Women key part of Cherry Point, Marine Corps history

Highly trained, highly motivated and indispensable to the war effort, they were called the Lady Leathernecks.

At the height of World War II at Cherry Point, 2,662 Marine Corps Women’s Reserve officers and enlisted personnel had jobs, including radio operator, parachute rigger, aircraft mechanic, aerial photographer, chemical warfare specialist, combat conditioning and gunnery, and public relations. By the war’s end, there were 19,000 Women’s Reserves nationwide and some 40 percent were in aircraft support, mostly as mechanics.

Gladys A. Hansis, one of the first to arrive, recalled coming to Cherry Point in the late summer of 1943 to serve as a radio operator. She was one of the more than 600 women reservists at the 1-year-old base, which was swelling with more than 14,000 personnel, mostly men who were rapidly departing for combat duty in the Pacific theater.

In a Veterans History Project for the National Archives, Hansis said there was just one barracks for women Marines in 1943.

"Of course we were looked at as something different you know," she said.

Their motto was "Free a Marine to Fight."

"We were taking their place, which meant that they were going overseas away from family, whoever," she said. "Some were hostile. I do remember not being liked because of that reason, because we were replacing them in those jobs."

Francis Skiba Hoffman experienced much the same thing.

"Some men did not want to be free to fight and we were not popular in some respects," she told the National Archives.

Hoffman’s first job was as an airplane mechanic at Cherry Point in 1943. She worked at a salvage yard where women hauled airplane parts around in wheelbarrows.

"At the salvage yard, our work was very grubby," she said.

Part of the work included dismantling airplanes for the parts.

" … It was a weighty kind of responsibility. We worked with the men and we learned a lot, but we did a lot of the grunt work," she said.

Hoffman said working with men at Cherry Point wasn’t hard but occasionally a hard-boiled chauvinistic would emerge.

"Oh it wasn’t really tough. It was kid of silly. They weren’t vindictive about it. It was more or less body language," she said. "When you were sent to help somebody, if they wanted to show you, they would. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t show you. They just weren’t helpful in learning the job."

She said living among the men wasn’t easy.

"Some accepted us. Some did not. And the barracks were also community living. That was difficult," she said. "We had to accept our pay under strict conditions. Our shoes had to be polished. Our hair had to be short, or we didn’t get paid. Payday was important even though it was a low pay. It was hardly enough to buy the sundry things that we really needed."

Hoffman said women had to make adjustments.

"I realized that there’s a lot of growing up that takes place. You are exposed to a lot of different things, a lot of different people, different kinds of circumstances, and it was not easy for women to do that," she said. "Lots of women didn’t make it. They were not able to adjust to the discipline of it.

"There’s an awful lot of discipline in the Marine Corps and really it wasn’t easy to do everything that was expected of us. It was an effort. What brought us through was we arrived at camaraderie. Boot camp wasn’t easy. The men had to drill us."

Hansis spent most of her time at Cherry Point in the control tower relaying coded messages.

"I remember seeing (Charles) Lindbergh one time," Hansis said. "Well, they had to file their flight plans and as I was going off at 11ish one time, he was downstairs where they file the flight plans. I didn’t know who he was at the time."

Hansis said she most admired Women Airforce Service Pilots

"They were the ladies who would bring in these great big planes all by themselves to be delivered somewhere else and they would have to file their flight plans," she said.

Tana Maxwell, of Newport, is the historian of the Women Veterans of North Carolina. She

served in the Marine Corps from 1964 to 1966 and was later in the reserves from 1974 to 1982. She worked at Cherry Point’s repair and maintenance facility — now called Fleet Readiness Center East — for 25 years.

She said women were proud of their work during World War II but were seemingly cast aside once the war ended and the men began returning home.

"They were let go and their experience no longer counted or anything else because it was the man’s job to support the family," she said. "The women, even though they had the experience and had taken the men’s place during World War II, were no longer considered as a benefit.

"They did the job. They took the place. Things got done, but once the men returned from overseas, the women were let go. It was not until the war was over with that they found out that they were expected to go back home and become wives or whatever.

"I prefer to look at the positive. They replaced the men while the men went overseas to fight the war and they did a very outstanding job of it."

Equality between men and women evened out, Maxwell said, with the enforcement of equal employment opportunity laws during the 1970s. In 1975, the Marine Corps discontinued the use of the term "Women Marines" and dictated that all women be considered Marines.

Ruth Fisher, 49, of Havelock, joined the Marine Corps in 1979. She grew up on a farm in Iowa and knew how to grease a tractor, so her recruiter made sure she got a guaranteed job as a mechanic in the Corps.

"My recruiter did know the type person I was and I was somewhat of an outdoors person and I was very hands-on because I came from a farm. A desk job was not going to necessarily fit me very well," Fisher said.

Fisher spent 13 years in the Marine Corps, 10 of which were at Cherry Point where she was an aircraft mechanic. She assembled and disassembled engines and also tested jet engines for aircraft such as the A4 Skyhawk and AV-8B Harrier.

Fisher said she got along well with her co-workers and rarely encountered discrimination.

"It depended on the individual," Fisher said. "You have mindsets that are very narrow, and no matter how much you prove yourself, they don’t think that a woman belongs.

"But on the other hand, you have a lot of other people that were very great people and made you feel more welcome and more qualified than any one of the guys. They accepted me for that. You had it go both ways."

She has worked at FRC East since 1996 and currently works on engines for the CH-53E Super Stallion.

"I was exposed to a lot of different things in the Marine Corps, which helped me a great deal, and I find even today at my job that exposure to things in the Marine Corps has helped me tremendously do my job a lot better now compared to somebody that comes in off the streets that doesn’t have any aviation background in any sort of armed services," she said. "It served me well the way the parts system is set up. It’s a lot of different experiences."

Today, women comprise about 6.2 percent of the Marine Corps and fulfill 93 percent of occupational fields. Women have gotten closer and closer to the front lines. Pilot positions were open to women in 1993. Just last week, the Pentagon outlined new roles for women in the military.

Sgt. Maj. Holly Prafke, of Headquarters and Headquarters Squadron at Cherry Point, is one of 874 active-duty women Marines at Cherry Point today.

The 48-year-old Rochester, N.Y., native has been in the Corps 28 years.

"I’ve wanted to do this since I was about 14," she said. "My father’s a Marine, my sister dated a Marine, almost married a Marine. This is it. I didn’t want to be a housewife."

Prafke plans on retiring with 30 years. She mentioned her participation with the Marine Corps Mounted Color Guard in California, graduation from drill instructor school and tours in Iraq and Afghanistan along with her marriage to a fellow sergeant major whom she met in drill instructor school as her proudest moments in her career.

"When I came in the Marine Corps, women could only wear skirts. Skirts and makeup was a big thing when I came in," she said. "You got the secretarial jobs, and I came in and did aviation supply and was into ground supply. When I came in, you did not shoot on the rifle range."

Now she’s considered an expert in pistols, rifles, machine guns and grenade launchers.

"If it’s in our arsenal, I’ve shot it, so you go from one extreme to the other in my career," she said. "So, you can see where women were working their way up to maybe in the future being in a combat role, which I think is where we are at now."

She said she takes pride in being a woman in the Marine Corps.

"There’s quite a bit of pride," she said. "There were a lot of ups and downs in those 30 years that go from where we started at, wearing skirts and doing more the administrative role, all the way over to I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan and back again.

"I have a lot of pride for my entire career from the things that I’ve done. I’ve been a drill instructor. I’ve trained many Marines to do the job that they need to do. I’ve trained them in their MOSs. I’ve been on ship. Women weren’t allowed on ship until 1994. They were actually only allowed on hospital ships on some of the ships that the Navy had. The Marine Corps in 1994 allowed us to be on ship.

"There’s been a lot of changes throughout my career that I was proud to see and be part of. Looking back, so many things have changed for females. Males have had a lot of changes too, but the females particularly."