The Women’s Reserve was established on July 30, 1942. The Women’s Reserve was an integral part of the Navy and was involved with numerous duties that included taking over jobs that were solely done by men. The idea of women serving in the Navy was not necessarily supported by the Congress at that time. Through the efforts of the Navy’s Women’s Advisory Council, Margaret Chung, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, women were allowed to serve. The women entered fields that were previously held by men causing some workplace hostility from male counterparts. My mother was one of those women who enlisted in the Navy around early 1943 and joined the ranks of the women who served. A new and separate women’s auxiliary called Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service (WAVES) was established to serve in many positions around the U.S, and since this new term – WAVES — was coined in 1943, my mother was most likely one of the first women to join this new established group within the Navy.
Born September 11, 1921, my mother, Dorothy, was the eldest of five children. She was an extraordinary woman who lived during some very turbulent times in history. She was brave, kind, adventurous, intelligent, talented, and had a gift for writing. Sadly, during January of 1931, she lost her mother, my grandmother, Thelma Dunn Howell, who succumbed from a kidney infection at the age of 31 when they were living in the Bronx, New York.
My grandfather moved his five children to Hampton, Connecticut where they lived in the basement of what was the beginning of a larger home built later on. My mom helped raise her four brothers. They attended school and worked on the chicken farm built by my grandfather. It was the era of the great depression with life being meager and tough. Nevertheless, my mother excelled at Windham High School, including the French language, and attended pre-med at the University of Connecticut before enlisting in the Navy. Moreover, three of her brothers served in the military — John, George and Tom. Her dad served in WWI.
Dorothy, “Dot” as she was called, did her boot camp in Norman, Oklahoma and then was sent to the Navy Air Station Quonset Point, Rhode Island. Her desire was to go into the medical corps. Instead she ended up working in mechanics. She made many friends and they would go to Boston on furlough. She corresponded throughout her life with some of the women she met in the Navy.
There is also a beautiful love story that emerged between November of 1944 and March of 1945 between her and my father, a member of the French Navy. He went back out to sea. It was reported that he was a casualty of war. It is difficult to decipher given the communications of the time. The story unfolds in his 40+ letters (all written in French) that he wrote to her while at sea. They corresponded for many months. The letters stopped after June of 1946. As a small child, I remember her sitting on the floor re-reading his letters. Tears would swell up in her eyes. She would carefully put them away as she experienced the emotions of losing someone she dearly loved. It is a WWII mystery as to what really happened to him. A book in the making.
Mom was discharged from the Navy in April of 1945. She raised three children and lived in Connecticut most of her life until she died from cancer at the age of 67, May 3, 1989.
Alexandra J. Zani