'I don't suppose you could take a letter'
The largest single employer of SPARs was headquarters, located in the former (and, according to rumor, condemned) Southern Railway Building at 1300 E Street in Washington. As the war went on, most of the clerical work in the eight-story structure came to be done by SPARs and female civilian employees.
Wartime Washington was hard pressed to find room for all the military women and civilian "government girls" who were crowding into the city. They were jammed into every building the government could locate that would accommodate a few bunks. SPAR Betty Splaine recalled how fortunate she felt when she and three other SPARs, after stints in an insect-infested rooming house and the Plaza Hotel, were quartered in a dean's office at American University. "It had wall-to-wall carpeting, and we got individual solid maple beds rather than iron bunk beds," she said.
Eventually the SPARs moved into a row of temporary barracks, named after Coast Guard cutters, on Independence Avenue. ADM Russell Waesche, then commandant, was an early convert to the cause of the SPARs. Stratton asserted afterward that "the thing that made the SPARs successful was the support of the commandant." Not every male Coast Guardsman showed the same inclination. When Splaine reported for duty at headquarters her officer in charge gave her a look of utter disgust and assigned her to a desk behind his so he would not have to look at a woman in uniform. He practically ignored her until one day when his civilian secretary called in sick. The officer turned to the SPAR and said, "I don't suppose you could take a letter." She, in fact, could take shorthand faster than he could dictate, and soon was doing most of the clerical work in the office.
The secret specialty
Late in 1942 the Coast Guard began setting up a new, highly confidential electronic navigation system called loran. Reports from the British Royal Air Force, whose female radar operators had helped win the Battle of Britain, probably were instrumental in convincing the Coast Guard that a loran station would be an appropriate billet for SPARs.
In the summer of 1943, LTJG Vera Hamerschlag took command of the Chatham, Mass., loran monitoring station, which consisted of a 30- by 50-foot, one-story building and a 125-foot tower on the beach at Cape Cod. The 11 SPARs under Hamerschlag's command had responsibility for ascertaining and maintaining the accuracy of transmissions from several other loran stations on the East Coast. The duty involved monitoring and recording those transmissions every two minutes, 24 hours a day. The SPARs were told not to "even think loran," and never to give anyone in or out of the service any hint of what was happening inside the mysterious building.
The policy of denying women authority over men inevitably created practical problems, particularly when female officers were assigned to stations that had male Coast Guardsmen on staff. The Coast Guard eventually got around the difficulty by means of an opinion from the judge advocate general's office dated November 1943. The JAG concluded that the prohibition applied "only to authority which pertains to command," and that "the authority of a subordinate officer as a representative of the officer in command has full legal effect in the execution of his regulations, instructions, and policies. The fact that the subordinate is a member of the Women's Reserve does not alter the effect."
In other words, a SPAR could give orders to a male Coast Guardsman so long as her commanding officer was a man. The logic behind the new policy was rather convoluted, but it put SPAR officers a step ahead of their counterparts in the other services.
On Sept. 27, 1944, Congress revised the law prohibiting WAVEs and SPARs from serving outside the continental United States. Henceforth, SPARs with good records who requested such duty could be stationed in American overseas territories. The war in Europe was almost over by this time, but about 200 SPARs were sent to Alaska and 200 more to Hawaii before VJ Day.
In October 1944, the secretary of the Navy ordered the WAVEs and SPARs to begin accepting black recruits. The first black SPAR was YN3 Olivia Hooker. By then the SPARs' initial recruiting goals almost had been achieved, and the service had stopped accepting civilian women for officer training.
A few black women enlistees did go through OCS and were commissioned as ensigns before the end of the war. Personnel records do not indicate the total number of black SPARs who enlisted in the three months before the recruiting effort began shutting down.
End of the SPARs
The SPARs had enlisted for "duration plus six" - the length of the war plus six months. SPAR recruiting virtually ended in December 1944. Shortly after the surrender of Japan, the women's reserve branches of all the services were disbanded, and the SPARs officially ceased to exist (though the label was still being applied informally to female Coast Guardsmen in the 1960s). A few SPARs were allowed to remain on active duty long enough to finish the projects on which they were working; the remaining 12,000 returned to civilian life. Stratton, who had attained the rank of captain, became director of personnel for the International Monetary Fund, and later would serve 10 years as national executive director of the Girl Scouts.
During the next few years many Women's Reserve records were destroyed, and the federal government seems largely to have forgotten about the SPARs. But the SPARs never forgot the years they had spent in uniform. Dorothy Gleason, who enlisted in 1943 and had just been commissioned an ensign when she was demobilized, recalls the pride she and her fellow SPARs felt at having played "an active part at a crucial time in our country's history ... we were the pathfinders; we ended up doing many things because we showed we could," she said.
Doldrums in the '50s and '60s
The Women's Armed Services Act of 1948 integrated women into the regular Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force. The legislation did not mention the Coast Guard, probably because that service was run by the Department of the Treasury rather than the Department of Defense.
The Korean conflict of 1950 to 1953 saw a brief expansion of the armed forces, as reservists were called to active duty and retired members were invited to reenlist. The Coast Guard made no systematic effort to mobilize the former SPARs of World War II, largely because it had made no effort to keep up with their name and address changes. About 200 former SPARs voluntarily reenlisted in the early '50s, but most left when the military effort in Korea wound down. By 1956 there were nine enlisted women and 12 female officers in the Coast Guard, and The Coast Guard Magazine reported that "your chances of seeing a SPAR on active duty today have a slight edge over the possibilities of your running into Greta Garbo at the corner drugstore."
Though the Women's Reserve continued to exist as a separate entity on paper, the Coast Guard of the 1950s had scarcely any recognizable policy regarding women. In 1950 Eleanor L'Ecuyer, a former SPAR who had graduated from law school after World War II, responded to an announcement that the Coast Guard was offering commissions to former reservists who had done additional work in college. She was appointed an ensign - and was thereupon "placed in limbo" because the service had no billet for her. (L'Ecuyer joined a reserve unit and eventually was called to active duty, becoming, in her words, "probably the only officer, male or female, who never had a day of OCS training.)"
Splaine passed the warrant officer qualification test in 1957, only to be told that she would "have to go home" because "we've never had a woman WO before." It took her eight months of arguments to get her commission.
In the 1960s individual reserve units did their own recruiting, and businessmen who held reserve officers' commissions sometimes talked their secretaries into enlisting. But the Vietnam War gave the Coast Guard a surplus of qualified male applicants, and the service made little systematic effort to attract women.
In the early 1970s, with ADM Chester Bender as commandant, the Coast Guard came to the forefront of American military policy regarding women. All the armed services were adjusting to several important national phenomena: civil rights legislation, the end of the Vietnam War, and the women's movement. The Army, Navy and Air Force wrung their hands and held back the tide as long as they could. The Coast Guard, though not without reluctance, accepted it.
A congressional law, passed in 1973, ended the Women's Reserve as a separate entity. Henceforth women would be eligible for active duty in both the regular Coast Guard and the reserve, in which men and women were to serve side by side. In the same year the service opened its officer candidate program to women, thereby becoming the first American armed service to do so.
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