During World War II, women were actively involved in Washington DC’s air defense system. Their work was hush-hush and the nation’s capital never came under attack, so what historian Anne Dobberteen calls the “gray area” of their war work has largely been forgotten.

“Through their service, they both challenged, and reinforced, traditional gender stereotypes of what women’s work outside the home could be, and what a ‘soldier’ defending the home front looked like,” she writes.

Dobberteen explains the roles of two groups of women. She first discusses the Antiaircraft Artillery Volunteers (AAV), who worked as plotters for the Army’s Coast Artillery Antiaircraft Command. They provided “real time 3-D visualizations of the region’s air traffic (friend, foe, and unknown planes).” More than three hundred women volunteered for this work at Bolling Field, located across the Potomac from DC. Since these were part-time volunteer positions in a still racially segregated society, they were mostly filled by middle- and upper-class white women.

The second group were some of the “militarized civilians” of the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC), which was formed in May 1942. These WAACs served in a test of mixed female/male anti-aircraft (AA) gun crews around Washington. It turns out that this was the only known American test of mixed-sex military units during the war. The Pentagon didn’t declassify the very positive results of the experiment until 1968.

Like the AAV,  the WAACs didn’t officially serve in the Army. It would only be in July 1943 that the WAAC was incorporated as an active-duty unit, with “Auxiliary” being dropped from the newly renamed Women’s Army Corps (WAC). The mixed-gender AA experiment was over by then.

The Military District of Washington was organized in May 1942 for defense of the nation’s capital. Coast Artillery Antiaircraft units around DC and in nearby Maryland and Virginia were responsible for defending against enemy air attack. German catapult ships, long-range seaplanes, and bombers sent from Europe via the Azores or Greenland were considered to be the threats.

For such air defense, the central issue was the identification of enemy planes as soon as possible amid all the friendly planes in the air. Civilian coastal defense spotters of the Aircraft Warning Service were integral to this air defense system, feeding information into the command center at Bolling Field.

The armed part of the air defense system primarily consisted of batteries of 90-mm AA artillery. Although Hitler had fantasied about reducing New York City to ruins by aerial bombardment, and hopes for a long-range bomber fleet to do so had been raised in Germany even before the start of the war, there were no Nazi air attacks against the East Coast. However, if there had been air raids against Washington DC between February and May 1943, it would have been women aiming eight of the city’s anti-aircraft guns.

Twenty-one officers and 347 auxiliaries (enlisted members) from the 62nd, 150th, and 151st companies of the WAAC participated in the mixed unit test authorized by Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. Marshall had been inspired by reports of successes with British women in the Auxiliary Territorial Service and concerned about manpower shortages at home.

The WAACs used searchlights to locate incoming aircraft and radar to help aim the guns; the “mathematicians among them computed the correct angle of fire to hit a target.” They did everything but load the 45-pound shells and fire the guns, which meant that they could still be, rather nonsensically, classified as “noncombatants.”

Battery X’s live-fire tests at Bethany Beach, Delaware, in April 1943 “found the women highly capable of manning 60 percent of the army’s antiaircraft positions,” writes Dobberteen. The women could “more carefully and precisely track” target planes than their male counterparts. Men in leadership roles above the WAAC commanders were very impressed, but people even higher in the chain of command discontinued the project. They thought that the women would be better used to fill administrative posts, freeing up more men for combat.

The Women’s Army Corp was disbanded in 1978, as gender integration of the armed forces took a big step forward. Since America’s beginnings, women have been under fire and taken part in combat, although it has only been since 2015 that they have been officially allowed to serve in combat roles in the US armed forces. Women make up about 16 percent of those forces today.

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