WAVES in Sherburne County

Recruitment poster for WAVES in
the United States Navy, circa 1944.

Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services, the WAVES of World War Two, became an elite group of 81,000 women enlisted in the United States Navy in 1944 and 1945.  Minnesota had its share of WAVES.  Even closer to home, Frances Beck of Sherburne County served as a WAVE in a military specialty so top secret she couldn’t speak of it until 50 years after the war.  Francis Beck served as a code breaker against the Japanese. 

In the early 1940s Beck felt a passionate desire to serve.   She wanted to volunteer and do her part in the war effort, the navy, however, actively opposed women joining the service.  Finally, in 1944 Beck and 81,000 other women became WAVES.  “When I enlisted they said, “’Well you’re going to be in there until the war is over.’  I told them, ‘Well it can’t go on forever,” she recalled. 

The duration of Beck’s service lasted slightly longer than a year.  In that time she trained first at Hunter College in New York.  Hunter College was boot camp for the WAVES.  The Navy then sent Beck for a quick stay at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.  While at Miami University she trained in cryptography, radio operation, and writing secret code. Her orders finally sent her to Bainbridge Island, Washington state to intercept coded messages from the Japanese.  She served there until the end of the war. 

“Until a few years ago I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what I did when I was in the service,” she told reporters from the Sherburne County Star News.  “I was in a branch in which you had to be a second generation American before they would even put you in there.  Then when we were discharged we were told we could not disclose what we had done while we were in the service.”  

 

Francis Beck served as an elite member of a very small contingent of women in World War Two.  Only 81,000 young women could ever claim service in the WAVES.  A young lady from Sherburne County, truly unique to the community.