Interviewer: Michael J. Thomas

Subject: Claire Anderson (grandmother, former WAVE)

Date: April 2, 2007

• When and where were you born?

-I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, June 2, 1923

• What do you remember about growing up during the Depression?

-Well, at the time I thought I had the good life. That was the time before we had TV and all the electronics. We spent most of the time outside and when we came home it was game time outside. Girls learned to sew and cook and do all the things girls don’t do now. But it was wonderful in the Depression as they call it. Now that you look back you think about how good we really had it.

• Can you remember some of the reactions to German and Japanese aggression during the ‘30’s?

-Well, you know that’s something else. During the ‘30’s we didn’t really think that much of it, because, I mean, that was over across the sea. We were here in America and everybody I think felt a little too secure, because the radio, we only had the radio. You didn’t have instant news as you do today. And I don’t really think that anyone was aware that there was that type of conflict going on over in Europe that would ever affect us. The only time we realized we were really going to get involved was at Pearl Harbor.

• In 1941, Roosevelt instituted the first peace-time draft. Was anyone you knew called up?

-Yes, as a matter of fact, three of the boys I graduated with in high school were among the first three to go. I don’t remember their names but I know they were [anxious], everybody was anxious at that particular time to be called up. They thought that was sort of a special way to get in the service. As I say, at that time when the draft came, it was so new and I don’t think a lot of the boys just graduating from high school, knew what they were going to do with their life. They thought This is wonderful, we’ll go in the Army, we’ll go in the service. As I say, when they started the draft we knew what had happened in Europe and mostly everybody sort of wanted to get in and stop it before it did come over here.

• Where were you when you first learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor?

-I was attending a birthday party in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with one of the boys that had come down during the summer. It was his birthday and his family invited me up for his birthday. And three of the boys that were there, well, right after that, I guess, within in a few months they all joined the military. But I think the funniest part, well it’s not funny now, but we didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was when they interrupted and said that Roosevelt was on the radio saying we had just been attacked at Pearl Harbor. They didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was. Two of those three boys were killed over in Europe.

• What can you remember of the local reaction?

-When I look back, I think how now we look at all the people protesting, protesting the war, protesting everything. At that time everybody wanted to get involved. I mean, my brother, who at that time was only ten years old, he and his friends were going house to house, they were collecting aluminum foil, they were collecting pots and pans and people were joining up for the, what they called the Shore Patrol, that would patrol the streets making sure everybody had their window shades drawn so there’d be no light going out into the ocean. You know, afraid of maybe attacks by subs or foreign ships. I mean everybody was in it, everybody was volunteering. The club that I worked with, what they called the AWVS, the American Women Volunteer Service and then a lot of the girls would volunteer to go up to the USO and serve food to the soldiers and what have you but everybody was involved. To me that was…. It’s just… The boys that didn’t get in were frustrated, they wanted to get in. There weren’t too many that were what they called 4-F, who didn’t qualify because of some physical disability. I think just about all of my friends either joined up in the service and very few of the girls actually went into military but they were all doing volunteer work.

• When did you decide to join the WAVES?

-I decided to join in 1942. I don’t know, I just thought it’d be a wonderful opportunity to go in, I mean I…at that time I was just like a lot of the guys I guess, I thought I wanted to do something. Of course, with recruiters they have a way of making you feel that whatever you contribute is going to help in the long run. So I guess I was naïve but I still feel that joining was one of the best decisions I ever made.

• What was you enlistment date?

-I enlisted in November the second 1944.

• What prompted you to join the WAVES? Why the Navy and not another branch?

-I honestly can’t tell you why. I just liked the Navy. Several of the boys that I knew from high school had joined the Navy and I don’t know I just…that was it, I just made the decision that that’s what I wanted to do.

• What do you remember from your experience enlisting? What kind of training was required? Any stories you can share?

-Well, we went to the Naval Training School in Bronx, New York and unfortunately November and December were just about the coldest months that anybody could’ve been there. The weather was horrible but one of the things I do remember was marching in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and that was in 1944 and the enlistees, I guess you’d call us at Bronx, were asked to participate and we did and it was cold but it was memorable. And I remember when I went to Cedar Falls, Iowa. We went there on the train. When it stopped at Cedar Falls I thought it was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen and there was so much snow. We were met at the station with the horse drawn sleds. When we got to the Cedar Falls State College, which at that time was still civilian, but a certain part of it was designated for WAVES training and they made us feel wonderful. At Christmas they gave us a party and had us put shoes outside the door and put little gifts in there. Coming back to Washington D.C., I mean, to me that was a thrill. I’d never been to Washington and I’ll never forget the first day, the first week, it was absolutely wonderful and it made it all worthwhile because I did a very good job in Washington, I had an important job. So, I don’t know what else you want to know, Michael, but I made a lot of wonderful friends. Very few are left, but I’m still in contact with two of the girls who were in the service with me in Washington D.C.

• About how long did the training take overall?

-Well, the training in New York was just a six week period. When I was in Cedar Falls, it was three months of intensive secretarial training and I had already gone to Business College so my typing and shorthand were pretty good to start with. When I got out of there I had the opportunity to either go to California or go to Washington D.C. and I chose to go to Washington so I would be able to get home once in awhile.

• Can you describe the appearance of the city? Were there barrage balloons or anti-aircraft guns?

-No, all you knew about the war in Washington D.C. was there were so many uniforms. Army, Navy, Marines, Shore Patrol, MP’s on the streets and all you had to do was come into Union Station any hour of the day or night when trains were coming and leaving and you knew there was a war on, because it was full of soldiers, sailors, marines going either to a new duty station, home, or on leave. It was just military. But there were no…I mean it was just like an ordinary town there were no, uh, what’d you say, Barrage Balloons? There was nothing to indicate as far as we knew, I’m sure there had to have been protection somewhere, but it wasn’t publicized and if you were in the service you really didn’t realize what was going on perhaps to protect the president, protect the Congress. As I say it seemed like a very normal city, with the exception there was military, military, military.

• Where were you assigned?

-I was assigned to Naval Headquarters in Washington D.C.

• What kind of work did you do?

-I was a Yeoman. I did…well, I took dictation and I did a lot of typing. The ones I did then were supposedly confidential and it still is. There were things that we had to get all kinds of messages out. As I say, now all you’d have to do would be to get on your computer, get on your laptop, but it was so different then. Instead of having all of the information on the computer or a disk, we had rooms that had what they called jackets. They were paper, thick paper envelopes that had everybody’s record. And in Washington D.C. there were records of all the service people in certain parts of the east coast and different headquarters all over the country had these jackets. And now they say everything that was in what we called the service record room could be put on one disc now. So I mean everything then was done the hard way.

• So did you work with a lot of classified material?

-Uh, not really. We knew that it wasn’t…I would say we knew a lot that was going on, but we didn’t really put it on the typewriters and when we were given dictation, it was primarily to family members, it was, um, well, I don’t know how to put it…there were special requirements for different services…or not services, the parts of the navy certain supply and different officers would get the request, they’d investigate, they’d dictate their reply and the yeomen, or in other words secretaries, would type it out and everything had to have four or five copies so that the original went out and one was filed in the office that it came from, others were filed in the Navy Bureau. Everything was, as I say, very, very paper [static]…paper [static]…Paper in the military during World War II, I don’t know how we ever would’ve gotten our communications ‘cause everything like supplies had to be requested with an order form plus so many copies and then it would go down the chain of command and then if you wanted to leave you had to apply for weekend leave or a pass and then you had to have the original and copies. As I say, now they don’t do that anymore, but that was part of my job.

• About how much free time did you get and what did you do with it?

-Well, I was very fortunate because where I worked we worked almost on a straight…like we had to report at seven o’clock in the morning and the main reason for that, the unit that I was attached to we made up the WAVES parade unit and as the parade unit we represented all of the, um…oh, when they would have a parade for like, um…oh, I can’t think of his name. It’ll come to me. [I think she was thinking of Nimitz-MT] All the officers and the dignitaries would have a kind of a parade or celebration. They would ask the WAVES and the WAC’s and the different military parade units to march. So we had to go in early for our practice. And then we had breakfast from 7:30 to 8:00, and then from 8:00 to four, five, or six everyday; that’s how long you worked. Then on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday, its just like a typical job today, you had the weekends off. And I tried to get back to Atlantic City at least once a month.

• Kind of a related question, what kind of music and movies did you enjoy?

-[Laughter] Well, at that time it was like Jimmy Dorsey and Betty Goodman and Glenn Miller and all of the old bands. There were very few…there was nothing compared to rock’n’roll or any of that. And the movies, were musicals, primarily musicals, Westerns, and then when they started to have the war movies, they began coming out in 1943, ’44 and they were versions of, like “Tora, Tora, Tora” and all of the jungle movies about the Japanese in their battles and…I don’t know how to put this, Michael, cause as I say there weren’t too many war movies coming out, but they did begin to come out toward the end of the war. As I say, we didn’t have the choices that you have today. Music was all big band music.

• How did you typically learn or hear about events overseas? Newsreels? Work?

-Well, I learned a lot through my job, but you would go to the movies and they would have, well here in New Jersey they had Café News, which would give an update on what had happened the week before. And then the radio, they would have announcements about different…but you had no idea what was really going on because the news was kept very secret. I mean, now the newscasters are on the battlefront, sometimes before the military. But there was none of that. There were a few reporters who traveled with certain units during the war, but very, very few.

• One thing of interest to me is the U-Boat campaign. In 1942, Admiral Doenitz sent U-boats to the American coast as part of Operation Drumbeat…

-Well, you know this is something that most of us did not know until after the war was over. That there were actually German submarines right off the coast and that is why, even though we weren’t made aware of it, that is why any building-hotels, homes-anyone that had their windows facing the ocean, and even at night all of the street lights, they had to have their shades pulled and on the boardwalk the big globes were painted black with the side that faced the ocean and it was just a slit, facing the West, that would allow light through. I mean, anybody caught with their shade up or any kind of light, they were subject to arrest at that time, but there were…we found out that there were patches of tar floating up on the beach, there were pieces of what we now know were merchant marine boats that were torpedoed and there’s a very interesting book put out showing how many actually were shot, the submarines, how many were actually destroyed off the coast and we never knew that until after the war.

• Was there any trouble, did any people on the coast complain about having to black out?

-No. As a matter of fact, it was amazing because they said everybody was so willing, they had…oh, I can’t think of the name of the people that volunteered to go through their neighborhood and be sure that every light was out that faced the ocean or even if they thought something might reflect or shine off of something metallic, they would ask you to turn your light off. I don’t ever remember anybody complaining about a sacrifice. We couldn’t get sugar and you couldn’t get gas, [because] it was rationed. People didn’t complain, they really didn’t complain and as I say, I never heard of anybody that felt they were having requests made that were unrealistic. They just thought, “We don’t want any problems, we’re going to cooperate.”

• What were your opinions of Hitler and the Nazi Party?

-Well, we were given the story that this man, of course we didn’t know about the years prior to his starting on Great Britain. It really wasn’t publicized, the fact that he had gone and murdered people, taken Jews and put them in concentration camps. Nobody really was aware of that, but as soon as Japan hit Pearl Harbor and Hitler wanted to invade France and Germany, uh, everybody thought “He’s got to go” It’s just like with Saddam Hussein, “He’s got to go.” But Hitler, nobody wanted to give him a second chance, everybody wanted him dead, because they didn’t want to live under the Nazi Regime and they found out all the things that he was doing. I mean, I don’t think there was one person that was sympathetic toward him.

• Were your opinions of the German people the same as the Nazi’s or did you have any differing opinions about the Germans themselves?

-No, next door to us we had a family named Bressler who were very, very German, I mean, the mother spoke German, the father was fluent in German. And, they were some of the first people to volunteer to do anything they could here. They wanted no association with it and it was just the same with a lot of the Japanese. I went to school with two Japanese girls and one Japanese boy and it was sad, but they were sent to California because of the fact that they were Japanese, which I thought was sort of cruel because they were Japanese-Americans but, as I say, we hated the Japanese and we hated the Germans in that area, um, time, because we heard all of the bad things and of course I guess that’s all there was with Hitler, just bad. Everybody wanted him to go.

• Did your opinions change after the war? Did you still see Germany and Japan as aggressors?

-No, as I say, once Hitler was gone, once the war was over, I mean, you heard different [things], just as in America you have the Democrats and Republicans. Then you had the good Germans and bad Germans. The ones who were true followers of Hitler and wanted to continue on, and the others, that wanted Hitler out of their lives completely. So, as I say, I have nothing against anybody because they’re German or Japanese, but If I knew they were following Hitler or following Hirohito, I don’t think I’d want anything to do with ‘them.

• What about the Russians?

-At the time, we thought the Russians were the good guys, I mean, the Russians were fighting on their front to protect their country and they seemed to be working with the Allies and of course the news and things later on with Stalin, you had a different opinion. All we knew were the boys in the news that we did get were the German soldiers and the Russian soldiers were doing nothing but getting frozen to death trying to protect the country. I don’t know, as I say, I always thought the Russians, during World War II were on our side.

• What can you remember about the death of President Roosevelt?

-That was a very, very sad day. The funeral procession for Roosevelt, the street, I mean people were crying when his funeral procession passed, people were crying. They knew he was ill, but they were hoping he could’ve lived to see the complete end of the war and as I say, everybody that I know of thought he was a wonderful president. I mean, what you hear years later, that doesn’t seem to matter, he did a good job while he was in there and of course I thought Harry Truman was a wonderful president to follow him, but, I don’t know what else I can say except I don’t think I knew of anybody who didn’t think Roosevelt was a wonderful man.

• Now were you part of the funeral procession or did you just witness it?

-No, the WAVE parade was part of the funeral procession and it was very, very quiet, you could hear the horses, you could hear that, you could hear people crying and it was, as I say, it was a very, very sad day. But all of the military units were represented.

• Can you describe your feelings on V-E Day?

-Well, uh, [chuckle] Washington D.C. went crazy. I mean, everybody was…it’s one of those indescribable things. Everybody was out on the streets, they were dancing, they were singing, horns were blowing, sirens were going, and it was something you had to be there to appreciate. You just can’t imagine how excited everybody was. People that didn’t know one anther were hugging and kissing and just acting crazy. It was a wonderful, wonderful day. And of course, it went on through the week. Everybody was excited, the boys started coming home. You’d go to Union Station and see families waiting for people that were coming back from the war. It was a time like no other.

• What about V-J Day? Was that more or less the same?

-Oh, well, that was really the end and, as I say, at the time I think a lot of people were very upset hearing of how it ended with the dropping of the bomb. But, as…I mean as horrible as it was eventually everybody knew that had that bomb not dropped there would have been many, many more American boys killed so, it was just a way to get the war over and as I say, the celebration…that meant it was over and almost the same type of celebrations took place. As I say, you cannot imagine the screams, the noise, the excitement. It’s something I don’t think I’ll ever see again.

• What did you do after the war was officially over? How long did you remain in the service?

-Well, I got married when I was in the service and I left in, oh lets see when I exactly did leave here…I left the service on June 29, 1946. I’d gotten married and I was expecting a baby and at that time if you were pregnant you could not stay in the service. You can now, but at that time you could not so that was the end of my military career.

• Anything else you’d like to share?

-Well, I was looking at my discharge and I laughed because at the bottom it says “mustering out pay” and it was paid on June 29, 1946 and I had to sign it, it was authorized in the presence of a Lieutenant Commander and I got $100 mustering out pay. Now just think how far that went back then. I look at that and I laugh and I thought well, I guess that was better than nothing, but I think all those boys and all the people that served in the service to get out with a mustering out pay of either $100 or very little more. As I say, the pay is not what made one go into the service, I mean if you volunteered, you volunteered because you wanted to, not because of the money.

• Anything you’d like to say in conclusion?

-Well, Michael, I don’t know, I really don’t realize what I’ve said to you, but I’ll tell you, I honestly and truly think it was such an honor to be in the uniform and I was so proud of that uniform and, as I say, I just…I can’t imagine anybody that served in World War II or the Korean War or any of the wars we’ve had since, I can’t imagine anybody having more pride in what they did, than I did while serving in the WAVES.