'Make a date with Uncle Sam'
During World War II more than 16 million men joined the armed forces - while the country's industrial and agricultural production had to increase. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, noting the examples provided early in the war by Great Britain and the Soviet Union, realized even before Pearl Harbor that women would have to play a major role in the U.S. war effort.
On Nov. 23, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Public Law 772 of the 77th Congress, 2nd Session, creating the Women's Reserve of the Coast Guard. The purpose of the act was, "to expedite the war effort by providing for releasing officers and men for duty at sea and their replacement by women in the shore establishment of the Coast Guard, and for other purposes." The Women's Reserve was to be modeled on the one the Navy had created a few months earlier. Two Navy restrictions were carried over to the Coast Guard. Women were not to serve outside the continental United States, and no woman, officer or enlisted, could issue orders to any male serviceman.
The armed forces, never having confronted the prospect of organizing a large contingent of young women, sought help from the academic community. Navy LT Dorothy Stratton, former dean of women at Purdue University, IND., agreed to transfer to the Coast Guard and, with the rank of lieutenant commander, became director of the Coast Guard Women's Reserve. Fifty years later she said, "I am sometimes referred to as the commanding officer of the SPARs. Actually I had no command authority. All I had was power of persuasion .... I didn't even have authority over the enlisted man at the desk across the hall."
An informal proposal to call the Coast Guard women WARCOGS was mercifully abandoned. Stratton suggested that the Women's Reserve be known by an acronym based on the Coast Guard motto: "Semper Paratus - Always Ready." By early 1943 the WAAC and WAVE recruiting posters on post-office walls and telephone poles were joined by placards urging women to "Make a Date With Uncle Sam" and "Enlist in the Coast Guard SPARs."
Recruiting for the SPARs
The initial estimate was that the Coast Guard would need 8,000 enlisted women and 400 women officers, with a recruiting target of 500 enlisted and 25 officers per month. Applicants had to be between 20 and 36 years old (the upper limit for officers was 50) and have no children under the age of 18. Enlisted women had to have completed two years of high school and officers two years of college. "Married women 'may enlist provided their husbands are not in the Coast Guard. Unmarried women must agree not to marry until after they have finished their period of training. After training, a SPAR may marry a civilian or a serviceman who is not in the Coast Guard.'" A SPAR who became pregnant "must submit her resignation promptly."
The first 153 enlisted SPARs and 15 SPAR officers were former WAVEs who agreed to be discharged from the Navy and join the Coast Guard. Several of them were assigned as recruiters and dispatched throughout the country.
Recruiters were told not to sit in their offices and wait for women to walk in, but to go out in the field to talk to prospects and their families. At least one recruiting office took that advice literally, sending its staff on repeated treks through the cotton fields of the South to seek out potential SPARs. Recruiters made speeches on the stages of movie theaters. Mobile units traveled in jeeps with "Don't Be a Spare - Be a SPAR" painted on their vehicle's spare tires. A song-and-dance show called "Tars and Spars" played in the cities of the East Coast.
The recruiters faced some serious obstacles, for military women were experiencing an image problem. In 1943, a nationwide rumor mill gave rise to public speculation about American women in uniform. One popular tale had it that the female recruiting effort was a front for a government-sponsored prostitution ring, the function of which was to slake the sexual appetites of new male soldiers and sailors. Each uniformed woman supposedly was receiving a monthly issue of prophylactics to help her accomplish her mission. Newspaper editors and clergymen started warning parents not to sell their daughters into slavery.
The Coast Guard constructed what it wanted the public to perceive as the real SPAR: an attractive, wholesome, high-spirited young woman with impeccable grooming habits, perfect teeth, and no ambition beyond serving her country, "releasing a man to fight at sea," and getting married - preferably after the war.
The SPARs adopted a slightly modified version of the WAVE uniform, which had been designed by Mainbocher of New York, a women's fashion firm. Newspapers and magazines were bombarded with glossy prints of SPARs smiling as they marched in formation, smiling over steaming pots, smiling at assorted vehicles, and smiling at male Coast Guardsmen. One managed to look as though she was smiling while blowing a bugle. There is almost no such thing as a casual photograph of a World War II SPAR.
SPAR Training
To train the new recruits the Coast Guard again relied on assistance from academe. The first enlisted SPARs were former WAVEs who had received their basic training at Oklahoma A&M University in Stillwater. When civilian women began joining the SPARS they were sent to Iowa State Teachers College, in Cedar Falls. A joint training center for WAVEs and SPARs was established at Hunter College in New York City.
In the middle of 1943, the Coast Guard set up its own indoctrination facility in what had been the Biltmore Hotel in Palm Beach, Fla. The slogan "Train under the Florida sun" was added to the recruiters' propaganda arsenal and during the next 18 months, more than 7,000 SPARs received their basic training at Palm Beach.
After graduation, the new SPARs were ordered to various specialized schools throughout the country where they received the same training as their male counterparts. Late in the war, as the SPAR recruiting effort met its quota and the number of new recruits diminished, the Palm Beach facility shut down and newly-enlisted women were trained alongside enlisted men at the Coast Guard training facility in Manhattan Beach, N.Y.
Enlisted men were assigned specialties when they enlisted, but the service's initial policy was to give all enlisted SPARs the rating of seaman second class. It was assumed that a woman could not bring any useful civilian skills (other than typing or working a telephone switchboard) into the military. Then a former policewoman demonstrated in boot camp that she knew how to shoot, and a former professional photographer suggested that she could qualify as a photographer's mate. The policy changed, and by the end of the war SPARs held 43 different ratings from boatswain's mate to yeoman.
The first 200 SPAR officers were trained at a Navy facility on the campus of Smith College, a women's school in Northampton, Mass. The Coast Guard realized, however, that it needed an indoctrination facility for its own female officers. On June 28, 1943, the Coast Guard Academy, New London, Conn., opened its doors to women when a class of 50 SPAR officer candidates reported for indoctrination. SPAR officers, like male reserve officers, went through a streamlined program crammed into six weeks (later lengthened to eight) that bore little resemblance to the academy's peacetime curriculum. But, in using its service academy to train women, the Coast Guard was taking a step that none of the other armed services emulated. More than 700 of the 955 SPAR officers commissioned during the war received their training at New London.
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