In Tandem with Ken Burns' The War -
A Vermont Farmgirl Who Answered the Call to Service

By Heather K. Michon

Sometime around midnight on June 5, 1944, Technical Sergeant Mabel Christiansen was walking across an English field toward her barracks with a group of her fellow female soldiers when she heard the sound of planes overhead. It was not just a few planes but dozens, and "they were coming and coming and coming over our heads." These women knew what it meant: the Allied invasion of Europe was about to begin. As a file clerk at Allied Headquarters in London, the young Vermonter had seen any number of papers about something called "Operation Overlord" but hadn't guessed that this was what the world would come to know as D-Day. "That was the best-kept secret of World War II," says Mabel "Chris" Wright today.

The East Montpelier native is one of two women showcased in an online project by Vermont Public Television as a companion to the new Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary, The War. This seven-part series, set for re-broadcast in October, tells the story of World War II from the perspective of men and women from four American towns: Waterbury, Connecticut; Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; and tiny Luverne, Minnesota. Working with the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress, over 100 PBS stations across the country are participating in the collection of written and video histories of men and women who served during the war.

Wright was a member of the Women's Army Corps. WAC was the brainchild of Massachusetts Congresswoman Edith Nouse Rogers, who had served as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I and believed that women could do a valuable service as support workers in the military, freeing up men for combat. In the spring of 1941, she introduced a bill to create a women's auxiliary corps, but the bill died without a vote. After Pearl Harbor, she gained the support of Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and reintroduced it. President Franklin Roosevelt signed Public Law 77-554 on May 14, 1942, creating the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC).

The response was overwhelming: WAAC met their first year's recruiting goal of 25,000 within the first six months. The Army auxiliary was quickly joined by other groups: Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVEs), the Coast Guard's SPARS (a play on the branch's motto, SET ITALS Semper Paratus END, "Always Ready"), the Army Nurse Corps, and the Navy Nurse Corps. Hundreds of thousands of women answered the call to service during the war.

Among them was Chris Wright. In the spring of 1943, she was 22 years old and in her fourth year of teaching at a small schoolhouse near her home in East Montpelier. The enlistment process involved travel: down to Rutland for psychological and IQ testing, then up to Fort Ethan Allen in Colchester for the physical. She was accepted into the service and ordered to report to Fort Devens in Massachusetts in early June 1943.

Wright says her decision to join was "very difficult for my mother," since she was both the youngest child and the only daughter, but neither her mother nor her father tried to dissuade her. "I just wanted to help," she says. "Everybody did." An older brother had joined the Army, serving in the South Pacific, and another brother was staying home to work on the farm - itself a vital part of the war effort.

Wright set out for Massachusetts in early June and, as directed, brought no extra clothing other than her travel suit. When she arrived at Fort Devens, she was told they were temporarily out of uniforms. "I wore that pink seersucker suit for five days," she says. "I had KP (kitchen duty) a few times. There were [no] washers and dryers available as there are today, so it was pretty messy."

Basic training included marching, drilling, military discipline, learning to keep their beds and barracks areas neat and tidy, classes on Army organization and rules, and lots of physical education. "I seemed to take to it, and I really enjoyed it. I liked the physical exercises that we did," she remembers.

As Wright was learning how to march in formation and square the corners of her bedsheets, changes were coming for the WAACs. A small group had been sent to North Africa in the winter of 1943 and had done quite well. Expanding military operations in Europe and Asia required an increase in noncombatant support, and WAACs were the obvious choice. As the law was written, women like Wright were not actually part of the U.S. Army. Among other things, this meant they had no guaranteed protection if they should be captured or injured.

Congresswoman Rogers introduced a new bill calling for the creation of the Women's Army Corps, giving women full military status and all the privileges - and responsibilities - that came with it. After much debate, the bill passed and was signed into law by Roosevelt on July 1, 1943. Women serving as WAACs were given 90 days to decide if they wanted to join the new service. Around 75 percent did.

Wright was among them. "I hit it just right," she says. "Along with the idea of being patriotic, I had always loved geography and there was also the idea that I would have a chance to travel." Life on a Vermont dairy farm had not allowed many opportunities for adventure. Before her enlistment, her only real travel experience was a bus trip to the West Coast to visit relatives. While some WACs had to wait months before applying for overseas duty, she was accepted into the program almost immediately.

Overseas training meant another six weeks of training and courses. Along with more drills and marching, there were shots, psychological examinations, and lectures on how to act in a foreign country. They were also lectured about sexually transmitted diseases "until we were petrified." Many of the lecturers, she says, "built us up, told us we were the cream of the crop, which we really liked to hear. And we were also told we were a symbol of American womanhood, and all our actions had to be discreet and careful."

They set out for England on September 5 but did not arrive in Liverpool until October 18. Their first ship was declared "unseaworthy," and they were diverted to Newfoundland for two weeks; a second ship scraped the harbor floor and was also dry-docked. The third and final ship had to divert to Halifax on the first day out due to German U-boat activity. It was a rough crossing, and Wright remembers that the captain sometimes had to send down depth charges to guard against U-boats, with everyone ordered to their bunks and told to "be perfectly quiet."

Disembarking at Liverpool, they were sent to Litchfield for skills training. WACs were eligible for 406 of the 628 Army specialties; Wright was assigned as file clerk and eventually ended up in Bushy Park, London. This was the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (known as SHAEF) -- "General Eisenhower's domain," she says. Wright and her fellow WACs shared rooms in "a lovely old mansion" on the Park grounds.

Her days fell into a pattern: rising around 6 o'clock, dressing and tidying her room "because you never knew when you might have an inspection," eating breakfast in the women's mess hall and heading to the SHAEF offices by 8 o'clock. At lunch, they had to walk back to the mess hall for a quick meal, then hurry back to work within an hour. Until the weeks leading up to the invasion at Normandy, they worked a regular day, and their evenings were their own. "Lights out" was around eleven o'clock at night.

Her fellow WACs were "just wonderful girls" whose friendship made the inevitable homesickness more tolerable. While overseas, her only contact with family and friends was by letter, and, like all soldiers, WACs would often pass the evenings writing the folks at home. But life was not all drudgery: they had time to explore London, go to an occasional show or dance, and spend some time at a Red Cross center set up for their use.

Britain had been at war since September 1939. The sustained German bombing campaign between September 1940 and May 1941, known at the Blitz, killed 43,000 civilians and destroyed more than a million homes. Wright remembers rows of bombed-out buildings and the terrible wartime privations. When she and friends visited the landmark London department store, Harrods, "the shelves were so empty."

The Blitz was over before Wright arrived, but German bombing was an ongoing source of misery. During the worst of it, there could be two or three raids a night, and each time, Wright and her fellow soldiers had to grab helmets, blankets, and flashlights and head for the safety of the basement - with a rotating schedule for a detail to wait on the roof in case a firebomb hit the building, whereupon they were supposed to douse the flames with buckets of sand.

In the summer and fall of 1944, the Germans introduced the V-1 and V-2 bombers, the world's first guided missiles. Dubbed "buzz-bombs," soldiers and civilians soon learned that the V-1 gave some warning, cutting its engines before drifting down to the ground and detonating. The V-2 was not as accommodating. On a rare day off in the summer of 1944, Wright had biked over to a public swimming pool and was splashing around when she heard an incoming rocket overhead. She looked around and saw that nobody else seemed to be running for cover, and figured "well, if they can stand it, I guess I can." The engine cut out and the bomb drifted away "and I knew we were all right.

"You just wondered how the English people survived," she says. "They had a lot of courage."

The British armed forces had their own women's corps, but Wright and the other WACs at SHAEF didn't get to socialize with them very often. Even though they shared a mess hall and other facilities, the British women kept to themselves. There was considerable resentment at the American presence in England during the War. This lack of communication "seems so sad today, because it would have enriched us to get to know them."

The British were not the only ones who resented the WACs. Rumors about their "immorality" had dogged the WAC from its beginnings as an auxiliary. (In reality, the WACs had lower rate of unintended pregnancy, venereal diseases, and criminal misconduct charges than the general civilian population.) Some of these rumors, says Wright, were started by the Germans, but many were embedded in the culture of the time. One WAC historian notes that a study by the Office of Censorship during the War found that 84 percent of soldiers' comments on women in the military were "negative."

"I don't think we had time to be aware of it," says Wright. They were far too busy.

Eisenhower certainly didn't share a negative view of the corps. "During the time I have had WACs under my command, they have met every task and test assigned them," he once said. "Their contributions in efficiency, skill, spirit, and determination are immeasurable." In the fall of 1944, Wright and her unit were ordered to Versailles, France, where the Allied command had set up headquarters. They followed the headquarters on to Reims, in northeastern France, as the front continued to move north towards Germany.

As a file clerk, Wright had to make sure that everything was properly filed and cross-referenced so it could be found instantly if a general or official needed it - or even someone not quite so high-ranking. Kay Summersby was an Irish woman who had joined the British Mechanised Transport Corps (MTC) in 1939, and in 1942 she was assigned as a driver for Eisenhower. She was later reassigned as his secretary and, in a memoir written near the end of her life, claimed the two had an affair.

When Summersby called for files, Wright would put them in a locked satchel and walk them over to Summerby's office with an armed guard. Well-schooled in the need for military secrecy, Wright nevertheless found this additional security a bit odd. But the winter of 1944-45 was a tense one for Eisenhower's staff, as intelligence sources believed there was a German plot to assassinate the general. In her first book, Summersby noted that every time they heard so much as a car backfiring, there was a flurry of calls to make sure "the Boss" was all right.

The French, having survived years of German occupation, were generally happy to see Allied forces in their city. One of Wright's WAC friends was a Greek-American woman who spoke some French. Wright recalls that they were invited to dinner with a local family one night but when they arrived, they realized they had gotten the date wrong. The family scrambled around to make them feel welcome and managed to pull together a fine dinner from their meager supply of food and wine.

Wright was in Scotland enjoying her one and only furlough when news of the German surrender was announced. She heard that the Germans had signed the official surrender documents at a small schoolhouse in Reims - the same schoolhouse where she had been living. She reached London in time to join the boisterous crowds in Picadilly Circus, and later was among the crowd in front of Buckingham Palace cheering King George VI and Winston Churchill as they stood on the balcony.

After the Victory in Europe Day celebrations, Wright rejoined the Supreme Allied Command, which after the surrender moved to the massive I. G. Farben building in Frankfurt, Germany. The work was the same, but everyone was "anxious to get that notification" that it was time to go home. Her second transatlantic crossing was much less eventful than her first. She remembers "what a thrill it was to see the Statue of Liberty" as they sailed into New York - the same sight that had greeted her relatives when they arrived from Denmark four decades earlier.

Once home, nobody asked Wright much about her experiences. "I never even talked about it," she says. This was not unusual, since the expectation was that veterans would put the past behind them and carry on. And she did just that, marrying a man who had served in the South Pacific and raising a family. Over time, she lost touch with most of the women she had served with during the war.

According to the Federal Department of Veterans Affairs there are currently 3,744 female veterans living in Vermont today, of whom 2,333 have served during wartime. Of that number, 459 are World War II veterans like Chris Wright.

About 12 years ago, she joined a group of Vermont WACs, who try to meet at least once a year in White River Junction or Montpelier.

She is rightfully proud of her service and the role she and other women played in the war, and has nothing but compassion for women fighting today in Iraq and Afghanistan. World War II was, she believes, a necessary war to combat the real evil of the time, but she does not think America should engage in aggressive wars. "When we came home, we thought we had fought the war and won, and it was going to end all wars," she says. "Now I don't know as war ever really settles problems."

Heather K. Michon is a Vermont woman currently living in Virginia.