Elizabeth Weigle: Serving with the Red Cross, and the Marines, in World War II

Elizabeth Weigle checking in a new library card, standing behind the Red Cross information desk, at Camp Tarawa, Hawaii, 1945.

Courtesy of Virginia Amsler.

Elizabeth Weigle:
Serving with the Red Cross, and the Marines

(Note: This narrative is drawn from text that is part of an exhibition, “A Special Role: St. Paul’s Church and World War II,” currently on display in the visitors’ center at St. Paul’s Church National Historic Site, in Mt. Vernon, NY.)

The experiences of Elizabeth Weigle illuminate an interesting aspect of the service of civilians who crossed into theaters of combat during World War II. Elizabeth served with an American Red Cross support unit assigned to the Fifth Marine Division in 1944-45, organizing a relief and recreational station at Camp Tarawa in Hawaii.

In a memoir published just after the war, Elizabeth says she joined the Red Cross, and requested overseas duty, “because I'm sick and tired of coasting through this war, and I want to do something worthwhile to help win it. Besides my kid brother is flying combat in Europe and I don't want him to be ashamed of me.” With the Red Cross, she received a uniform and modest monthly salary of $150. “In case of death, $2,000 would go to our next of kin. However, if, and this turned out to be a terrible “IF”, we were disabled or injured in the tour of duty we would receive no permanent financial assistance from the A.R.C. This was made frighteningly clear. No girl backed out, and in retrospect I think this was pretty gutsy,” she recalled.

When she joined the Red Cross, Elizabeth, daughter of the St. Paul’s minister Father William H. Weigle and his wife Anna, was 24, born in China in 1919 where her parents were serving as missionaries. She had attended the prestigious Katherine Gibbs secretarial school, and a year of college. Following induction in Washington, D.C., she traveled to the West Coast for preparation, which included lectures on censorship and training on close order drill similar to instruction received by Women’s Army Corps (WAC) recruits. Elizabeth recalled: “Day after day these hardened and vigorous young officers forced us through exhausting exercises which left us unable to move without bones creaking and muscles aching. Leap frog, relay races, and hopping – at our age! To add insult to body-injury, one of these brash youths asked me for a date. Coldly I replied: ‘No. Thanks to you and your darned drills, I couldn't dance a step even if I got the Gold Embossed Star of Gallantry for trying.’ They took us on hikes, and oh brother, how we yearned for the good old days of sidewalks and high heels! One afternoon they marched us to a field on which stood a terrifying contraption known as a practice landing platform or some such.”

The Red Cross staff arrived in Hawaii in late December 1944. Elizabeth’s duties included administering and planning programs at the Camp Tarawa facility, which featured a cafeteria, a canteen, and a lounge stacked with the latest magazines from the states. There were also tables for soldiers to read and reply to letters from home, subject to censorship, since the camp was highly classified.

Camp Tarawa was a forbidding place situated between volcanic peaks, and the Red Cross facilities were a welcome refuge for Marines engaged in mock battles and arduous training for some of the most deadly combat of the Pacific war. It was the largest Marine Corps training camp in the Pacific, housing as many as 25,000 service members at a time. When Elizabeth arrived, the Fifth Marine Division was preparing for the Battle of Iwo Jima, which developed into one of the costliest campaigns of the war against Japan. Survivors and the wounded returned to Camp Tarawa for relief, including the five Marines who raised the flag atop Mount Surabachi, captured in a famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal. Elizabeth and the other Red Cross staff supplied donuts and coffee, provided magazines and heard the stories of those five men, along with other Marines. Recalling them as fairly typical service members who acted heroically at Iwo Jima because the situation presented a need for gallantry, Elizabeth remembered interacting with these “men every day,” but that “they didn't look like heroes. They didn't act like symbols of gallantry.”

After VJ Day, Elizabeth was injured in an auto accident, and spent time in an Army hospital on Hawaii.

There was a tentative plan for the Red Cross staff to accompany the Fifth Marine Division on occupation duties in northern Kyushu, Japan, but that assignment was rejected by Red Cross administrators as potentially too dangerous. By then, Elizabeth had formed a real bond with the service members, reflecting an understanding of the military family evolving to include the support staff like Red Cross assistants. Because of the decision by Red Cross officials, “the warm friendly relationship built up so slowly between a bunch of Red Cross girls and a mob of tired Marines was ruthlessly smashed,” Elizabeth remembered. Despondency emerged among the Red Cross staff when the Marines departed for Japan. Looking back, Elizabeth recollected: “Our whole lives were being wrenched apart? The agony of losing our Marines and the homes we’d created for them were infinitely more searing than the grief we felt in the states when we left our homes and families. The blunt, disinterested refusal of the Red Cross Headquarters to even so much as consider the Marine request made us sick with rage and disappointment,” especially since the occupation of Japan proceeded with relatively little opposition.

But with sober reflection, Elizabeth respected the decision to withhold the Red Cross staff from Japan in 1945, when military planners anticipated opposition to the occupation by the Japanese: “After more than three-years time, I can look back at their refusal and admit that probably it was the only rational one which rational woman could rationally reach. They had no way of knowing then that the Japanese situation would be so smooth, nor could they foresee how short a time it would be before feminine social workers would be safely permitted within the boundaries of the Land of the Cherry Blossom.”

With the departure of the Fifth Division to Japan for occupation duty, Camp Tamara closed, and Elizabeth Weigle’s World War II odyssey of service, participation and personal growth drew to a close, returning to New York in late 1945. Her wartime recollections, “I’d Rather Die than Come Home” reflect a remarkable degree of dedication, energy and humor that capture the spirit of the World War II generation.