The World War II Navy Women of Floyd Bennett Field: A History Lesson

From the National Park Service series "Women's History to Teach Year-Round", adapted by Talia Brenner and Katie McCarthy from the Teaching with Historic Places lesson "Floyd Bennett Field: Naval Aviation's Home in Brooklyn". Written for middle-school learners, adaptable for any age.

WAVES at Floyd Bennett Field, 1945. National Park Service.

To start: Who are the women in this photograph, and what details make you think so?

What learners will do

• Describe the women who worked at Floyd Bennett Field in World War II and the jobs they did.
• Outline what the WAVES contributed to the war.
• Find the central ideas in primary sources — posters, memoirs, songs — and what they reveal about their authors' points of view and purposes.

Background

When Floyd Bennett Field opened in 1931, it was not a military airport. Through the 1930s commercial pilots and famous aviators flew from the Brooklyn airfield, and women pioneers such as Laura H. Ingalls and Jacqueline Cochran set records from its runways. The U.S. Navy took it over in June 1941, six months before the United States entered the war in December 1941, and its naval air station soon became the busiest in the country.

With so many men at war and a growing need for military equipment, the armed forces and their contractors began hiring women for jobs once open only to men — factory workers, engineers, air traffic controllers, test pilots. Women of many ages, races and levels of education took them, out of patriotism and for independence, adventure and good pay, and helped the Allies win in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Hundreds served at the Floyd Bennett Field naval air station, many of them in the U.S. Naval Reserve's women's branch, the WAVES — Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service.

A WAVE operating radio equipment in the control tower, Floyd Bennett Field, 1943. National Archives and Records Administration.

Document 1: Fran Boggs Metcalf

Writing in 2004, Fran Metcalf recalled the shock and anger of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the wave of patriotism that followed. Her brother Jim, a Navy aviation mechanic, wrote enthusiastic letters, and she resolved to follow him. On her 20th birthday — the minimum age — she took a streetcar downtown and was sworn in as a WAVE, on delayed entry, on July 21, 1944.

At Floyd Bennett Field she lived in a bunkroom of 50 women, four bunks to a cubicle, with an open communal shower. She remembered little friction: a dispute over a kitten, another over open windows, both settled amicably. Married women without children could serve, but pregnant women could not — one woman was discharged when her pregnancy was discovered. Slacks and jeans were fine on base, but full dress uniform was required to leave it.

Assigned to an aircraft crew, she carried tools, washed propellers, changed oil filters, unbuckled cowlings and dusted cockpits on F4Us, F4Fs and PBYs. She never became the mechanic she had hoped to be: when a WAVE officer walking through the office of the aircraft unit's outgoing flights heard the men's language, she ordered a woman put in that office at once. So Metcalf ended up logging in planes delivered from Grumman Aircraft and logging them out, after inspection, to aircraft carriers heading to sea. She kept aspirin in her desk for hungover young sailors — some only 17 to her 20 — knowing they might soon be shipped out. Sixty years later she still met her bunkmate, Amy Foster Feluk, several times a year.

Discussion: Why did Fran keep aspirin for the sailors? Why might the officer have wanted a woman in an office where men swore? Why were WAVES barred from leaving base in trousers, and how might Fran have felt about it? What made her join?

Document 2: Amy Foster Feluk

Amy Feluk joined the Navy in September 1944. After boot camp at Hunter College in the Bronx, she travelled alone by subway to Flatbush, where a "cattle car" — an enclosed semi-trailer — picked her up for Floyd Bennett Field.

• WAVES worked a four-weekend rotation: Saturday off, Sunday off, both off, then all weekend on duty. Cattle cars, standing room only, took them to meals, church and the post exchange.
• She trained as an apprentice aviation machinist's mate in the Aircraft Commissioning Unit in Hangar A — and learned to watch out for turning propellers after seeing a sailor badly injured by one.
• On free weekends the WAVES headed for Manhattan and the USO on Times Square, which handed out free tickets to musicals, films, roller skating, nightclubs such as the Copacabana and Toots Shor's, and Radio City Music Hall. Closer to base there was dancing at the Blue Mirror in Flatbush, hamburgers and hot dogs they did not get on base, and Coney Island.
• After spraining both knees in a basketball game in Rhode Island "between Christmas and New Year 1945", she spent two months on kitchen duty, unable to work on aircraft.

Discussion: Why might Amy stress that she travelled to Flatbush alone? What does her time off aircraft duty say about the physical demands of the job? Did the WAVES' days off lean toward rest or excitement, and why?

Activities

1. Creative writing. Pick an event from one of the memoirs and write a diary entry about it as that woman — imaginative about feelings, but consistent with the facts.

2. Popular culture. Study three WAVES recruiting posters by John Philip Falter, then listen to "Rosie the Riveter" as sung by the Four Vagabonds — a song about a factory worker that shows how Americans saw women's war work. Then design your own WAVES recruiting poster.

"It's a woman's war too! Join the WAVES. Your country needs you now." John Philip Falter, 1942. Library of Congress.

"Bring him home sooner… Join the WAVES." John Philip Falter, 1944. Library of Congress.

"Don't miss your great opportunity… The Navy needs you in the WAVES." John Philip Falter, 1944. Library of Congress.

• For each poster, finish the sentence: "Join the WAVES because …"
• How are the women in the third poster's surroundings shown, and what message does that send?
• How do the women in the posters look? Did every WAVE look like that? Why might the artist have drawn them this way?
• Is the song's picture of Rosie positive, negative or mixed? What qualities does it give her?
• From the posters and the song, what was the ideal image of a woman working for the military?

Wrap-up

• What challenges did women face in the WAVES, and how might they have felt about them?
• What motivated them to enlist? When have you needed extra motivation to take on something new?
• Are there World War II memorials or preserved wartime places in your community?

More to explore: Gateway National Recreation Area, which includes Floyd Bennett Field and preserves 26,000 acres around New York City; the Navy's Naval History and Heritage Command; the National Archives' online exhibit A People at War; and the Women Veterans Historical Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Sources

• National Park Service, "(H)our History Lesson: The World War II Navy Women of Floyd Bennett Field," part of Women's History to Teach Year-Round. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/-h-our-history-lesson-the-world-war-ii-navy-women-of-floyd-bennett-field.htm
• The memoirs of Fran Metcalf and Amy Feluk, both dated March 22, 2004, are held by the National Archives; they are paraphrased here.
• The lesson's background expands WAVES as "Women Accepted for Volunteer Exceptional Service"; its first document, and the Navy, give "Emergency Service".
• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.