Women Marines: Serving at Camp Lejeune in World War Two
North Carolina
About four and a half miles south of this marker, nearly twenty thousand women trained during World War Two to serve in the United States Marine Corps. The Marine Corps Women's Reserve transferred its training programs to Camp Lejeune in late nineteen forty-three, when crowding forced the Corps to open its largest East Coast base to female recruits. Women trained as cooks, clerks, transport personnel, and mechanics.
One third served in aviation-related fields, many of them supporting the nearby air station at Cherry Point. By the war's end, more than fifteen thousand women trained at Lejeune were on active duty, freeing male Marines for combat assignments overseas.
