Women Veterans Battle to Save Museum

The Women’s Army Corps is at war again--this time against the Army itself. Disbanded 19 years ago to end gender separation in the service, the corps is reuniting to save the only museum that chronicles the evolution of women’s role in the Army.

“They’re going to bury our history,” says Karen Chambliss, who retired from the Army Reserve in 1994 after a 33-year career that began at Ft. McClellan, where she did basic training as a member of the WAC Training Battalion.

More than emotion is at stake. WAC veterans and supporters collected $500,000 in private contributions in the early 1970s to pay for the museum’s building. They also donated the more than 5,000 artifacts in the museum that distinctively illustrate the history of American women in uniform.

“We built this ourselves, from the first stone to the last,” says Mary Clarke, who as a brigadier general was the last director of the Women’s Army Corps.

The Army, however, is the legal owner.

The Army is shuttering the 12,000-square-foot museum--the only one in the country devoted entirely to the history of women in the American military--because it is abandoning McClellan, whose military police and chemical defense training centers are to be moved to Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., in September 1999.

Army officials insist they will not let the WAC Museum die. They intend to recreate it at an active Army base, possibly Ft. Leonard Wood, home of Army combat engineer training, or Ft. Lee, Va., which was the WAC training center for six years before the operation was moved to Ft. McClellan in 1954.

“The WAC Museum will continue to exist,” says Gary Harvey, a Defense Department official at McClellan who is coordinating the closure of the base.

Army assurances cut little ice in WAC circles.

“We never dreamed this would happen,” says Clarke, now retired in nearby Jacksonville, Ala. “The Army has not treated us right on this.”

Women who served in the WAC tolerated discrimination on a scale that is almost unthinkable--and largely forgotten--today. Created out of wartime necessity in 1942 as an auxiliary to the all-male Army, many of the women served overseas. Initially, none was provided with life insurance or veterans’ health benefits. If they died, their parents received no death benefits.

At first, WACs were limited to such jobs as clerk, typist and cook. Some served abroad during World War II and later during the Korean and Vietnam wars. They were excluded from combat, but their roles gradually broadened to include medical support, intelligence work, military police and aircraft repair.

Chambliss and other retired WACs believe that the evolution of women’s role in the Army--a process that continues today--can best be told and preserved in the WAC Museum, which stands near Galloway Gate, a fort entryway named for Irene O. Galloway, a former WAC director who died of cancer in 1963.

Carol McCormick, a retired WAC first sergeant, doubts the Army will take the trouble--and invest the necessary money--to duplicate the extensive exhibits at another base. She fears that the window on women’s Army history will be shuttered.

“The nightmare is, you move artifacts into a storage facility and will they ever be seen again?” she says.

Cathy Alshire, president of the WAC Veterans Assn., whose national headquarters is in Anniston, Ala., takes a similar view. She says moving the museum to another base could be a good thing if it were used as a training tool to teach young female soldiers how the trail to wider Army opportunities was blazed by the women who served as WACs.

“But I don’t think it will,” she says. “I’m not even sure it will be a tourist attraction.”

The museum draws about 15,000 visitors a year, said Jerry Burgess, the curator.

One display in the museum notes that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower told Congress during debate on disbanding the WAC at the end of World War II that he had been “violently against” creating the WAC in the first place. The Allied forces commander added that the women’s war record “convinced me of the error of my first reaction.”

Eisenhower’s view won the day, and the WAC remained until 1978.

Women have won many skirmishes in the male-dominated military, but the museum war may be lost.

“We feel defeated,” says Bettie Morden, a retired colonel who served throughout the 36-year history of the WAC and who is now president of the WAC Foundation.