Ex-WAVES Tell Tales of Abuse in the Old Navy

It took Ship’s Cook 1st Class Margaret Craft 38 years to talk about the dark side of her years as a Navy WAVE.

Describing herself as a “virgin and a Christian” when she enlisted in 1944, the snowy-haired grandmother said the prevailing civilian opinion then was that the WAVES were “bad” for taking men’s jobs.

Within the Navy, that attitude sometimes turned violent.

“We had a lot of girls raped,” Craft said. Back then, she said, “no matter what happened, you kept your mouth shut. I didn’t think it was right, but what can one person do?”

Like most of the 850 former WAVES expected to attend a national convention here this week, Craft, who came from South Carolina and wore a Navy-blue vest festooned with Navy memorabilia, wouldn’t trade a single day of her Navy job for the world.

Many of the early pioneers enlisted out of spunk and patriotism and were sad to have to leave when the war ended. But many also revealed tales of sexism, harassment and assault, foreshadowing the incidents that recently have rocked the top Navy echelons and spread to other military bases.

The secretary of the Navy was replaced in the wake of a September incident in which 26 Navy women were groped and fondled as they ran between two rows of male officers during a Las Vegas convention of the Tailhook Assn., a booster club of active and retired aviators. An admiral who failed to respond to a victim’s complaint also resigned.

Monday was the first day of a court-martial for Cmdr. Steven C. Tolan, a Navy officer at Camp Pendleton, on charges filed by two women who say he groped them, read them sexually explicit books and used a grease pencil to write offensive remarks on the leg of one female sailor.

Though Navy women now serve as fighter pilots and port commanders, sexism hasn’t changed much in the five decades since the Navy Women’s Reserve Act was signed to train women to temporarily replace fighting sailors in World War II, said Lynda Smith, chairwoman of the local convention. WAVES originally stood for Women Appointed for Voluntary Emergency Service.

Women officers were prohibited from exercising military authority over male subordinates, and men did not want to salute them.

Women said they had coffee poured on them in restaurants and their hats stepped on if they blew off down a sidewalk. They were ordered to take jobs baby-sitting for officers’ wives.

“I had a lieutenant who wanted me to go out with him,” said Mary Geddes of Orange, who enlisted in 1949. “He made my life miserable.”

When she married someone else, she said, he forced her out of the Navy. Back then, she said, she paid little attention to it. “That’s just the way it was.”

Smith, an electronics technician stationed outside Washington after the war, said the pioneering Navy women in WWII were treated well compared to the Navy women in the 1950s, when they were perceived as taking men’s jobs in peacetime. Smith, who was married to a Marine assigned to her base, said one colleague would grab and kiss her whenever her husband was near and then yell, “What are you going to do about it, Marine?”

But Smith said she also found allies among the 400 men who worked with her in the same hangar. Once, she said, she was rescued by two colleagues who frightened off three other men who were attempting to rape her.

Hostility toward women in the Navy persists, said former WAVE Rita Tanner, 42, of Dana Point, who served as a hospital corpsman from 1974 to 1979. Women are permitted to serve on only 66 of the Navy’s 480 ships, and in the Marines, she said, the women’s barracks are sometimes called the “Bay of Pigs.”

The Tailhook incidents did not surprise her, Tanner said, because they resemble hazing rituals at sea, such as forcing sailors to sit on ice, keeping their thumbs on ice or greasing their bodies.

Sitting in the hotel lounge at the Inn at the Park on Sunday, a few pioneer Navy women said that if Navy behavior appears to have become less respectful, it only mirrors society at large.

“A lot of these officers think they’re macho hotshots and can do no wrong,” said one woman who asked not to be identified.

“Can you imagine what would happen,” she asked the others, if the Tailhook Assn. incident had happened in their era.

“We’d be out on our ears,” answered one.

The women had differing opinions on the seriousness of the sexual harassment incidents.

“They’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” said Frances Heppe of Stanton, in her 70s and one of the first women Navy officers. “When we went in, it was a man’s world. We knew it was a man’s world.”

Some, like Berenice George, 67, of Clearwater, Fla., president of WAVES National, said she wondered why the 26 women didn’t avoid the Tailhook Assn. convention. “Those were all intelligent women. Why did they go there?”

But Emily Sanford, 57, of Huntington Beach, a retired captain who led the Navy Nurse Assn. of Southern California, replied, “The thing is, you can’t be blaming the victim.”