How an All-Black Female WWII Unit Saved Morale on the Battlefield
When Romay Johnson Davis was in her 20s, she decided to do something millions of young men across the country were doing: enlist in World War II. All five of her brothers had already joined up. “They were being pulled away one by one, and I had no playmates,” Davis recalls. Most young women were staying in the United States and helping out on the home front. Even the iconic Rosie the Riveter was urging women to work in factories, not ship out overseas. But Davis’ parents supported their only daughter’s decision. “My father was skeptical sometimes about my going off. But Mama said, ‘Child, see the world while you can.’”
Davis says her service overseas helped define her. “Home is very good,” she says. “But a lot of good is awakened in you when you are challenged.”
That’s how Davis found herself on the Île de France in February 1945, en route to Glasgow, Scotland. Among the passengers on board were more than 800 recruits from her unit—women mostly in their late teens and 20s, and, in the segregated Army of the era, all of them Black. They would be doing something crucial to the war effort: clearing a massive backlog of undelivered mail. For two years or longer, soldiers had been waiting for letters and packages that still hadn’t arrived. Morale was flagging, and no one had been able to process the millions of individual pieces of mail piled up in European warehouses from floor to ceiling.
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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-all-black-female-WWII-unit-saved-morale-battlefield-180981540/
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