So Others Might Fight
Mechanics
The most vital weapon employed during the war was often a wrench wielded by the soldiers who served as mechanics. An “ambidextrous corps of worker-fighters,” these men and women did whatever was necessary to maintain and repair vehicles and weapons systems. “Without them,” noted National Geographic in 1942, “not a wheel could turn . . . not a tank could run or a plane fly.” Mechanics were vital to naval operations as well.
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Nurses
About 65,000 nurses served in the army and navy, and most were women. Hundreds worked just behind the front lines, contending with the perils of combat as well as its bloody results. Thousands more worked farther along the “chain of evacuation” on hospital trains and ships, aboard medical transport planes, and in station hospitals abroad and stateside. One nurse recalled “hours of giving injections, anesthetizing, ripping off clothes, stitching gaping wounds, of amputations, sterilizing instruments, settling the treated patients into their beds, covering the wounded we could not save.”
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Chaplains
Nearly 9,000 Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish army chaplains served during the war; hundreds more served in the navy. Although unarmed, many accompanied troops into combat. They were required to give regular “character guidance” and venereal disease lectures, but in religious services and personal conferences, they offered spiritual and moral support for scared, battle-weary soldiers. Chaplains rescued the wounded and attended the dying. They conducted services for the dead, assisted with registration of graves, and wrote letters of condolence to bereaved families.
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Red Cross Workers
Red Cross volunteers and staff offered a “friendly hand” to America’s fighting men and women abroad. Its camp service branch provided counseling, family information, even financial assistance. Its service clubs—often in makeshift quarters—offered recreation and meals, barbershops, and laundries. “Clubmobiles” brought coffee and doughnuts to troops in the field. Red Cross social workers and nurses served in military hospitals. Blood banks collected and distributed 13.4 million pints of blood during the war. Other workers coordinated relief programs for Allied POWs and civilian war refugees.
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Drivers and Flyers
U.S. military services operated a transportation network within the United States, across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and within war zones. Trains, ships, and aircraft—many flown by Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs)—provided essential connections. Trucks and their often weary, bone-rattled drivers were the last links in the logistical chain. Nearly 6,000 trucks, with mostly African American drivers, supported the Allied advance toward Paris in the summer and autumn of 1944. In an operation dubbed the Red Ball Express, they transported almost 500,000 tons of supplies in three months.
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Instructors
Thousands of military personnel worked stateside as instructors. Many were the barking drill instructors central to basic training. Many more were chalk-toting lecturers who conducted classroom sessions or hands-on workshops. The U.S. military developed training programs and ready-reference field and technical manuals for hundreds of topics, from the operation of weapon systems to weather forecasting.
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Clerks and Typists
Thousands of soldiers were assigned to secretarial and clerical support positions stateside and in combat theaters. They answered phones, operated switchboards, took dictation, typed correspondence and reports, and filed carbon copies in the burgeoning military bureaucracy. After 1942, most were women who had been recruited to “free a man to fight.” They served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC)—later the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), the navy WAVES and coast guard SPARS, and the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve.
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