mandan tribe, there was a lot of mystery about them because they were wiped out by a smallpox epidemic in 1837. Almost 90% or more of the tribe died from smallpox within a period of a few weeks. And so for my mother, she grew up on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. It's Mandan, Hiloza. And she was an orphan at the age of three.

So she had to kind of be passed around from family to family that could take her in. She wasn't formally adopted. She had a very hard life, very hard. The thing that really shaped her life while she was young is she was 16 years old and she was in high school and she came home and she was loaded up into a fancy sedan and taken to a white man's house where he bought her for a team of horses and a buggy and he married her at 16 against her will she didn't know who he was and she had plans on going on to school you know she was very smart she was very good in the hard sciences and that was her interest very good in the hard sciences and that was her interest. So this completely derailed her plans at 16. So what she did is she refused to eat for two weeks. That

is how strong she was. And so the man, he brought her back to her family and wanted his horse and buggy back because she wouldn't eat and he was afraid she'd die. Her brother took her to the school for nurses and she got very high grades. And as I understand it, she was number two in the state on her nursing exams and then went into the army when the war started. To find out more about the training program for nurses in Ganado, Arizona, I reached out to author Jim Kristevic, whose book Medicine Women recently won the New Mexico, Arizona History Book Award. I grew up on Ganado Mission Campus when I was a child, and I would see images of the nurses, a very famous photo that was used in Time magazine of the optometrist fitting a woman

for eyeglasses and the native nurses standing next to her, images like that. And those were interesting, and I knew that had something to do with the hospital where my mom worked as a nurse. The way the campus was set up, it emerged as economics permitted. So Dr. Clarence Salisbury gets there in 1927. He said, saving souls is nice, but we need to save lives. And it wasn't really until 1929 that the large stone hospital that's still on the campus was built. That hospital became kind of like a theater piece. People went, whoa, that was now the biggest building any of them had ever seen. And so it was his idea to do the nurse. He saw he needed ambassadors. And so in this case, Salisbury thought, well, if these women who are all related to the people here, or they look like

someone who's related to the people here, they will connect with people. They know the language. They will be a way to carry forward this idea of modern medicine. The nursing school was a natural extension of the Ganado Mission School, where some of the nurses had boarded as children. It was a less harsh environment than similar schools of the era because they were boarding on the reservation and could see family. Carolyn Holmes, whose beloved aunt Charlotte Adele Slivers had attended the mission school, been a star pupil, and then became one of the graduates of the nursing program,

shared her aunt's story with Jim. Charlotte Adele Slivers was in the first graduating class in that school. Her father was a medicine singer. He had survived a long walk, had grown up during that. And she was very close to him and seeing the ways that different herbs would help people get well. So that had impressed upon her as being very important. And I'm sure was no small part of her wanting to pursue medicine. As the school grew in reputation, women came from reservations all over the U.S. to attend.

Salisbury wanted to keep them sheltered in the school environment and occupied so that they could not be distracted from their goals or led astray by men. It was a highly regimented environment, but the women were motivated, and as the war heated up, they had encouragement from their communities. In fact, a lot of the Indian newspapers around the country would talk about the women of the tribes, the warrior women that were going to help the war effort, and were not going to be outshone by the men who were enlist to help the war effort and were not going to be outshone by the men who were enlisting for the war effort as well. It was unbelievable the response that they got that women too wanted to work as nurses in the field hospitals in South Pacific and Europe

and wherever else they were sent. Many of the approximately 800 Native American women who served in the nursing corps had real combat experiences that shaped their lives forever. Here's Judith about her mother, Ida Birdsbill. She realized that she had the education that would actually make her an officer and that it was a much better choice than working on the reservation. And as far as being on the reservation, I think what prepared her for being in a MASH unit in New Guinea, which was very difficult, she cried about it, that she had some friends that were nurses. One killed herself and two of them had to go into a mental institution just from handling the living conditions there in the jungle, living in a tent, the war going on, people dying. It was just an incredibly difficult situation for most people. But for her,

she was prepared for hardship. So she did very well. Here's Jim describing Charlotte Adele Sliver's tour in the Philippines. The story that she told her niece, Carolyn, was that they were essentially moving behind a column of armored vehicles, tanks, moving through the jungle there in the Philippines. And then they were attacked and there was explosions going on and mayhem, just chaos. And she had run away from an explosion and was captured by the Japanese and marched off. And one theory is that maybe they thought she was another Filipino that was living there because she looked like she could be a Filipino. They thought of Americans as white. So they took her to this kind of improvised internment camp or, you know, people were essentially just sitting out in the open air tied up to stakes. They couldn't run away. And while she was out there, you know, she would kind

of watch what they were doing. They would try to interrogate her because they knew that she was with the Americans. She had a uniform on, but she would just speak Navajo back to them. Eventually at night, she was able to kind of slip her bonds and ran off in the jungle. She could see things like smoke from campfires or she would hear a machine sound and just run toward that and was able to elude people when they chased after her. This was all at night. Another thing that she also would look for, obviously if tanks move to the jungle they leave quite a track. So she just kind of found the track that they had left and just ran after that and then caught up with them again. I was able to reconnect with her unit and thankfully was not shot. No friendly fire. Before her tour in the Philippines,

Lieutenant Charlotte Adele Slivers had been stationed in Europe where she made a lasting connection. She was working at an air base. What she was there to do was basically to give medical services to the air crews who were running the airports. The one story she did tell was that there was a pilot flying back from Germany who was American and the plane was on fire as he was trying to land on the runway and he landed the plane and the plane hit like the landing gear buckled out the fire must have damaged it and it was scraping sparking down the runway on fire and she and other people they had

to run out you know and pull the guy out of the flaming cockpit. He had been shot through the actual metal carapace of the aircraft. And they pulled him out and got him on a stretch and they had to run him into the hospital. And so she had to take care of this busted up pilot who was scorched in a lot of places. And she ended up marrying him. So there you go. So that worked out okay. While the Native American nurses were treated the same as their white peers, African American nurses were not. The Army was segregated, and despite chronic nurse shortages and plenty of training and applicants,

very few Black women were accepted into the nursing program. Lieutenant Prudence Burrell was interviewed by the Library of Congress and shared stories about the discrimination she encountered on the battlefield. When I went into the service, I went to Fort Huachuca. And they began to send the hospital units. One group went to China, Burma, India. Another one went to Warrington, England. And our hospital, 268 Station Hospital, went to the South Pacific, which was staged in Australia, then up into New Guinea, Milne Bay, New Guinea. And that's where we worked for 14 months and while we were there we

could nurse only black soldiers and just down from us one white soldier was severely hemorrhaging and they brought him up to our hospital and we said well we're sorry but the blood is labeled. And you know we knew the difference of people. And they had labeled it A for African with their stupid selves. And so we told him the blood is labeled A so we can't give it. He said, I don't give a damn. Don't let me die. So that's why I've said if he's still living, he's walking around with this A blood. He didn't turn black. That's why I've said if he's still living, he's walking around with this A blood. He didn't turn black.

The fact that Lieutenant Burrell made it overseas at all is a testament to her courage and determination. Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona was where 350 black nurses were first sent for training, and it was here that they experienced segregation at its worst. For African American women in the nursing corps, right from the get-go, there were quotas. How many Black women could be part of these nursing corps? And it was only 10%, and they rarely got even close to those numbers. During World War II, there was tremendous shortages of women. It was just egregious that Black women were not being allowed into the nursing court to help out with the situation. It was just blatant discrimination. We had segregated armies, segregated bases, and because of that, these women were often overlooked or excluded.

And when they did come, they were actually mostly sent to southern Arizona, to Fort Huachuca, which is just outside of Tucson in a very remote area. And Fort Huachuca had long been a place where African American troops had been sent. It was home for the legendary Buffalo Soldiers in the 19th century. That is where black women were sent to train, but also to administer because they were relegated to only serving black men or prisoners of war. And there were quite a few German prisoners of war in this country. Black nurses found that they were not only segregated, they were not treated with respect as officers, and that was really a hardship on these women.

They had worked hard, they trained hard, and they were treated with disrespect. In Arizona, businesses and schools could choose to enforce a law that allowed segregation, and so many of the black nurses were denied entry and or service at restaurants and other businesses where German POWs could enter. It was horribly demeaning, and even POWs noted the unjust treatment of black Americans in their own country. I spoke to British playwright Ilema de Sousa about her play Fort Huachuca and the difference between the hopes the women had when they enlisted and the different reality they found. You're an American, it's patriotism, you're

like you're doing what you're supposed to do, you know, fight like stepping up to the cause, it was the promise of equality, it was good pay, you were going to get treated better, promise of a better future, initially. And that is not what they got at all. They were told that they were allowed to go into certain buildings, certain places, but then they got turned away. The dining halls, everything completely segregated. And with regards to Fort Huachuca, completely segregated and with regards to Fort Huachuca and even the German prisoners' fort could walk into places where they couldn't. Some of them got

talked down to or got insulted by some of these prisoners of war and wouldn't be reprimanded. That's all, nothing would be done. Here's an excerpt from the play in which Ilema's main characters, who are all newly arrived at the fort, share their dreams and different points of view. I mean, this is the first step. Do you know how many possibilities come from this? Get to see changes. Them letting us in the army is already a huge change.

I'm not talking just in the army, Thelma. I'm talking desegregation. Whoa! Slow down, Miss Creole. I accept equal rights. I don't want to be sharing the same neighborhood as these folks. Desegregation is the future, which means more equal rights along the road, and it will be your choice with how you exercise these rights. Exactly. This is our country, too, and we have a right to be a part of it. Our names will be in the paper, even in the history books. Ah, here we go. The history books are filled with white folks and how they found America and whatnot.

Ain't no place for us in those books. I say we make our own books. I spoke to Ilema about why this story still resonates today. to Ilema about why this story still resonates today. Reading multiple stories of these nurses, there was just this sense of waiting, waiting for change to happen. And I feel like that's, it's still here. There's still a, okay, so when's it, when's this going to happen? When are we just not going to have to keep fighting for this? There's just this notion of black women having to fight for equality and being on the front lines and not being regarded for their work kind of just being

brushed under the rug and there's still that sense of actually no we're here we're present these women did this incredible things let's not forget about the black women who are doing incredible things now so it's just that fight to just keep them in the spotlight and just keep their stories alive. While their service was quite different from what they had anticipated, in the end these heroic nurses paved the way for generations of women to come. That's this week on Legends of the Old West. Thank you for listening to the miniseries Frontline Women. These episodes are executive produced by Black Barrel Media and Assertion Films.

Music by Peter Wingard and James Sale. Sound mixing by Thaddeus Homan. If you'd like to hear more episodes, please let us know. Send us a message on Facebook or Instagram at Assertion Films or Black Barrel Media. The miniseries Frontline Women is made possible with generous support from Arizona Humanities. That's it. It's the best deal. The highest cash back. The most savings on your shopping. So join Rakuten and start getting cash back at Sephora, Old Navy, Expedia, and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start your shopping with Rakuten to save money at over 750 stores. Join for free at Rakuten.ca or get the Rakuten app. That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N.