Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II (review)

The U.S. Navy was first to officially sanction the presence of nonmedical women in the ranks of the armed forces when it recruited a few thousand women volunteers for enlisted yeoman rank—the now well-known Yeoman (F)—during World War I. Less familiar are the many thousands of patriotic women in both secular and religious organizations who mobilized for war work during World War I. Educated, largely middle- and upper-class women (wearing versions of military uniforms) filled a wide range of support roles, some in scientific specialties. During World War II, greater numbers of military and civilian women found opportunities to do scientific work. They, too, have been absent from military history and the history of science. Kathleen Broome Williams is among the first to give a voice to these women.

In the mobilization for World War II the navy recruited highly qualified women scientists to work on essential nonmedical scientific and technological projects. Both as junior naval officers and civilian employees, women furthered several scientific fields, notably computer science, oceanography, and meteorology. Although their wartime work was no less essential than that of their male counterparts, it rarely rates mention either by military historians or by historians of science. It is even slighted in women's history. Williams intends to remedy these historiographic lacunae with Improbable Warriors. She has amassed an impressive amount of information to support her pursuit of this elusive aim. The bibliography is itself a useful resource. In addition to interviews with principals, she has scoured government, corporate, and academic archives for personal papers, service records, official reports, and contemporary publications. She seems to have been less assiduous in locating the relevant secondary literature, both in military history and the history of science. Do not be misled by the book's title. It is not a history of women scientists in the World War II navy. Rather, it offers biographical sketches of four women—Mary Sears, Florence van Straten, Grace Hopper, and Mina Rees—sandwiched between a sketchy introduction and an epilogue about the women's postwar careers.

As head of the navy's Oceanographic Unit, Mary Sears developed and coordinated information in marine sciences vital to naval intelligence for invasion landings and submarine activities. Florence van Straten's work in meteorology ("aerology," in naval parlance, until 1957), like that of Mary Sears in oceanography, provided useful data for naval wartime operations. Both also made lasting contributions to the development of new atmospheric and marine equipment and systems technologies. Grace Hopper, the best known of the four, was introduced to computers in 1943. As a navy reservist, she was assigned to manage the primitive Mark I. But Hopper's eminence was largely postwar. She and a cadre of military and civilian computer scientists developed government-industrial associations that have advanced the proliferation of computers, and she was instrumental in translating data processing from symbols to ordinary alphabetical letters. Mina Rees served as technical aide to the Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Committee. Herself a mathematician, she participated in theoretical studies for the Naval Research Laboratory, helping to improve the performance of a wide variety of weapons systems.

Unfortunately, the biographies are quite uneven, both in structure and exposition. The women often disappear in swamps of minutiae—descriptions of numerous complex and fast-changing wartime offices, the names of far too many inconsequential staff members—and Williams seldom distinguishes the significant from the mundane. Her digressions fragment a story sometimes weakly grounded historically. This may, in fact, be the book's most serious flaw. The individual biographies are largely devoid of historical context and the inadequate introduction is no remedy. What Improbable Warriors sorely lacks is a solid framework that addresses the place of women in military history and the history of science to give greater meaning...