From Wikipedia

Women's Army Auxiliary Corps

Public Law 554 on 15 May 1942 created a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps for service with the Army of the United States. In September 1943 the WAAC was replaced by the Women's Army Corps (WAC). The measure permitted the enlistment of 150,000 women between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five, but the executive order which established the corps set an initial strength limit of 25,000. It was typical of the AAF, with its long-cherished ideas of independence, to desire a separate women’s corps completely independent of the women serving with other branches of the Army.

WAACs went though indoctrination training at Fort De Moines, Iowa under Army Service Forces (ASF) auspices. Once completed, they began to arrive at Army Air Force stations in September. The influx of 27,000 recruits did not pose a major training problem for the AAF. There was no need for elaborate technical training because the majority of women, in contrast to the seventeen- and eighteen- year-old boys being inducted, had a usable skill before they enlisted, often in the highly prized clerical field. The AAF proposed and pioneered in a time-saving policy of avoiding unnecessary training for women already qualified.

AAF policy did not prevent specialist training for women who would benefit by it or were highly qualified for it; in fact, the AAF early opened to women virtually its entire roster of job specialties and schools. On 20 November 1943 Wacs were declared eligible to attend any noncombat training course attended by AAF men, provided that the training would in a station commander’s opinion increase an individual’s job efficiency or would enable her to be utilized in some higher skill for which she had unusual aptitude or civilian background.

The job training of women was so completely integrated with the entire AAF training program that virtually no separate statistics are available as a basis for comparing the record of the women with male trainees. Obviously, this policy meant that the Wacs had to be as well qualified as men to enroll in and graduate from a training course. It is known only that approximately 2,000 women completed courses in AAF technical schools, including those for Link-trainer instructors, airplane mechanics, sheet-metal workers, weather forecasters, weather observers, electrical specialists of several kinds, teletype operators, control-tower specialists, cryptographers, radio mechanics, parachute riggers, bombsight-maintenance specialists, clerks, photo-laboratory technicians, and photo-interpreters.

The AAF showed no reluctance in opening up its noncombat jobs to women, even jobs which required “unwomanly” mechanical skills. Toward the end of the war there was an increase in the number of women on technical assignments, when it became difficult to obtain enlisted men in the top intelligence brackets required by some of the work. At the peak of WAC enrollment, in January 1945, more than 200 different job categories were filled by enlisted women, while WAC officers held more than 60 different types of jobs in addition to that of company officer. A flexible system of assignment enabled the AAF to use Wacs with special skills found in only a very few women, like those who were skilled as chemists, cartographers, geodetic computers, topographers, sanitary inspectors, and even dog-trainers. But as might be expected, a high percentage—about 50 percent—of the Air Wacs held administrative or office jobs. These clerks, typists, and stenographers were doing only what they had been doing in civilian life.

Geraldine Hill (1908)