The Spars of Unit 21: the women who ran a secret Coast Guard station

In 1944 a Coast Guard station on Cape Cod was handed over to women and told to keep its purpose secret. The station at Chatham, Massachusetts, monitored LORAN, a radio navigation system so new and so sensitive that even the officer training its staff did not know what their duties would be. The engineering officer's one requirement was the "ability to keep their mouths shut." Within a month of their arrival the station was run by Spars, the women of the Coast Guard's wartime reserve, with one male radio technician staying on for six months to teach them maintenance. The Coast Guard's historian believes it was the only all-woman station of its kind in the world.

Always Ready

The Coast Guard founded its women's reserve in 1942 and named it SPARS, after the service's motto, Semper Paratus — Always Ready. One servicewoman was a Spar. Thousands enlisted, recruited in a hurry and in competition with the Army's WACs and the Navy's WAVES. The purpose was stated plainly: a woman at a desk or a radio set on the home front would "free a man up to fight." Dorothy Stratton, recruited from WAVES officer training, led the reserve through the war.

Training without the lark

"If any recruit had entertained the notion that going into service was a lark, she soon got over it," the editors of the Spars' group memoir wrote: physical exams, aptitude tests, shots, courses, swimming, drill, and "hurry, hurry, hurry — hurry up and wait." Lillian Vasilas trained at the Biltmore hotel in West Palm Beach, six to a room with a private bathroom, and had to prove she could swim in the pool before she was allowed in the ocean. Margaret Gorley Foley trained in Stillwater, Oklahoma, marching to class at dawn behind three other companies — "the Radio City Rockettes have nothing over the girls who went to Oklahoma" — while airmen and radar men shouted "you're out of step, sister."

The work, and the men who resented it

Vasilas became a radio operator at the Coast Guard's Washington Radio Station in Alexandria, copying coded messages in Morse, four hours on watch at a time; one of three women operators among a great many men. When she passed for First Class, her chief was not pleased: he had spent some twenty years reaching his rank. "I don't blame him," she said. Harriet Writer, an officer, put it this way: "I think the men in the service maybe didn't respect us totally, but they respected us enough to be nice to us." In Boston she ran staffing and daily reports for the LORAN stations — "such a big, top secret thing at the time and now it is absolutely nothing."

Unit 21

At Chatham, Lieutenant (junior grade) Vera Hamerschlag found that commanding the station made her its operations officer, engineering officer, medical officer, personnel officer and training officer at once. She learned plumbing, a coal furnace and the Kohler engine that gave emergency power when nor'easters took the lines down, and wondered which Spar would climb the 125-foot antenna mast if it failed. A hurricane the next autumn suspended operations and evacuated the station.

LORAN fixed a ship's or aircraft's position from the timing of signals sent by pairs of radio stations. The Coast Guard ran 72 of them; by the end of the war they covered about 30 percent of the globe. For the women monitoring it on Cape Cod, Hamerschlag wrote, that was the point: it made them feel "as close to the front lines as it was possible for Spars to be."

Sources

Written from the National Park Service's (H)our History Lesson Always Ready: Women in the Coast Guard during World War II, a work 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), and from Coast Guard oral history interviews with Lillian Vasilas (2007) and Harriet Writer (2012).