Preparing for War

Assan Beach, the 2,500-yard shoreline stretching between Punta Adilok (Adelup Point) and Punta Assan (Asan Point), which the Marines in World War II called a "pair of devil horns," is a poignant symbol of the Guam's complex history, blending indigenous CHamoru traditions, wartime struggle, and ongoing military presence. In many ways, the story of Guam can be read through the story of Assan Beach. Talk a walk through history at Assan Beach.

Fort Des Moines is a military installation in Des Moines, Iowa. During World War I, the fort served as the first and only training site for African American officers. During World War II, Fort Des Moines was the first training site for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) and the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and the only training site for WAC and WAAC officers.

The Curtiss JN-4 Jenny is synonymous with the “barn storming” era of aviation, and is truly the airplane that taught American pilots of the 1916-1925 era how to fly. This training airplane, designed by a team working for the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company in 1914-1915, was built in the thousands in during World War I to train US servicemen how to fly.

On December 13, 1914, the German auxiliary cruiser SMS Cormoran, out of fuel and cut off from Germany by World War I, took refuge from Japanese warships in Guam. The ship spent the next two years interned in Apra Harbor. When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, the Cormoran's captain blew up the ship rather than let her fall into enemy hands.

The First World War brought an end to one of the biggest periods of immigration in American history. During the decade leading up to the war, an average of 1 million immigrants per year arrived in the United States, with about three-quarters of them entering through the Ellis Island immigration station in New York Harbor. By 1918, a trickle of only 110,618 people were arriving in the United States.

One of Ellis Island’s most famous immigrants provided the soundtrack to America’s participation in the First World War. Irving Berlin, a popular songwriter, produced patriotic popular music to inspire soldiers and to divert those who needed a break from wartime concerns.

When the US entered into World War I, the government was faced with the dilemma of converting and funding a standing army to armed forces. The solution enacted were propaganda campaigns with intense recruiting and fundraising appeals that employed the Statue of Liberty as the symbol of American freedom. The Statue appeared in poster images with banner logos designed to appeal to the public’s sense of nationalism, competition, guilt, fear, revenge and social standing.

The use of camouflage in the military during World War I came as a result of technology and circumstance. Aerial photography made masses of weaponry or troops a liability, unless they were hidden from the camera’s eye. As the war in Europe became increasingly a stand-off between enemy troops dug into trenches in close proximity, and often in the open, the need for camouflage became greater.

In spring of 1917, more than two years before the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote, a radical transformation was taking place at the Boston Navy Yard. The US Navy adopted a radical enlistment policy that opened its clerical ranks to educated, white women. Parallel to this national watershed, the Boston Navy Yard (now known as the Charlestown Navy Yard) hired civilian women as unskilled laborers for the first time in its history.

While America ramped up to fight in World War I, Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower trained troops here in a new form of warfare that changed the battlefield forever.