'We did what they did'
Olga Currier, Marine at Quantico
Concord Monitor, NH



Ken Williams / Monitor staff
Olga Currier, Marine in WWll.



As a member of a military family, Olga Currier learned to present arms while she was still in grade school. When war came, Currier, now 83 and living in Weare, couldn't wait to turn 20, the minimum age to become a Marine. In late 1944, she dropped out of college and asked her mother to drive her to Boston to enlist. This is her story, as told to Monitor reporter Meg Heckman.

Everybody knew the Marine Corps was the best, and that's what I wanted to become a part of. I went in in December. It stands out in my mind because that was my first Christmas away from home. You'd hear people crying at night. We were all in one big squad room. Boot camp was very challenging, physically and mentally. I'd had a sheltered existence. I thought I was pretty special until I got into the Marine Corps. They set me straight in a hurry.

We wanted to enlist to "Free a Marine to Fight.” That was the slogan then. Many of the people were older than me, but we were all young: teachers, college students, secretaries, from all parts of the United States. Some of the women had husbands who were also Marines, and they joined the war effort. They needed Marines to fight in the South Pacific. The death toll was horrific, children fighting children, really. I don’t know how the Marines felt about it. Some of them wanted to go over, some of them didn’t.

You were working for a good cause, working for people you cared about, not thinking that there’s a darker side to freeing a Marine to fight. We were freeing a marine to die, but at 18 or 20, everyone felt immortal.

They weren't used to women being in the corps.

We had an old gunny - a gunnery sergeant. He was devastated that women were in the corps. He said, "First the dogs, then the ******s, then the women. What the hell is the Marine Corps coming to?" About a month later, I was going out, probably on a date, and I looked at these people and there was the gunny showing three women Marines how to spit-polish your shoes. They came around. They were our brothers, friends and protectors. Even to this day there is a special bond between the Marines, and there always will be.

Our drill instructors and teachers at boot camp were South Pacific veterans, and they were tough. We went to class every day and every afternoon. We learned everything that the Marines learned. The history of the corps. All the different battles, administrative, everything that you could cram into your brain in six weeks. We scaled the walls with the rope ladders, we went over the logs, and we jumped from a tower. We went through a tent that was filled with tear gas to learn how to use the gasmask. We never learned how to use an M-1 rifle, but everything else, we did what they did.

They called on us to do more than I ever thought I could physically do. I'd never done laundry. I'd never ironed shirts. Somebody had always cleaned my room. I just was spoiled, I guess, and it was a rude awakening. You got head duty. The head is the bathroom. You have to clean a toilet. Oh my God! Totally different. It was good for me. We had two ironing boards for a squad room of 100 women. When they'd see me go to the ironing board, everybody would groan.

Fortunately, I was chosen to go with the Marine Air Wing Squadron 21 at Quantico, Va., the nerve center of the Marine Corps. The officer candidate school was there. There's all kind of rugged terrain where they could train right on the Potomac River. I was at Brown Field, right on the edge of Quantico, which was a sleepy little Southern town until the Marines got there.

First I went into Navy Supply with a big burly Marine named Sam and a little skinny dark-haired fellow. They were both First Division Marines who had landed on Guadalcanal. They were both yellow from malaria and atabrine. One of them had mu-mu, which is elephantitis - a horrible disease you get in the Tropics. The legs swell out and other parts of the body. Very painful.

We had to keep track of aeronautical supplies on a huge Cardex file system. It really makes you appreciate computers today. Every little bolt, screw and aeronautical part had to be entered and kept track of. Terribly boring. My next job was for a lieutenant commander in aeronautics and repair. I was in charge of civilian payroll. Our offices were on the side of the airstrip where our beautiful and deadly F4U Corsair fighter planes and J-3 reconnaissance planes were parked.

A lot of the Marines and Marine women worked there, but they had to have civilians work there also, mostly people from Quantico who came up. It was an intensely secret place because they had one of the first radars there. You had to have a purpose for going on the base or you were not allowed in.

Good times

Everybody wrote to each other. We were letter writers in those days. We had a huge beautiful lounge in our barracks, and people would be there listening to music and writing letters home or to their husbands or their boyfriends overseas.

We did a lot of dancing. Name bands would come: Stan Kenton and Glenn Miller.

We had good times. We were 30 miles from Washington, D.C., so we would go up there. Once we stayed at the Shoreham hotel and crashed a dance in the ballroom filled with uniformed men and women in beautiful ball gowns. My friend and I were the only women in uniform. Of course, we were immensely popular and everyone was dancing with us. I danced with Gene Kelly! Can you imagine? He was in the Navy, a boatswain’s mate. He was shorter than me and had a blue mole on his cheek.

We were a pretty positive lot, until you saw those Marines return from battle and saw how radically they had changed. It was something about the eyes. They called it the 1,000-yard stare. They'd be focused on something else. A lot of them would be wounded, but everything was gung-ho. We're going to win, it's going to be all right.

My friend Paul Sampson was from Boston. He died on Iwo Jima. I remember a woman getting news that her husband had died on Iwo. I remember her screams. It was awful. She found out by telegram. We were in the same squad room. Double-decker bunks all the way down, probably 60 bunks. Nothing was private. She just broke down completely, screamed and screamed. Just horrible, but her friends were there for her. She stayed in the corps. Never looked the same.

On April 12, President Roosevelt died. Most of us never knew another president, and it was a terrible blow. He had been secretary of the Navy and always loved the Marines. He referred to himself and the Marines as “we.” The base emptied as we went to D.C and joined the somber crowds, silent except for tears and sobs of the people lining the streets.

On V-J Day the barracks emptied again. Everybody wanted to go up to Washington. It was wild. Everyone was just delirious with happiness. The war was over, and 19,000 women Marines could return home.

After the war, Olga Currier married a fellow Marine and eventually settled in New Hampshire. She worked for GTE Sylvania before retiring. Currier still fits in her white dress uniform and wore it recently to march in a local parade.


Ellie