Digital Extras

5.26.2001
Part 1: WAACs led the way for women in military

BY ELIZABETH ABBOTT
Journal Staff Writer

On this Memorial Day weekend, we are publishing the first in an occasional series of stories about Rhode Island's female veterans. A group of them is trying to raise $150,000 to erect a memorial in the Rhode Island Veterans Cemetery, in Exeter. This story profiles a Providence woman who was one of the first to join the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps after it was created by Congress at the outset of World War II.

It was September 1942 and war was raging in Europe and the Pacific, but it hadn't yet touched the life of Charlotte Kwasha, a petite, fun-loving clerk in the tax assessor's office at Providence City Hall.

"He said 'I dare you to sign your name,' " Kwasha recently recalled.

So she did, not bothering to read the fine print, believing her mischievous girlfriends when they said they would be right behind her. When she realized what she had done — that she had just agreed to join the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, of all things — Kwasha begged the recruiter to tear up the form. But he couldn't.

"I was stuck," she said.

She was 32 then, a daughter of Russian immigrants who owned three triple-deckers and a junk business in the Smith Hill section of Providence. A single woman, she had lived in Hartford, Conn., and New York City for a while. But her heart had always remained in Providence.

"I was in trouble. How was I going to tell my father? How was I going to tell my sister?" Kwasha remembered.

When she finally told her sister, Haddie, about her fate, just days before boarding a troop train for basic training, Haddie cried.

Kwasha is 92 now and living in an assisted-care facility on Providence's East Side. A vibrant lady with bright brown eyes, she has a knack for telling stories. She is also a rarity — one of the few female veterans left in Rhode Island from the World War II era.

Time has not tarnished her spirit. Twice during a two-hour interview, she asked that the tape recorder be turned off so she could tell a particularly racy story.

It hasn't faded her memory, either. Like yesterday, she can remember her three years of military service, an extraordinary adventure that took lighthearted Kwasha from a dusty cavalry post in Des Moines, where she once shared a cup of coffee with Eleanor Roosevelt, to the jungles of New Guinea and the Philippines under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Hardship? Oh yes, she knew hardship. She lost 39 pounds during her tour of duty, dropping to a measly 87 pounds by the time she came home in October 1945. The Philippines were especially trying, Kwasha said. Impetigo swept through the women stationed there, though she managed to keep the skin infection at bay.

"I used the GI soap, which was made of lye. I didn't have a blemish on my skin," she said.

The Women's Auxiliary Army Corps was a fledgling organization when Kwasha reported for basic training on Oct. 12, 1942. Created by Congress in May of that year, its mission was to establish an elite corps of highly skilled women who could replace men in clerical and technical jobs, freeing them for combat.

"I want a women's corps right away and I don't want any excuses," Gen. George C. Marshall reportedly roared when critics expressed opposition to the idea of women in uniform.

At the time, a mocking press called the WAACs "wackies" and "petticoat army," among other pejoratives. But the commander of the first WAAC Training Center, who would later become the first female colonel in the Army, told the skeptics she meant business.

". . . It will be no glamour girls' playhouse," Oveta Culp Hobby vowed.

Kwasha was in the second company of WAACs trained in Des Moines.

"I lived in a hotel that used to be a brothel," she remembered.

It was filthy, and the WAACs had to clean it before they could move in. A photograph from that time shows a 5-foot, 1-inch Kwasha standing in the doorway, a cap on her head and a smile on her face. Her uniform looks like it fits, though finding one small enough was a constant challenge, she said.

After basic training and administrative school, it was on to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. Compared to dusty Des Moines, where the temperature in the winter plummeted to 18 below, Fort Sam Houston was "utopia," Kwasha said. It was a beautiful base made of white stucco and brick, where the WAACs never wanted for dates — even if most of the men had no business dating.

"They would all take off their wedding bands, but you would know because there would be an indentation or a discoloration," she said.

Work wasn't easy. Kwasha's job was to keep track of the thousands of people who worked at the base, civilians and military alike. This task was made more difficult by men, who resented the WAACs for being there, she said.

Discrimination against WAACs was common then. A slander campaign that painted them as loose, immoral women became so vicious in 1943 that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had to step in. Interestingly, Roosevelt blamed it on the press. He called it a "deliberate newspaper job."

In Kwasha's case, male colleagues refused to give her a lift when she was sent to far-flung corners of the base to get information.

"They made our lives miserable, all of them, because we were the first females," she recalled.

At Fort Sam Houston, Kwasha decided that she wanted to attend officers' training school. But the Army had other plans.

"I was assigned to MacArthur," she said.

MacArthur was in New Guinea when Kwasha left the states in September 1944. He had already suffered a devastating defeat in the Philippines and was trying to work his way back, via New Guinea, to fulfill his famous pledge: "I shall return." The ship carrying the women to the South Pacific zig-zagged during its 15-day voyage to avoid being hit by Japanese submarines.

"It was very frightening," she recalled.

In New Guinea and the Philippines, Kwasha's job was to provide recreation for the other WAACs, who by this time were just WACs, since Congress abolished the corps' auxiliary status in 1943. She oversaw the construction of recreation halls in both locations and acted as a chaperone when the men asked the WACs to attend one of their parties.

Kwasha never witnessed combat, but she frequently saw some of its ugly side effects. One of her tentmates lost her mind as a result of the atrocities she saw in Leyte, she said. In Manila, she had to clean a dining hall that had been used by the Japanese as a torture chamber.

"There was blood splattered on the walls," she recalled.

But none of what happened to Kwasha in those years — not having to eat the Spam, bully beef and other Army rations, not the challenges that went along with being one of the first women to join an all-male Army, not even the shock of finding herself in the Army when she didn't intend to join — bothered her, she said. Why was that? Kwasha paused before answering.

"Life was good to me," she finally said.

She came from a loving family, where money wasn't an issue.

"When you have a buck in your pocket, you have a feeling nothing's going to happen to you," she explained.

After the war, Kwasha went to work for a Jewish war veterans organization in Providence. She officially retired at age 72, but continued working three days a week until the age of 83. She never married. These days, she is helping to plan the effort to create a memorial to Rhode Island's female veterans in the state cemetery in Exeter.

Donations may be sent to the Rhode Island Women Veterans Memorial Project, 645 New London Ave., Cranston, R.I. 02920.