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FORWARD

An older Regular Army sergent, who had been a prisoner of the Japanese since the fall of the Philippines, returned to the United States in August of 1945; looked around him in bewilderment at the aerial port of debarkation; and said, "What are all these women doing in uniform?" People stared. By the summer of 1945 women were so integral a part of America's wartime army that men and women, soldiers and civilians alike, who were working at the port, looked at the sergeant as they might have looked at Rip Van Winkle. Key jobs at that aerial port were being held, efficiently and casually, by members of the Women's Army Corps. There were over 40,000 Wacs serving with the Army Air Forces throughout the world. And yet a short three years before there had been no Wacs in the AAF anywhere. It makes quite a story, the development of the WAF program in the AAF. This paper sketches the highlights of that story.