On her 21st birthday, Edna Hall did something unusual for a young woman in 1945. She joined the Army.
“I just couldn’t wait to be old enough to get in,” says Hall, now 85.
She and her fellow Women’s Army Corps recruits attended basic training at Fort Oglethorpe, Ga. She still remembers the cold North Georgia winter.
“I guess you had to be a little bit adventurous,” she says, “not knowing at that time what the Women’s Army Corps meant, really.”
Hall graduated and was assigned to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla.
“You did jobs that ordinarily guys had to do when there weren’t any women in the Army,” she says. Duties included driving officers on base.
Hall experienced the elation of Victory in Europe Day and Victory in Japan Day.
“Oh, what a celebration that was,” she says. “It lasted for days. It really did.”
Hall stayed in the WAC until her husband returned from his overseas Navy deployment.
Looking back, she says she doesn’t think a generation has ever rallied around a war the way hers did during World War II.
“If they didn’t do anything but make a victory garden they were doing something,” she says of Americans then. “Everybody was totally together. … Well, I just wish that it was like it was then, but I’m afraid it isn’t.
“There doesn’t seem to be the love of the country, the caring for the country, the cohesive way that Americans have always been. Somewhere along the way, since World War II we’ve lost that.
“And that’s a shame.”
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