The SPARS: Women of the World War II Coast Guard, and the Recruits Who Broke Barriers

"Always Ready"

When the United States entered World War II, the Coast Guard was short of people: its men were being sent to sea, leaving essential shore jobs empty. On November 23, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the law creating its first women's branch, the Coast Guard Women's Reserve — known as the SPARS, from the Coast Guard motto Semper Paratus, "Always Ready." A member was a Spar. Its director was Dorothy C. Stratton, a lieutenant in the Navy's women's reserve, the WAVES.

Women could enlist or be commissioned for the duration of the war plus six months. Between 1942 and 1946, more than 10,000 volunteered. They had to be U.S. citizens aged 20 to 36, could be married — but not to a Coast Guardsman — could have no children under 18, and had to pass aptitude tests and a physical. The average enlisted Spar was 24, single, a high school graduate with a clerical or sales job; the average officer candidate was 29, single, college-educated, a former teacher or civil servant.

Recruiters promised better pay than civilian work, skills for later careers, a chance to "free a man to fight," and assurance that service would not make women less feminine: each Spar got $200 worth of uniforms designed by the couturier Mainbocher.

Training and service

At first Spars trained beside the WAVES. From May 1943, enlisted Spars trained at the Biltmore, a luxury hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, taken over by the Coast Guard; officer candidates went to the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut. "Boots" learned discipline, Coast Guard history, drill and endless cleaning, and marched to and from the beach. When recruiting quotas were met in early 1945, training moved to Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn.

About 40% of Spars became yeomen (clerical and administrative work) and 30% storekeepers (logistics and procurement). Others became photographers, cooks and bakers, pharmacy assistants, drivers, parachute riggers, air traffic controllers and radio operators. They could earn the same pay and do many of the same jobs as Coast Guardsmen, and served at every Coast Guard station except Puerto Rico. After Congress lifted the ban on overseas service in 1944, about 200 went to Ketchikan, Alaska, and 200 to Hawaii.

Men's attitudes, two Spars wrote in the Coast Guard's 1946 history Three Years Behind the Mast, "ranged from enthusiastic reception through amused condescension to open hostility." Some resented women who freed them for sea duty or rose faster; civilians could be respectful, curious, or harassing. "Any woman who tries to become part of a man's world even in time of a great national emergency," the authors reflected, "is automatically placing herself at the beginning of an obstacle course."

Barrier-breakers

Recruiting targeted young white women, and most Spars were white. But women of other backgrounds served, facing extra obstacles:

• Olivia Hooker, born in 1915, survived the 1921 Tulsa race massacre as a six-year-old hidden under the dining table while a mob wrecked her family's home; her father's store in the Greenwood district was burned. Later an Ohio State graduate and teacher, she was turned down by the WAVES, then welcomed by a SPARS recruiter. The SPARS accepted Black women only from fall 1944, and just five joined; Hooker was the first Black woman on active duty in the Coast Guard, and later a pioneering psychologist.
• Florence Finch, born in the Philippines in 1915 to a Filipina mother and an American father, worked for U.S. Army Intelligence in Manila. After the Japanese occupation she smuggled food, medicine and money to American prisoners of war and helped the resistance, and was arrested and interrogated. Freed in October 1944, she joined the Coast Guard — breaking barriers for Asian American women — and was later recommended for the Medal of Freedom.
• The Sooner Squadron, recruited in Oklahoma by Mabel Martin, who let friends enlist and train together, included six Native American women. Lula Mae O'Bannon and Lula Belle Everidge (Choctaw), teachers at Goodland Indian School, enlisted together in 1943, saw the ocean for the first time at Palm Beach, served as typists in Philadelphia, and were recommended for officer training. Cousins Mildred Cleghorn Womack and Corrine Koshiway Goslin (Otoe) — the only two Otoe women among 87 Otoe-Missouria who enlisted — served in Washington, DC, locating missing Guardsmen for their families, and in Tampa, in radio and communications. Nellie Locust (Cherokee), who spoke Cherokee before English, chose the Coast Guard as the smallest branch with the most opportunity; June Townsend Gentry (Yuchi/Choctaw) left a job at Douglas Aircraft to enlist. Newspapers covered them in stereotyped language — "Indian princess," "herb doctor" — while their communities honored them: Goslin's mother founded the first Native American chapter of the War Mothers, and her father commissioned a veteran flag song for her.

After the war

V-J Day, August 15, 1945, brought celebration and an uncertain future. On June 30, 1946, more than 10,000 Spars were demobilized. The Women's Armed Services Integration Act of 1948, which let women serve permanently in the military, did not technically cover the Coast Guard, then part of the Treasury Department. The Coast Guard revived the SPARS in 1949, but only a few hundred rejoined, and the reserve lasted until 1973, when Congress let Coast Guard women serve alongside men.

Sources

Based on "(H)our History Lesson: An Unforgettable Experience: Diverse Stories of Women in the World War II Coast Guard," by Alison Russell for the National Park Service with the National Council on Public History, National Park Service, and the readings it assigns — Ella Wagner's "United States Coast Guard Women's Reserve (SPARS)" and the Park Service's biographies of Olivia Hooker, Florence Finch, Lula Mae O'Bannon, Lula Belle Everidge, Mildred Cleghorn Womack, Corrine Koshiway Goslin, June Townsend Gentry, Nellie Locust and Dorothy Stratton; works of the United States government in the public domain. Quotations are from Mary C. Lyne and Kay Arthur, Three Years Behind the Mast (U.S. Coast Guard, 1946); interviews and wartime newspaper coverage are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The lesson's activities are left out, and a 1943 Tulsa World photograph is not reproduced.