SPARS - WW2 WOMEN'S RESERVE

Photos: U.S. Coast Guard
Captain Dorothy C. Stratton, SPARS commander, at her desk at U.S. Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C. in 1944. 

Congress established a U.S. Coast Guard Women's Reserve in World War Two called SPARS - an acronym drawn from the service's motto "Semper Paratus—Always Ready."

Recruits - ages 20 to 50 for officers, 20 to 36 enlisted - augmented Coast Guard personnel sent overseas. More than 10,000 served between 1942 and 1946 in every Coast Guard district except Puerto Rico.

In the early stages of the war, SPARS training was held on college campuses. In 1943, a formal training facility was established at the Palm Beach Biltmore Hotel, Palm Beach, Florida. Fashionable address aside, it was boot camp.  

SPARS worked in administration as well as radio communications, health care, supply and recruiting, and agreed to serve for the duration of the war plus six months.

The women played a critical role in the administration and operation of a new long-range radio aid to navigation called LORAN. Many stood watch at monitoring stations to ensure the network stayed on the on the air. "That was such a big, top secret thing at the time," Harriet Writer, a lieutenant JG assigned to the LORAN program, said in a June 2012 interview with C. Douglas Kroll, Ph. D., U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary.

Dorothy Stratton, dean of women on leave from Purdue University and a lieutenant in the Navy Women's Reserve, was tapped to command the force and attained the rank of Coast Guard captain. She held a doctorate degree from Columbia University and had a desk at Coast Guard Headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

It was all new. "I knew nothing about the Coast Guard. Nothing," Stratton said in a 1970 interview archived by the Naval Research Institute. "I felt if that was a place I could work that was fine with me."

Stratton coined the term SPARS - much easier to remember than the original handle, WORCOG. Her first dozen recruits were female officer candidates from the Navy's WAVES program. They were "tremendously helpful and saved us a lot of time," Stratton said.

The Coast Guard named two cutters in honor of the SPARS.

Spar WLB-403, a 180-foor seagoing buoy tender served from 1944-1997. The second, also named Spar, hull number WLB-206, is a 225-foot seagoing buoy tender commissioned in 2001.