Women and the National Parks in the Pacific West during WWII
Emma Chapman
There was no one typical experience for American women on the West Coast and in the Pacific during WWII.
Some women were in violent war zones as Japanese and United States forces fought across the Pacific. Some were on the homefront growing crops and raising funds or donating supplies. Some worked in war industry in factories, shipyards, and offices. Japanese American women on the West Coast and some in Hawai'i were forced to leave their homes and live in concentration camps throughout WWII. Women’s experiences of the war varied according to multiple factors including race, class, age, profession, and location. National Parks, Monuments, Memorials, and Historic Sites on the West Coast and in the Pacific shine a light on these experiences.
Color photograph of three Japanese people smiling at the camera. A woman in her sixties or seventies wearing a white yukata stands next to a young woman wearing a floral yukata and an older man wearing a western-style gray suit.
Color photograph of a woman in her nineties, wearing glasses and a National Park Service ranger's uniform, smiling and standing next to a statue of a man in a suit
Black-and-white photograph of 4 women in work shirts and pants controlling a large, powerful fire hose on a dock with the ocean in the background
Japanese American young woman with stylish hair, buttoned blouse, necklace and glassed looks directly at camera
Woman looks away from camera at child, surrounded by family standing in large metal cylinder
black-and-white portrait photograph of a young Japanese woman in a light-colored, 1920s dress, smiling slightly at the camera
Black and white photograph of three young women with their hair back, wearing coats and glasses, and smiling at the camera
Woman with stylish, short-cropped hair, poses in pearls for formal portrait
Black-and-white picture of a woman wearing a coat and scarf speaking with a man wearing glasses and a suit with a bowtie
Explore Their Experiences
Click on a picture or a map marker below to learn more about the women and their experiences during WWII.
Click the x on the bottom left-hand side of the screen to exit the tour.
During World War II, Chamorro women on Guam endured a brutal Japanese occupation lasting from 1941 until the US military retook the island in 1944. When Cecilia Cruz Bamba was a young child, her pregnant mother was beaten by Japanese soldiers and died a few days later from her injuries. When her father attempted to help a crashed US pilot escape his aircraft in 1944, Japanese soldiers shot and killed him, leaving Bamba an orphan.
Bamba eventually married and had ten children, ran several businesses, and led clubs. She was also motivated by her hardships during WWII to help her fellow Chamorros. As a senator in the Guam legislature, she lobbied the United States federal government for financial reparations for her people who had suffered during the war. She raised over thirty-seven million dollars for the Chamorro on Guam who had lost land during the war.
The Buckner sisters grew up on a remote apple orchard in Stehekin, part of what is now Lake Chelan National Recreation Area in the North Cascades National Park Complex in Washington state. Despite their rural location, the war had a major effect on how they lived as young women. Irene's husband joined the military and she spent the first years of their marriage working as a secretary for a factory and hoping her husband returned safely from fighting overseas (which he did).
Elizabeth Joy ("Bucky") and Harriet ("Hobbie") became the main sources of labor in their family orchard, as male farm workers left due to the draft. Bucky paused her studies at Washington State University every fall to help Hobbie and her parents harvest the apples that were important sources of food for the country during the difficult war.
Erma Ouida Godbey moved with her husband and children to Nevada during the Great Depression so her husband could find work on the Hoover Dam. When the war started, Godbey, then a middle-aged mother with an established home, became an active member of homefront support efforts in southern Nevada. She volunteered as the head of the Navy Mother's Club, the VFW Auxiliary, and the local Red Cross while her sons were in the military overseas. She and her family voluntarily used their own food rations to host and feed hundreds of soldiers-in-training who were on leave from the training camp nearby. Although Godbey was not in combat during WWII, like many other women, her work was essential to the homefront effort.
Image: The Godbey family stand inside of a thirty-foot-wide penstock pipe. Erma Godbey is in the middle, looking away from the camera, ca. 1930-1940.
Hana Shimozumi Iki was an accomplished opera singer who was born in Hawai'i in 1893 and raised in San Francisco. She was highly educated and performed on the radio and in large theaters, becoming the first woman of Japanese descent to play the female lead Yum Yum in The Mikado. In the 1920s she married a doctor named George Iki who was also of Japanese descent.
Their world turned upside down in 1942 when Executive Order 9066 forced the relocation and incarceration of all people of Japanese descent on the United States West Coast. The Ikis had to sell their home and medical practice and move their family to the Tule Lake Segregation Center. While there, George continued to work as a doctor and Hana cared for their daughter and her aunt who lived with them. Like most incarcerated families, they ate meals in the mess hall and worked hard to maintain familial closeness in the camp atmosphere.
When the war ended, they moved to Los Angeles and eventually retired in Sacramento.
On December 7, 1941, Katherine Lowe was taking her family to church on Honolulu when she learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Soon after, she quit her job at the Dole Pineapple Cannery and got a civilian job at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard.
In her work, Lowe and other women shipyard workers took on jobs that had previously been done by men: they transported materials, carried oil drums, and moved heavy equipment. Lowe learned how to hold and use powerful hoses because of the shipyard's susceptibility to fire. Her work was essential to the movement and efficacy of United States naval efforts in the Pacific. Lowe eventually moved to Okinawa, Japan where her husband was marine superintendent for several decades before the couple returned to Hawai'i. Along with many other civilian women in Hawai'i, Lowe contributed vital labor for the United States during WWII.
Image: Katherine Lowe and four other women training with fire hose, from left to right: Elizabeth Moku, Alice Cho, Katherine Lowe, and Hilda Van Gieson, ca. 1940s.
"In wartime, it was a desperate time. I think we did right and we couldn’t have done differently.”
Dr. Leona Woods Marshall Libby was the only female member of the scientific team that built the world's first nuclear reactor. Her work contributed to the creation of the two atomic bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
When Marshall Libby earned her PhD in chemistry in 1942 she was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons. She was instrumental in designing the boron trifluoride counter, an important component of the nuclear reactor. She was also the only woman present at the first recorded human made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in history. Despite her contributions, Marshall Libby was hid her pregnancy after her marriage to avoid colleagues' disapproval.
Marshall Libby and her first husband eventually moved to Hanford, Washington in 1943 to help with operations at the nuclear reactor there. When asked in the 1980s if she regretted her part in the development of the atomic bomb, she stated that she had "no regrets. In war time it was a desperate time."
Image: Leona Woods Marshall Libby and John Marshall at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, 1952.
"I have such a love-hate relationship with Rosie!"
Betty Reid Soskin grew up in New Orleans until the Great Flood of 1927 forced her family to move to Oakland, California. While living in the San Francisco Bay Area as a young woman during WWII, she was confronted with racial discrimination as she sought a job in the military. When she began working for the United States Air Force in 1942 she discovered that she was only hired because her superiors believed she was white. She informed them of her identity as a Black woman, and they replied that they were "willing" to work with her. Refusing to be merely tolerated, Soskin left the job and went to work for the Black auxiliary lodge of the International Boilermakers Union for the rest of the war.
In 2004 Soskin became a Park Ranger at Rosie the Riveter WWII Homefront National Historical Park when she was 85 years old. As a Ranger she is dedicated to telling the stories of Black women and women of color during WWII and the ways they participated in or were barred from participating in homefront war efforts.
Image: Betty Reid Soskin at the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site.
“I can now understand how an eagle feels when his wings are clipped and caged.”
Kimiko Kaye Tambara was born in the United States and grew up in Oregon. While she was a college student studying journalism, she was forced by the federal government's Executive Order 9066 to halt her studies and relocate with her parents to the Minidoka concentration camp in Idaho because of her Japanese heritage.
This did not stop her from pursuing her passion in journalism. She became the editor of the Minidoka newspaper, The Irrigator. She investigated the Salem Anti-Alien Land Law and wrote about Pearl Harbor. Sometimes camp personnel felt threatened by her journalism. The War Relocation Authority often stopped and searched her van when she was doing her work.
After the war she led efforts in Portland to demand a formal apology from the United States government for what she and her fellow incarcerees experienced during the war.
Image: Closeup of Kimi Tambara seated with the staff of The Irrigator.
Several hundred Japanese Americans from Hawai'i were forcibly removed from their homes and confined in concentration camps during WWII. Kiyome Tsuda was one of these people who were incarcerated at the Hono'uli'uli Internment Camp.
Tsuda grew up in Hawai'i and was educated in Japan. In 1940, Tsuda went to Japan to train as a Buddhist priestess. When she returned to Hawai'i she became the leader of a temple where she practiced a type of religious syncretism that was common among Japanese New Religions. Her position as a religious leader made her a target for incarceration in late 1941.
She was kept on the women's side of the gender-segregated Hono'uli'uli camp, but she often communicated with the men she was separated from and continued to practice her religion through prayer and fasting. She sneaked letters to members of her temple and prayed for their sons in the United States military. After the war she returned to religious leadership, raising funds to build a new temple in 1956.
Image: Kiyome Tsuda (right), also known as Tatsusho Hirai, in the late 1970s or early 1980s with her daughter and uncle.
Women during WWII reckoned with extreme circumstances. Women of color were especially affected on the West Coast and in the Pacific as they faced incarceration, racial discrimination, and violent warfare. For most women, the jobs they took, the families they cared for, and the ways they lived were all altered by the war. For many, their experiences during the war became a foundation for their identities and activism for the rest of their lives.
Illustration of a woman wearing a red and white polka-dotted head wrap and a blue work shirt flexing her bicep in front of a yellow background and staring resolutely at the audience
