Wartime Romance
A Short Story
From an Idea by Erin
By Maryanne Peters

After Pearl Harbor, everyone wanted to get in the fight. I had two older brothers sign up in the spring of 1942. My father said that they were born to be soldiers. He never said that about me.

I was too young to join up anyway, but my father said that I was too small to join the army. Maybe because I was the youngest, but definitely because I was the smallest, I was the brother to help my mother in the homestead. Even with my brothers gone my father hired in boys only a bit older than me, to help him on the farm.

I told my mother that I was going to join up as soon as I could. She was horrified. There is no other way to put it. But she could see that I was determined. Nothing was going to change my mind. So, she relented. She said that she would help me with the enlistment papers.

It took me years before I understood what she did to keep me alive. I should be furious with her. But the truth is that now, I can only give her thanks. I survived. My oldest brother did not come home.

I had the given name of Marion. If you think that is a girl’s name, I should point out that the movie star John Wayne had the same given name. He was born Marion Morrison. I hear it that he was named after his mother Mary, just as I was, with my two other brothers taking my father’s given names.

The name should have been of no account. It is the application that you file. I passed the physical. They could see I was a man. But the form was not right.

The army is a bureaucracy, as I came to learn. Trying to get back on track is like asking a single man to push a tank out of a ditch.

When I received the papers confirming my acceptance and posting for training, I was excited. Then I saw where I was headed.

“Marion Callan has been accepted for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and she must report to Fort Des Moines for training as a typist.”

Why would they want a man in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps.? And why would they want me training to be a typist? But the little letter “s” made it clear. To the system Marion Callan was a woman.

Try to fix that. Put your shoulder against that tank in the ditch and push. What’s going to happen? Nothing, that’s what. Nobody was listening. Correction forms in triplicate might still lie on some desk somewhere. And I had final date to report looming. And if you don’t report on time you are AWOL. WAAC or regular army, there are serious penalties for not reporting.

“You just have to go along with it,” my mother said. “Do your bit and serve your country without complaining.”

But what kind of a war would that be? I would never see battle. I might never even fire a shot anywhere.

“Just as well you were waiting for the army shears to cut that hair of yours,” my mother said. “I can make your something to wear and fix your hair to look real nice.”

I was for just turning up as me. What better way was there to say: “Look. There has been a mistake”.

But my mother said: “You have to work within the system. I will keep going at my end. You try to fix it from within.” She kept going all right. She wanted me to stay in the WAAC – to stay out of the shooting war. She was worried enough about her other two sons. With good reason as it turns out.

My father thought it was a huge joke. I don’t know how much he knew. He took me down to the train wearing that dress and coat, with my hair curled and bags packed. He told me to fight the war in any way I could and make him proud.

He had shaken the hands of both of my brothers, but he hugged me and kissed me on the cheek as if I was his daughter. That was how I looked.

In my bags my mother had packed three special undergarments that she had made for me, and a pot of Granny Gunn’s Wax. The underwear would give me a woman’s shape and hide my maleness and was to stay on even when I slept. The wax would keep my face clear of any beard and soft with the residual oils left behind. I would need to wash in private “for religious reasons”.

Fort Des Moines was an old officer training school which had been set aside to train female volunteers. There were no males at Fort Des Moines, as I was told. The army does not make mistakes. To suggest that it does would be to totally undermine discipline. Who can challenge their superior officer? “Not you Auxiliary Second-Class Callan!”. Insubordination is an offence against the Code. The very best I could hope for would be a dishonorable discharge, and I did not want that. It seemed that I was trapped.

What made it tolerable was the adventure. I have no doubt that the true adventure would have been in the real army as I wanted, but here I was physically stronger than “all the other girls” – meaning that I had to be one of them. I learned later that small guys like me might have a rough time in the real army, but among female recruits I had advantages – mainly in fitness training.

There was no rough time in the WACs. We were girls in it together. It is a whole different thing. It was like one big sleepover party, except that I needed to keep my special underwear on. I soon learned that the underwear could not accommodate any lustful thoughts without extreme discomfort in the crotch. The body or the mind adapts to such a situation. And constraining those parts has long term effects.

We set about training, which included fitness training as well as typing classes. Other girls worked in other areas including small arms maintenance, but I felt that typing was a skill that might be valuable, even for a man.

Even before the official manual came out the following year, in the fall of 1942 the message was being restated again and again: "Your Job: To Replace Men. Be Ready To Take Over." “Your Contribution to the War Effort is as Important as Any Man in Uniform”.

The uniforms were condemned by many of the girls, but to me they were at least military. It made me feel that I was doing the same job as my brothers, even though it seemed that I would never leave home.

The manual that appeared included a section that derived from those of the girls who bemoaned the drab daywear. The section was entitled "The Army Way to Health and Added Attractiveness" and it included advice on skin care, make-up and hair styles. Our role in compiling it was to attend to the appearance of one another.

Gradually I saw my masculinity melt away.

At a more brisk pace I acquired skills and a promotion to “Leader” which is the equivalent of a sergeant. Neither of my brothers had got that far.

I went home for Christmas that year (1942), proudly wearing my WAAC uniform with my hair styled and my makeup perfect. Both of my parents received me as if I was a war hero. My brothers had been home a month earlier, but by Christmas they were both in North Africa.

I just wore my dungarees around the house, but my mother had made me a dress and a coat for going into town. “Looking as pretty as you do it would take a lot to explain why you would be dressed as a man,” she said.

It took only one look in the mirror to see that she was right.

After Christmas I received my first posting to Army Headquarters in Washington DC. I was in charge of a typing pool of 10 WACs all from Fort Des Moines. We set about our work with vigor true to our motto. I was a country boy, or was I a country girl, but whatever I was, I was in the big city now. And for the first time I was around men. And suddenly it seemed as if men were off another planet, and I was from Planet Earth.

“You’re too cute to be in the army!” Who says that? Almost every guy below the rank of colonel, that’s who. But we were not really in the army. Not then anyway. But everything changed in April 1943 when the WAAC was fully integrated. Then the typing pool was broken up and we each got separate postings.

I thought for a moment that being in the army might allow me to transfer into a male unit and lose the skirts, but it did not turn out that way. I approached somebody in deployment with my story. I am not sure if he believed me as he smiled all the way through. I guess he thought that I was some crazy broad who wanted desperately to get a rifle in her hands and ship out with the boys, like Diana Prince in that new comic out - “Wonder Woman”.

“The problem is, Leader Callan, that we don’t need grunts, male or female. We need people with skills. It’s a war of paper as well as blood, and you are good with paper. That take that cute little caboose of yours out of my office and down the corridor to Colonel Hutchison.”

That is not what I wanted to hear. But I made sure that he got the full wiggle of my “caboose” on the way out.

So that day I started as private secretary to Colonel Hutchison in logistics. He was a man I came to admire greatly. He was a recent widower who had placed his young children with his mother so that he could devote himself 100% to fighting a war, despite his obvious love for them.

He impressed upon me the importance of ensuring that our boys had all the supplies that they needed to take the fight to the enemy.

“We are the important people in this army,” he said. “In fact, it is people like you, making sure that all the paper is in order and everything goes where it needs to go.”

The irony was not lost on me. There I was sitting in my skirts and heels, my shaven legs crossed, my genitals crushed, all because I could not get the simplest paperwork right. Now victory depended on how good my paperwork was. And it was clear that he was staring at my legs, even while I was taking shorthand notes.

But Colonel Hutchison was a gentleman, and a thoroughly professional soldier. He would do his best to put aside his feelings, even though they were becoming increasingly obvious to me.

When I went home for Christmas that year, I did not even bother wearing men’s clothes even around the house. I found myself sitting down to pee, checking my air and lipstick, flicking through women’s magazines. It no longer seemed as if I was just pretending to be a woman.

And then at the beginning of 1944, Colonel Hutchison took me as his assistant, over to Britain. I was promoted to Third Officer, and I played a key role in the largest logistical undertaking in military history. You can probably guess what it is. Colonel Hutchison says to this day that I was the first woman who landed with US forces in Normandy, which of course is incorrect in one very important particular. Of course it was a week after the boys landed, and when the younger of my brothers was invalided home having lost a leg on the beaches.

We both remained focused on our tasks and we spent Christmas and the winter in Paris. There is something about that city, as so many have said. Even for two people in the middle of a war; two people who have no right to be together, separated not just by our age difference but by an obstruction held in by my underwear; that city can work its magic.

We had no right to be kissing in the moonlight on the Pont de Neuf.

I had to tell him. Of course, I did want to. Just as I wanted out of the army. I had done my bit. I was living a lie. Where was my life headed? There would be tears – mainly from me because that was the person I had become.

“You can have everything you want,” he said. “There is one way out of the army for a woman. You get married.”

He was talking nonsense. Was he so shocked by my story that his brain had been addled somehow?

“Marry me,” he said. “Be my wife. My mother can no longer cope, so be a mother to my children. I don’t care about who you were. I only care about who you are now – the most capable, determined, intelligent and beautiful woman in the whole world.”

They said that wartime romances do not last. Well, in our case they could not be more wrong.

The End

© Maryanne Peters 2020

Author’s Note:
This was an idea Erin sent through on my “Story Idea” forum thread yesterday. I just had to write it when I found the training manual section "The Army Way to Health and Added Attractiveness" (yes, really).