When I was a cadet, I searched for women role models and found one in LCDR Dorothy Stratton, the leader of the SPARS, the Coast Guard’s women’s reserve during the Second World War. In LCDR Stratton, I invested all manner of worry about my place at the Academy and in the Coast Guard. At the time many men, at every rank, questioned whether a woman should serve in the military, and sometimes they laced the question with aspersions aimed not simply at my character, but my nature. In those moments, Dorothy Stratton was my North Star.
What my women peers and I were doing in the mid-1970s was new and unheard of: women attending a military academy. My own grandmother questioned my father’s willingness to let me go. Although she was very proud of me when I was commissioned, before I left for New London, she complained, “women will ruin” the academies. The situation was little different for the women in the World War II reserves. In more than one household, a father pronounced, “no daughter of mine will join the military!”
Against this backdrop, Hampton should be proud of its history during the war, for in the 1940s, a town of only 535 people produced four young women who volunteered to serve in our military. I find that number extraordinary. Today I would like to honor those women.
No one from Hampton joined the SPARS, but Dorothy Howell Johnson joined the WAVES, the naval women’s reserve on which the SPARS were modeled. Dorothy was a farm girl. In the early 1930s, her father moved the family to Hampton from the Bronx after her mother died. Dorothy was only ten, but soon she was responsible for household chores, caring for her four younger brothers, and helping her father run a chicken farm. Dorothy graduated from Windham High School and started at UConn in the hope of studying medicine some day, and then the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The military had to expand, and quickly. In four years, the Navy grew from a quarter of a million to over three million enlisted men, and it needed to send those men to sea. Women were recruited to take over the men’s military jobs stateside, and Dorothy enlisted, becoming one of 100,000 women who served in the Navy. In 1943, she left Storrs for Hunter College, where enlisted WAVES completed basic training. At the war’s outset, the Navy imagined women would serve as yeomen, radiomen, and storekeepers, but by early 1943, the service realized they needed women to serve in less traditional industrial roles, such as machinist mates. Dorothy demonstrated technical proficiency, and the Navy selected her for the rating of Aviation Metal-Smith and sent her to Specialist training in Norman, Oklahoma. The majority of the WAVES completed their specialist training in women-only units located at colleges around the country, but the women who went into aviation specialties, like Dorothy, trained at naval air stations alongside enlisted men. At a time when most of American labor was highly segregated by sex, Dorothy’s training in the WAVES was very unusual. Moreover, Dorothy held the same rank as the men with whom she’d graduated, and she received the same pay. After earning her Specialist rate, Dorothy was assigned to Naval Air Station Quonset Point, Rhode Island, where she served until April 1945. After the war, she returned to Connecticut, married, and raised three children, and like most veterans, she corresponded for the rest of her life with the friends she’d made in the WAVES.
Of the 350,000 women who served in the military during the Second World War, 74,000 were nurses, and two of those nurses came from Hampton. One was Ruth Burchnall, whom Jo Freeman remembers as a no-nonsense woman: “[she] wasn’t afraid to speak up in defense or support of what she believed.” I am a great-niece and a sister of Army nurses, so well I know they are direct, confident, and steely in dicey situations. In war, they confront great human crises, mass casualties that require quick and efficient triage on one hand and sympathetic care for the wounded and dying on the other. Military nurses also are commissioned officers. Ruth Burchnall was senior to the enlisted Corpsmen and Pharmacist Mates she worked with, so at a time when there were few places in the civilian world where women supervised men, Ruth and her sister nurses had to learn to give men orders in a way that did not arouse the men’s resentment or defiance. The nurses had little to guide them but their own good sense and knowledge of human nature. Unlike the women in the WAVES, WACS, or SPARS, Army and Navy nurses were assigned overseas, meaning they were put in harm’s way. Thirty thousand nurses served in Europe, and 1,000 served in the Pacific theater. Among the latter, 77 were captured by the Japanese on Bataan and Corregidor and were interned in a brutal POW camp for three years. These nurses now are known as the Angels of Bataan, and they were the first American women to become POWs.
We should remember that women like Dorothy Howell Johnson and Ruth Burchnall volunteered to serve in the military. In fact, so many Registered Nurses volunteered to serve that Congress and the civilian medical community feared a devastating shortage of nurses at civilian hospitals and clinics. To address this likelihood, in 1943 Congress established the U. S. Cadet Nurse program, through which the government would agree to pay student nurses their tuition and a small monthly stipend in exchange for the students’ guaranteed service as nurses for the duration of the war, either in the military or the civilian community.
Longtime Hampton resident Eva Loew applied for the program with the intent of joining the Army Nurse Corps and being sent to Europe. Many of you know Eva’s remarkable life story—her family’s escape from the Nazis and her long residence in town, where she and her husband Ernst ran a farm and raised their six children. Time does not permit me to tell her full story. Today I want to emphasize that this woman who gave so much to Hampton was, when she joined the Cadet Nurse Corps in 1943, a new citizen of the United States. She had been naturalized in 1941, and was the first naturalized citizen to join the Cadet Nurse program. Eva’s story teaches us something important about the gratitude so many immigrants have felt for the liberties our country bestows and their willingness to put their lives at risk to protect those liberties.
Of course, anyone who knows much at all about the military knows that its dangers are leavened with what Readers’ Digest has long called “humor in uniform.” Jokes and laughter inevitably relieve the pressures of service. Jean Surridge reminds us of this. She grew up in Hampton and completed her nurses’ training at Hartford Hospital. Like many veterans of the Second World War, she did not talk much about her service, but her son remembers her being amused that anyone considered her a veteran. He writes that during the war, “she simply [felt] she was going to nursing school.”
Hampton has not stopped producing young women who go to war. During Vietnam, Caroline Filupeit and Laurie Burrelle volunteered, and in the post-9-11 years, Laura Gibbings graduated from the Coast Guard Academy and served five years in the Coast Guard, and today, Tanya Cuprak, also a Coast Guard Academy graduate, is serving in a Coast Guard logistics center in Alameda, California, managing maintenance for area cutters; Captain Gabrielle Frissel, U.S. Air Force, stationed at Seymour Air Force Base, Johnson, North Carolina; and LT Mimi Lieu, a U. S. Naval Academy graduate, stationed as a physician at Naval Medical Center, San Diego, California.
What connects this bucolic town to military service, we might ask. I surmise it has something to do with the demands of rural life. We learn on farms and in isolated areas that we are dependent on one another, as the Howell family depended on one another to run a farm, but we also learn self-reliance. Everyone has his or her own farm to run, so one cannot expect neighbors to solve all problems. The military demands the same set of characteristics. As I taught the cadets, when you’re at sea, you can’t call 9-11.
I admire our little town, and you, my neighbors and friends, for these characteristics of interdependence and self-reliance. We have much to be proud of on this Memorial Day and many people to thank for the quality of life we enjoy here. I am grateful to the Memorial Day Committee for offering me an opportunity to speak about some of these people, the women from Hampton who have served in our nation’s armed forces.
- A. Flammang, Captain, USCG
Captain Anne Flammang was among the first women to attend a federal service academy, graduating from the U. S. Coast Guard Academy in 1981. During her thirty-year career, she served as an engineer aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Rush; as the Twelfth Coast Guard District Training Officer; and as a Professor of English at the Coast Guard Academy. In 1990, she became the first woman selected for the Coast Guard’s Permanent Commissioned Teaching Staff. After earning her Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa, Captain Flammang returned to the Academy where she served as Associate Dean of Faculty and chair of the Humanities Department. Captain Flammang’s personal awards include the Coast Guard Meritorious Service Medal and the Legion of Merit. She and her husband Scott, a professor at Quinebaug Valley Community College, have lived in Hampton since 2003.