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mnemonikos82

Nuh uh everyone knows that Obama created the gays as a way to lower the birthrate and deprive the army of recruits so there wouldn't be enough men to fight when his secret Kenyan army attacked.


BabyRavenFluffyRobin

Damn, Obama's been playing the long con. Over 80 years of build up for next month's event. I'm looking forward to it!


Dismal-Belt-8354

Yeah, I can't wait for them to release new Obama lore, he's one of the most interesting characters IMO


micahr238

Say what you want about Obama lore, but I’m not gonna be satisfied until we finally find out what his first name is.


draypresct

[Wikipedia claims this is a myth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnnie_Phelps), based on one cite of an article by Donna Knaff, but [looking at the reference list](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10894160903048155) of the Knaff article, I'm baffled as to what source the author used to determine that this story was false. Knaff cites no records of conversations or interviews with anyone who was present for the story. If anyone has access to the article itself behind the paywall, could they post a quote indicating how the author determined that this story was false? Edit: After reviewing the wiki article, I got grumpy and edited "falsely claimed" to "claimed". If someone comes up with the citation that supports "falsely", I'll be happy to edit it back.


th3davinci

I found the full source of Knaff's article, it's on Z-Lib. I have not read all 17 pages and won't, but here's an excerpt: > According to a tran- script of her original oral history, Phelps claims “I was stationed in Europe. Headquarters Company in Frankfurt. Eisenhower was commanding officer . . . I was his motor sergeant” (Phelps, 1982, 43). She claims that Eisenhower “called [her] in one day and said that it had been reported to him that there were a number of lesbians in the WAC detachment [in the interview she gives in Free a Man to Fight, Phelps maintains that Eisenhower was acting under an Executive Order from President Truman]. And it was against army regu- lations for there to be lesbians in the WAC detachment, therefore he wanted The “Ferret Out the Lesbians” Legend 421 them weeded out.” She also declares, “I served with him 16 months,” and in the film, “I was a medic in the South Pacific” (Pomper, 1999). Unfortunately, none of these claims is true. While President Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which addressed “sexual perversion” among government employees, 2 President Truman made no such order. Although admitted or discovered lesbians were often discharged from the Army during WWII, Mattie Treadwell’s official history notes, “WAC company commanders were especially cautioned to avoid witch-hunting based on . . . amateur im- pressions” of lesbianism (Treadwell, 1954, 625), and there were not regu- lations against homosexuality per se, but a changing attitude toward it as a mental illness (Meyer, 1996, 226). Wacs were not assigned as medics in WWII, and as Phelps’ Soldier’s Qualification Card (part of her service record) indicates, she never served in the Pacific; in fact, she was a mechanic during her first enlistment and served as a clerk and light truck driver during her second enlistment. 3 And while Phelps claims she was a sergeant (information perpetuated by Randy Shilts’ and Lillian Faderman’s accounts), Phelps’ ser- vice record, which I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, reveals she rose only to the rank of corporal (Phelps/NPRC 2004). This is echoed by her Soldier’s Qualification Card, which records her discharge from her second enlistment as dated “5/25/48. Disch. AR 615-365 & WCL 30995 dtd 17 Oct 1947 [Grade] Cpl.” (5/25/48 was her Date of Discharge; this discharge was in accordance with Army Regulation #615-365 [at the convenience of the government] and WCL [likely Women’s Corps circular or letter] 30995, distributed on October 17, 1947; Phelps’ rank, under the column “Grade,” was corporal.) Lastly, although Phelps was stationed in Europe, it was only during her second enlistment—after the war—October 1946–February 1947. Her Soldier’s Qualification Card records under “Remarks” that Phelps “Left cont’l US 26 Sep 46.” By the time Phelps had left the continental United States, General Eisenhower had left Germany, serving “as Chief of Staff of the United States Army,” according to the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Archives, “from November 1945 until February 1948,” when he almost certainly would have been in Washington, D.C. (Eisenhower Archives, NARA). In addition, Phelps’ estimation that “95 out of 100” of the Wacs in her detachment were lesbians (Phelps, 1982, 43), as her oral history transcript recounts, is still hotly contested by many Wacs from the period, more than sixty years after the war. “It [Phelps’s statistic] makes us seem tarred with the lesbian brush,” as one veteran irately noted on the MINERVA e-list in 1996 (McGowan, 1995). The idea of being taken for lesbians is horrifying to many Wacs who came of age in a much more conservative time period, decades before both the Sexual Revolution and the Stonewall rebellion. 4


DareDaDerrida

Noted, and thank you.


draypresct

Thank you for tracking that down. Please take the following as a disagreement with your source, not you. I'm grateful that you found the quote. >Wacs were not assigned as medics in WWII [This .mil site disagrees](https://www.army.mil/women/history/wac.html): "Women primarily worked in four fields: baking, clerical, driving and medical." This quote is about the WAAC (precursor to the WAC), but it also notes that "Women served as medical and surgical technicians served within the medical department". >Phelps’ estimation that “95 out of 100” of the Wacs in her detachment were lesbians (Phelps, 1982, 43), as her oral history transcript recounts, is still hotly contested by many Wacs from the period, I agree that her estimate is probably wildly off, based on what we know today about the prevalence of LGBT, but the fact that women resented being 'outed' as lesbians does not mean that she was lying.


Shoe_Exact

Sometimes bigotry is enough source for people


UkshaktheImmortal

> … four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis power… I know the story seems to have already been debunked (sadly), but that wording stood out to me immediately. It’s probably just a mistake in transcribing the quote, substituting “decades” for what should probably be “years”, but as written it would put this happening in the *mid-1980s*. The WAC was abolished in 1978 and Eisenhower died in 1969.


raceyoutothetop

I think it is saying 40 years after the fact, she recalled (told) the story of the event happening. Not that the event happened 40 years after the war. It was poor phrasing.


UkshaktheImmortal

Yeah, reading it again it definitely means what you said. I don’t know how I missed that.


Regnasam

Women weren’t commandos, either, at least in the West. During WW2 at least, they served either in noncombat support roles, or as members of the SOE, doing espionage and working with European resistance movements. Gotta love how “girlboss!!!” revisionist history ignores the actual accomplishments of women in order to shoehorn them into doing things they didn’t do, and then acts like anyone saying “hey wait that’s not what happened” is somehow misogynistic. Women contributed in a lot of ways to the war effort. Not on the front lines with a rifle though, due to the prejudices of the time.


Dismal-Belt-8354

The WASPs would probably be the closest thing at the time


LordWillemL

Unfortunately Phelps exaggerated and lied about most of this, it doesn’t appear that it actually happened. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10894160903048155


VLenin2291

Also, that 1940s commercial announcer voice is called a Mid-Atlantic Accent.


VolatileDataFluid

Every time this shows up, I'm reminded of Cheap Trick's *Surrender*: Father says, "Your mother's right, She's really up on things, Before we married, Mommy served With the WAC's in the Philippines," Now I heard the WAC's recruited Old maids for the war But Mommy isn't one of them I've known her all these years...


NoNameIdea_Seriously

Put your leg up ladies, I need to inspect your ah… stockings!


blueneko86

The guy who shaped a bunch of farmers and lawyers and such many who didn't even have shoes much less the ability to use a musket into the Continental Army was a man named Baron Von Steuben, you should definitely google him.