By Leslie Kelly

Muriel Jean Whalley isn’t one to shy away from tough situations.
In her 90 years, she’s done quite a bit of living and has many stories to tell. But the story that she’s most well known for is that of Uncle Sam.
Living in England at the age of 20, she noticed that famous World War II poster of Uncle Sam pointing his finger right at her.
“He was the funniest looking bloke I’d ever seen,” she said. “Why would I ever want to talk to someone who looked like that?”
But that “angry white-haired” man intrigued her.
Whalley was born of British parents who were “on holiday” in the United States when she was born; so she had U.S. citizenship. And right there on that poster of Uncle Sam were the words “Uncle Sam is aware there are U.S.-born females in the U.K. If you are one, please telephone this number…”
So she did. The recruiter told her the U.S. Army needed women who understood what war was all about and who could help with the invasion of France. Being a U.S. citizen, and having lived with the war for several years, she decided it was her job to join up. But she had questions: “Who was Uncle Sam? Where was this man?”
When she was told he was a symbol of the United States, she said, “this is news to me, all I know of the U.S. is movies and music.”
Soon she found herself part of the U.S. Women’s Army Corps (WACs) being trained to intercept communications. The U.S. wanted women who were use to air raid sirens and the horrors of war and who could monitor calls. She was assigned to a special communications unit, 3341st Signal Battalion, Battle Company C, which commanded the Paris telephone exchange switchboard. In all, there were 45 women who were inducted in London in 1944.
“We were like sisters, dedicated to getting the job done,” she said.
They all had English, Scottish or Welsh accents and were born in the U.S. of English parents who had been in the U.S. doing business such as importers, banking and the like.
“We had top security clearance and we could not tell anyone our location or our assignment,” Whalley said. “When Paris was captured, we went to Paris and I handled calls from General Eisenhower to General Patton, Omar Bradley and all of our allies (during) the Battle of the Bulge and all the way to Berlin.”
She said as WACs they worked 16-hour days, and the winter of 1944 “was cruel and we had no heat.”
“We wrapped blankets around us and had to be checked for frostbite,” she said. “We were prime targets for the German spies in Paris and if they had known what we were doing, we would have been shot.”
The communications officers were told to say they were nurses. The women chosen arrived at Omaha Beach and had to go over the side of the convoy to get to the landing craft.
“There was no instruction on how to go over the ship side,” she said. “We were dressed like the guys in heavy Army boots, helmets and gear. I remember looking down the rope ladder and the waves that were slapping between the ship and the landing crafts. You hoped that your boot was going to step on that next rung and you wanted to go fast enough so that the next girl coming down didn’t step on your fingers.”
While crossing the English Channel, Whalley said they had only hard tack and Spam to eat and rested in lice-infested hay. “We were eaten alive and it itched like crazy,” she said.
The women weren’t issued guns; they had only hatchets.
En route on the ship, troops were packed “to the inch,” she said. “During the crossing, I was picked to sing on deck and lead the guys in their favorite songs.”
They sang “Paper Doll,” “I’ll Be Seeing You,” and “Over There.”
“I looked at the sea of faces and realized that most of them were singing for the last time,” she said.
At Omaha Beach, she and the other women “waded through the surf to the beach.”
They didn’t know what lay ahead, only that they were there to do a job.
She has many memories of her service, some good, some bad and some sad.
Whalley recalled the night Glen Miller, a famous 1940s orchestra director, was killed in a place crash crossing the Channel. She was attending a USO dance where Miller was supposed to perform that night.
“We girls were waiting and when we heard the news, we cried,” she said.
Whalley served two years, and she still recalls the look on her parents’ faces when she told them about her decision to join the WACs.
“You are going to get yourself bloody-well killed,” her father told her. Her response: “I could do that right here.”
“I knew what war was, what it was like to starve,” she said. “We wanted the war over. We knew it was something that had to be done.”
At the age of 15, in her home town of Warrington, close to Liverpool, she endured German bomb raids and daily put on a gas mask.
Following the war, she moved to Brooklyn, New York, and eventually ended up in Washington state. She now resides in Kingston and is a member of the VFW Post 8870 in Edmonds. For her service, she earned a Meritorious Service Award. And still, today, she loves to share stories of her service.
“We WACs had a job to do for Uncle Sam,” she said. “It was an honor to serve and help end World War II — the war where it was kill or be killed — no defeat, only victory.”
(This story includes written information from the Sound Publishing archives and from letters supplied by Whalley. To hear Whalley in a radio interview go online at http://kzok.cbslocal.com/2013/07/21/muriel-whalley/)