U.S. Navy Women’s Reserve

U.S. Navy Women’s Reserve. Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service “WAVES”. Facing a shortage of men to build additional ships and create new bases and facilities in the wake of 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 changed the course of naval history when he signed Public Law 689, the Navy Women's Reserve Act, creating the Women's Reserve of the Navy. The organization's official name became Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service expressed by the acronym WAVES. Although the word "emergency" was intended to denote the temporary nature of the women's service, the WAVES were unique among the other emergency women's armed services in that its members had the same full military status as male reservists. , , Between June and August 1942, with 1.5 million GIs steaming for Britain to prepare for D-Day, Axis submarines sank more than six hundred Allied ships. Even before the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, Polish, French, and British cryptanalysts had been working hard to break the codes they feared the Axis commanders would use to organize and carry out attacks on Allied shipping. As the D-Day build-up intensified, the need to break the German Enigma code became increasingly urgent and Project Ultra was launched. , , Starting with information gleaned from an intercepted commercial Enigma machine, the Ultra team began breaking the code. After the Royal Navy captured several newer machines from German U-boats, the decoding effort expanded to include 600 WAVES who, at Dayton, Ohio, assembled super-speed code readers called Bombes. At Bletchley Park, England, a contingent of the Women's Royal Naval Service, 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, which were in turn reported to Allied ships, thereby facilitating their safe passage to Britain, the build-up for D-Day, and 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. General Eisenhower credited women in uniform as an essential component in the successful planning and execution of Operations Overlord and Neptune. As stenographers, typists, translators, legal secretaries, cryptographers, telegraph and teletype operators, radiographers, and general clerks, WAVES assisted in the preparation for and planning of D-Day as well as subsequent naval operations. The Allied struggle against the Axis Powers in both theaters required thousands of WAVES to perform previously atypical duties in the fields of 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, WAVES proudly performed a wide variety of duties, sometimes at the risk of their lives, to help safeguard the principles of democracy. They have a noteworthy place in American history as a unique group of pioneers who led the way in the eventual incorporation of women into the military establishment of the United States. , , Given by the Family of Ivey Courtney Stone of Martinsville, Virginia, to honor her especially and all women who served in the Allied Armed Forces during World War II. She was a naval communications officer in Washington, DC, from 1942 through 1944.