WAVE recalls wartime duty

By Linda Bell
Correspondent

When Jean Nelson was offered a challenge--in jest--by a polio-disabled friend and colleague at her upstate New York accounting office to join the military in his place, she did.

"It was after Pearl Harbor," she said, "and I had been giving it a lot of thought anyway." So that very January afternoon she visited a Navy recruiter. "When I got back to the office and told my friend I'd become a Navy WAVE, he was quite astounded," Nelson said.

WAVE stood for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. "We weren't allowed to go overseas in those days," she said, "so we were like a reserve force at home. I'd always been a water person, so it seemed natural for me to join the Navy rather than the Army."

At the time of her enlistment, she was already a member of the Red Cross Motor Corps in her little town and a Civil Defense airplane spotter, doing nighttime duty on the roof of the high school.

Nelson went to Hunter College in New York City for boot camp in March 1944. Following six weeks of learning Navy "regs," parading in freezing spring snowstorms and taking medical and mental exams, she was chosen to stay for further training at Hunter to become a Specialist S, meaning "supervisor" of WAVE personnel. It was the equivalent of "shore patrol" in the regular Navy, she said.

"It completely changed my life," Nelson said. "First of all, I wasn't a morning person, and I had to learn to get up at 5:30 a.m. But it also changed my thinking because there were people from all over the country working with me and I began to have a sense of how diverse we were as a nation. It was wonderful to feel how we all came together in the war effort."

Nelson said she remained at Hunter College as an SpS to train "incoming boots." The Navy took over all of Hunter College and 600 family apartments in the area for their personnel, she said, which meant 600 families had to find someplace else to live during the duration of the war. There were six to eight women to an apartment unit, she said, and the only furnishings were bunks and a few chairs.

Nelson also was a bugler in the WAVE drum and bugle corps at Hunter, where the playing fields served as perfect review grounds. "I played trumpet in my high school band," she explained.

When her ship's company moved after Hunter College was decommissioned, Nelson went to Sampson Naval Hospital near Geneva, N.Y. There were German prisoners of war in the hospital, as well as American soldiers from the Pacific corridor, she said.

"A friend and I from Hunter were assigned to WAVE barracks, which meant keeping track of the 120 hospital corpsmen assigned there and enforcing Navy standards and discipline," Nelson said. "It was a bit like being a housemother."

While Nelson didn't meet her husband until after the war, she did have a fiancé who served in the Army in Europe at the time of her own service. He survived the war, she said, but by then everything had changed for both of them.