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In the beginning Hobby had confidently proclaimed: "Women will come marching —shoulder to shoulder—to serve their country. ... I predict that all America will be proud of them." Last week she said pensively: "I don't think it is so strange that there are no more women in uniform. Add up all the services, WACs, WAVES, SPARS, Marines and the various nursing corps and you get a sizable number of women who volunteered. I don't think it's a bad figure."
The figure was 172,822 out of nearly 50,000,000 women: about one woman in every 300. By comparison with this "not-bad" figure:
¶Of some 4,000,000 Canadian women, 31,367 have volunteered for the Army, Navy, Air Force women's services and the nursing corps: about one out of every 150.
¶Despite the Colonel's assertion that the U.S. could not raise a volunteer army of 400,000 men (TIME, Dec. 27), 677,000 men were voluntarily serving in the country's armed forces before the draft.
¶In Britain, where there is a generally approved national conscription (set up as much to distribute woman power as to compel service), out of some 8,670,000 women registered for national service, 7,750,000 have full-time war jobs. At least 2,500,000 of them are in the military services.
¶In Russia, millions serve in home-guard units for air-raid defense. Numberless women joined the Partisans during the Nazi occupation. The Government has decorated 4,575 women for valor on the battlefield. Six women have won the Government's highest award.
U.S. women are ready to point out that Russia's war is on her own soil, that British homes have been bombed; if U.S. women had to defend their homes they would join just as valorously; if they could even take a more active part in the war, they would join.
The simple fact remains that women who took on the prosaic, behind-the-lines jobs open to them released U.S. men for the fighting fronts, just as English and Russian women have done. The enemy realizes this better than U.S. women. Last week the Berlin radio gloated over "totally inadequate" women's Army enlistments in the U.S.
Diminishing Return. The history of WAC recruiting has been one of diminishing returns. In May 1942, when Hobby's army was the WAACs, a kind of stepsister to the Army, but not an integral part of it, it looked as if women would indeed come marching "shoulder to shoulder." The Army had set the WAAC quota at a cautious 25,000. The first day 13,208 applied.
There were some vexations. The country was inclined to laugh. Catholic Bishop James E. Cassidy of Fall River deplored the idea as a "serious menace to the home and foundation of a true Christian and democratic country." Even Army officers joined in inconsidered and harmful wisecracks among their friends. But the women kept coming in at a gratifying rate, until by last January 20,943 had joined.
In the months that followed, however, recruiting began to slide. The Army upped the quota to 150,000; enrollment by last summer was less than half that. In the fall the WAACs became the WACs, and a full-fledged branch of the Army, with soldier's privileges of insurance, pensions, dependency allotments and overseas pay.