According to most official accounts, Georgia Watson did not exist.
As part of a highly secretive Army unit, composed almost entirely of women responsible for defending D.C. against an air attack, Watson had been instructed to say nothing to anyone about her unit.
“We did not exist on paper, had no table of organization, and could officially be issued nothing,” she wrote years later in her memoir. The unit was known only as Battery X.
Although Battery X did not exist on paper, its work was very real.
In mid-1942, Gen. George C. Marshall, the Army chief of staff, personally directed the Army to handpick several dozen women for a classified assignment: evaluating whether women could be successfully integrated into D.C.’s antiaircraft artillery units.
When the women reported for duty in late 1942, Americans were on edge. A year before, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese rout of American holdings in the Pacific had rattled the nation.
Residents on the East and West coasts installed blackout curtains, painted their windows, and dimmed the lights in the evenings. Air raid drills were commonplace, and civilian patrols kept watch in towers dotting the outskirts of major cities.
Months of German U-boat attacks in the Atlantic, some of them alarmingly close to the East Coast, reinforced the sense that the United States might again come under direct attack. Watson and the women of Battery X trained to ensure that the Axis Powers never got close enough to try.
The idea of using Army women to guard the nation’s coasts was born of necessity. Marshall, the American commander responsible for allocating Army resources during World War II, faced an acute personnel dilemma in 1943: He needed more men to fight abroad, more men to defend the homeland, and more men to build weapons — and he was running out of them fast.
But on a serendipitous visit to England, Marshall stumbled on a solution to his manpower crisis: women.