Seabee Center Honors 1st Wave of WAVES

Erma Busch Ford was a 27-year-old shorthand and typing teacher from Nebraska in 1945 when she and 10 other women in Navy uniform became the first to be assigned to Port Hueneme’s Seabee Base, then home to 21,000 enlisted men.

The women were housed in wooden frame barracks, instead of the usual metal Quonset huts, with guards posted at the entrance to a fenced-off area. Escorted everywhere, they were shuttled by bus or jeep to a segregated chow hall. And Busch Ford, now 80 and an Oxnard resident, recalls having to walk two blocks from her workplace to use the bathroom in the Red Cross hut.

The women were the first of at least 90 WAVES--Women Accepted in Volunteer Emergency Services--that took over clerical and office duties on the base from enlisted men when manpower shortages occurred during World War II.

And Tuesday, the Naval Construction Battalion Center honored those women for their wartime service in a ceremony marking Women’s History Month. About 200 people at the ceremony sang “Anchors Aweigh” as a plaque was unveiled in front of the two women’s barracks still standing.

“We were pampered,” Ford recalled. “The officers on the base were so afraid we weren’t going to be safe they treated us with kid gloves really. . . . We kind of giggled about it. I don’t remember ever being afraid here.”

The military was skeptical of allowing women into the Navy, said Carol Marsh, staff historian at the Seabee Museum. Some enlisted men believed that it would take two women to do the work of one man. Studies showed the opposite to be true, she said.

Indeed, so well did the 86,000 pioneering WAVES perform during the war that, in 1948, Congress passed an act that paved the way for a permanent female military presence, Marsh said.

“It was an opportunity to serve my country,” Ford said of her 26 months in the WAVES, 13 of those in Port Hueneme. “I felt I was doing the job that was assigned to me.”