U.S. Navy Women’s Reserve

Facing a shortage of men after the 7 December 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Secretary of the Navy petitioned the U.S. Congress in January 1942 to establish a women’s reserve. On 30 July 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Public Law 689, the Navy Women's Reserve Act, creating the Women’s Reserve of the Navy, officially named Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES. Although “emergency” was meant to indicate temporary service, the WAVES were unique among wartime women’s armed services because their members held the same full military status as male reservists. As the war intensified and Allied shipping came under severe Axis submarine attack, efforts to break the German Enigma code became increasingly urgent through Project Ultra. Using information from an intercepted commercial Enigma machine and later from newer machines captured from German U-boats, the decoding effort expanded to include 600 WAVES in Dayton, Ohio, who assembled super-speed code readers called Bombes. At Bletchley Park, England, members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, or WRENS, operated the Bombes and fed information to Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer. As messages were decoded, WAVES and WRENS also plotted enemy submarine positions, helping Allied ships reach Britain safely, support the build-up for D-Day, and contribute to eventual Allied domination of the Pacific. Ultra’s neutralization of Enigma was vital to the build-up for and outcome of the D-Day invasion, and General Eisenhower credited women in uniform as essential to the successful planning and execution of Operations Overlord and Neptune. WAVES also served as stenographers, typists, translators, legal secretaries, cryptographers, telegraph and teletype operators, radiographers, and general clerks, assisting preparations for D-Day and later naval operations. In both theaters of war, thousands of WAVES performed duties in aviation, military law, medicine, communications, intelligence, science, and technology. By war’s end, 8,000 commissioned and 76,000 enlisted WAVES were still on duty, with 8,000 more in training, and they had established a noteworthy place in American history as pioneers who helped lead the way toward the eventual incorporation of women into the military establishment of the United States.

Bedford, Virginia · United States