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Services of Supply in the continental United States. Many of the first units (twenty-seven companies by October 1942) drew assignments with the Aircraft Warning Service, where they helped to operate a primitive tracking system along the East Coast. WAAC NCOS assigned to duty there primarily provided firstline supervision during around-the-clock operations. WAAC NCOs also were involved in the full range of the corps' activities outside the Aircraft Warning Service. Because nearly two-thirds of the women performed administrative and office duties, the majority of their NCOS naturally served in clerical fields as well. At the same time, over 13 percent of the WAACS were assigned

to technical and professional duties, which put NCOs in charge of photographers, medical technicians, weather observers, and other specialists.

Although the units deploying to assignments provided a valuable addition to the Army's capabilities during the second full year of World War II, WAAC NCOS still retained important functions as instructors. The final table of organization for a training company at the five WAAC centers provided the unit with 16 NCOs, but only 5 officers. A company contained between 150 and 200 recruits. Training needs ensured that several thousand WAAC NCOs would remain on training duty during the last three years of the war.

NCOS in Action

As important and varied as these responsibilities were, NCOs performing them labored under a handicap. As originally constituted, the WAAC was an auxiliary to the Army, not a part of the Army. This legal distinction meant that WAAC personnel did not have military status; the only real parallels to the Army were the WAAC chain of command, pay scale, and uniform. Neither NCOs nor anyone else in the Auxiliary enjoyed the array of benefits extended to male soldiers-from pensions to burial with military honors. Gender was not the issue, for the members of the Army Nurse Corps, part of the Medical Department since 1901, received benefits. The lack of status also affected WAAC legal standing. Since women were not subject to courtsmartial, questions arose about jurisdiction over disciplinary infractions. If WAACS had to be confined, they required separate facilities and guards.

The resolution of these issues came on 1 September 1943, when the War Department granted full military status to the Women's Army Corps (WAC). The name change, dropping "auxiliary," carried more than symbolic meaning. The Army had gained a large group of trained and dedicated new soldiers. On its first day, the new WAC numbered 51,268, of whom 1,811 were serving outside the continental United States. The corps grew as senior commanders discovered the value of using women in military roles. General Dwight D. Eisenhower in Europe became the first major overseas commander specifically to request WAC units. After his request was filled in January 1943, plans to employ Army women accelerated, and WAC NCOs took up supervisory activities in more locations with each passing month. WAC strength climbed as fast as volunteers could be processed, peaking at 99,288 in April 1945, just before the surrender of Germany.

During World War II, WACs and their NCOs served in every theater of operations, although most remained at bases within the forty-eight states. The Army used them in a large number of jobs, but not in slots related to combat, since public opinion held that women should not be on the front lines. The bulk of WAC jobs were administrative, and most WAC NCOs headed clerical sections, but some detachments carried out assignments that ranged from operating targets for antiaircraft artillery gunners to rigging parachutes for airborne units.

At major installations in the United States, WAC headquarters companies assumed most of the routine support functions of "post overhead." Sergeants and corporals had traditionally supervised such day-to-day activities; WAC NCOs took over from their male counterparts without friction. Diversity came from assignments to the various technical services; the Signal Corps was the first to request WACS, and it employed most of them in communications centers or in signal intelligence. Other WAC NCOs worked in the Chemical Warfare Service as pharmacologists and toxicologists; under Corps of Engineers control on the Manhattan Project (the highly classified effort to develop the atomic bomb); and at the eight ports of embarkation run by the new Transportation Corps as mechanics, photo technicians, tailors, movie projectionists, and even butchers.

So many WACS served with the Army Air Forcesnearly half of the total WAC strength-that throughout the war a number of War Department officials persisted in thinking of the WAC as an organization established for Air Forces use exclusively. Female NCOs in this line of work carried out assignments that included weather observation, Link trainer instruction, control tower operation, cryptography, bombsight maintenance, and sheet-metal work. A lucky few even drew flight duty.

One of the most important WAC contributions to the war effort came in the Medical Department which, by the end of World War II, employed one-fifth of the corps. Because medicine by its nature requires a high degree of individual competence, WACS in this field. became something of an elite group. To be eligible for training in one of the medical specialties (such as pharmacist, Braille instructor, optometrist, bacteriologist, or therapist), women needed superior scores on a screening test and a high school diploma. Because prior civilian technical training was necessary for many medical duties, WAC recruiters had to offer more than junior enlisted status and pay to attract women with the requisite talents. WAC psychiatric workers, for example, became staff sergeants upon completion of basic training. These special arrangements began to change the character of the WAC NCO corps by creating two types of NCOs: those who had come up the rank ladder one rung at a time, and "instant" NCOs who possessed critical skills. In both cases, these female leaders represented an infusion of new talent and leadership into what had long been exclusively a man's Army.

The Women's Army Corps was founded to free men for duty on the battlefield. WACS actually moved far beyond that relatively limited objective and became a vital part of the trend toward specialization that has marked the twentieth century Army. During the war, women in uniform did so-called feminine jobs such as typing personnel records and operating telephones, but they also repaired truck engines and changed tires, functions traditionally considered strictly masculine. Despite this steady expansion into traditional Army roles, however, WAC NCOs in many respects were all specialists because of their exclusion from combat, and their NCO corps in many ways retained an identity separate from that of the male NCOs.

As a noncombat component, the female corps never developed the sharp division between NCO troop leaders and skilled technicians that became so pronounced elsewhere in the Army. In an effort to control the negative effects of that division among male soldiers, the Army had favored first specialists, then troop leaders, in a series of rank and pay adjustments stretching over

several decades. The need for such adjustments never arose in the WAC, where the closest thing to troop leaders was training company NCOs, whose numbers steadily declined as more WACS took positions in the field.

The greater homogeneity of the WAC NCOs in many ways reflected the nature of the WAC as a whole. Female recruits differed from their male counterparts in several notable respects: all were volunteers and most were older than the average newly sworn-in male. As in later years, they were also better educated. Young male draftees usually came to the Army with little or no work experience, whereas many WACS had held a job of some kind between high school and enlistment. Most women brought to the Army valuable skills, even advanced degrees. Although some officers used WACS only reluctantly, many commanders recognized them as an asset and sought to place them in positions where their experience could be maximized. Women who had been secretaries or hospital laboratory technicians in civilian life needed little training to perform similar tasks in the WAC. The contribution made by American women in World War II was never a mirror image of that made by men; the Women's Army Corps was narrow in purpose but high in quality and experience, and its NCO leadership reflected the overall characteristics of the corps' membership.

At the end of World War II, the War Department began demobilizing all components of the wartime. Army. The important contributions to victory made by the WACS and their NCOS were recognized by all, but the idea of retaining women in a peacetime Army initially met the same objections that had always been raised. Alarm at the rapid loss of skilled personnel soon forced a reassessment. When Congress granted Regular Army status to the WAC in 1948, female NCOS were assured of the Army careers many desired. Although the prominence of Army women in adminstrative positions caused most to be identified with the Adjutant General Corps, WAC NCOs proved they could perform any noncombat specialty held by male NCOs. By the time the WAC was fully integrated into the Army in 1978, female corporals and sergeants were respected members of the Army NCO corps.

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From Information to Intelligence

Korea, 1952

The intelligence sergeant from division G-2 waited impatiently in the bunker for word that the reconnaissance platoon was safely back inside the barbed wire. He knew the importance of talking to the patrol, and especially the platoon leader, while the night's work was still fresh in everyone's memory. Even though the men might be tired, hungry, and dirty, they had to be debriefed immediately. Taking time out to wash up or wolf down a C-ration might make someone forget a critical detail that experts could use to piece together the enemy's intentions.

Once the infantrymen reported in, the two NCOS settled down in front of the maps and began working their way through a systematic question-and-answer process. Did the patrol uncover any features not on the map? Did it locate the enemy? Were they North Koreans or Chinese? What kinds of equipment did they have? These and a host of other questions formed a script carefully constructed by senior intelligence analysts to ensure that nothing was overlooked and that every point was covered. Fortunately, the corporals and sergeants assigned to the reconnaissance element usually brought back something of value each time

they went beyond the regiment's outpost line. Even now, with the Korean War two years old, Communist units still conducted operations with a single-minded inflexibility surprising to senior American noncoms who had been through World War II. That predictability gave the intelligence specialists their most valuable tool. It created patterns, patterns which created a framework that tied together otherwise isolated facts uncovered by repeated patrolling things like finding fresh tread marks along a dirt road or watching a new trench complex being slowly extended. When analyzed, that kind of information became intelligence that often predicted what the North Korean or Chinese troops across the valley would do next, as well as when and where. Such nuts-and-bolts work, rather than the glamorous discovery of a key document or the decoding of some message, actually held the greatest satisfaction for most of the senior NCO specialists. When their attention to detail allowed regimental, battalion, and company commanders to make adjustments that saved lives and brought the chances of peace that much closer, they had turned in a good day's work.

Background

Only five years after the conclusion of World War II, the United States found the so-called Cold War heating up. Encouraged by America's former ally, the Soviet Union, Communist North Korea launched a surprise attack on pro-Western South Korea in the early hours of 25 June 1950. Its leaders hoped to overwhelm

the Republic of Korea (ROK), and expected no armed reaction from the United States. Instead, Americans acted decisively. President Harry S. Truman immediately recognized that unless aggression was met with force, the pattern would be repeated endlessly around the globe. At his orders an emergency task force was pieced

together from units on occupation duty in Japan and rushed across the narrow strait to Korea. Other units, unprepared and inadequately armed, arrived in time to join a general retreat southward that halted only when ROK and American forces were backed up against the sea in a small pocket behind the Naktong River-the so-called Pusan Perimeter.

In opposing Communist aggression on the Korean peninsula, the United States entered a new and different kind of war. This war did not begin with a dramatic declaration by Congress and did not have as its objective the capture of the enemy's territory. Instead, Washington sought to "contain" communism and restore a border along the 38th Parallel. To avoid risking escalation into a full-fledged global conflict, possibly involving nuclear weapons, President Harry S. Truman opted not to order a general mobilization or to risk opening other fronts in Asia, although reinforcements were dispatched to Europe as a precaution. One of the earliest signals that the struggle would be limited in nature came in official references to it as a "conflict" or a "police action," not a "war." After the United Nations gave its blessing to the American policy, eighteen U.N. member nations sent forces, from platoon to brigade in size, to aid in the fight.

During its first year the struggle approximated the war of maneuver common in World War II. Within two months of being pushed south, United Nations forces, led by the U.S. Eighth Army and X Corps, coordinated a daring amphibious landing behind enemy lines at Inchon with a simultaneous breakout from the Pusan Perimeter. The North Korean People's Army shattered under the dual blows. U.N. forces invaded North Korea, and remnants of Communist forces retreated toward the People's Republic of China. Alarmed as the allies. approached its Manchurian border, China intervened, sending massive forces of so-called volunteers into the peninsula. The November onslaught defeated the allies and drove them back to positions south of the South Korean capital, Seoul.

Stalemate ensued. When truce talks began in the summer of 1951, the war of movement ended. For the next two years both sides traded blows and registered limited gains along a generally stable front stretching 150 miles from coast to coast on the Korean peninsula. The war now began to look like a replay of World War I, with the opposing armies dug into strongpoints and ridge lines. Minefields, barbed wire, and artillery duels completed the image of a Western Front in the Far East. Deliberately stalling the truce talks, the Communist side intensified small unit actions in an effort to improve its bargaining position.

In its first battlefield clash with Communist powers, the Army came face to face with strange new conditions.

More than at any time since the Revolution, Americans fighting in Korea had to be aware of the political effects of their actions. The impact of each operation on President Truman, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the American public (and to a lesser extent on other United Nations combatants) became a prime consideration behind each enemy move. Because their attempts to erode American public support for the war outweighed other factors, Communist forces frequently preferred to inflict small setbacks on isolated units rather than mount a large-scale campaign aimed at a major objective. Americans fought back by withdrawing and counterattacking enemy troops, rather than focusing exclusively on the capture or retention of terrain, and attempted to avoid heavy losses. Unfortunately, while preserving lives, this tactic confused a public conditioned by World War II to expect a series of territorial gains that added up to victory. On the other hand, its long experience with civic action programs gave the Army a decided edge in winning the support of the Korean people.

Within this context, exploiting the potential of military intelligence became extremely important. Although spying is often referred to as the second oldest profession, military intelligence as a dedicated specialty was a new phenomenon in the Army. Until World War II the function involved a handful of detailed personnel, mostly officers, operating at the highest levels. Beginning on the eve of that conflict, however, advances in technology made it possible for experts to gather a massive volume of information, process it rapidly, and give it to units in time to influence ongoing operations. Taking advantage of the new advances in signal intelligence required a dramatic organizational change. In addition to a vastly expanded and functionally specialized collection and analysis capability at the national and theater levels, the demand for usable intelligence required other staff positions at echelons down to the battalion.

Such growth meant more than just adding bodies. As the equipment and techniques of war became more sophisticated, intelligence production became more complex. All personnel assigned to the newly formed Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), and their counterparts in the Signal Corps involved in intercepting communications, had to meet high standards of competence and to remain constantly in touch with new developments as technology advanced. To meet the sudden demand for proficient NCOs, the Army turned to an old mobilization technique: recruiting people with relevant aptitudes and offering them extra technical training. That approach, retained even after World War II ended, produced intelligence specialists, especially within the NCO corps, capable of carrying out very complex tasks requiring unusual attention to detail with only a mini

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