Andree Fifield Collection

Only a part of this collection has been digitized.

https://uncg.as.atlas-sys.com/repositories/2/resources/1163

26 April 1999 oral history transcript; copy of Washington Post article with Andree in the photograph from September 5, 1945; photographs of the Navy WAVE Quarters and WAVES on parade in Washington D.C., 1944-1945; Naval records of service and recommendations, 1943-1945.

Andrée B. Fifield (1921-2011) was a secretary for the Office of Naval Intelligence and Joint Chiefs of Staff as a member of the United States Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) from 1943 to 1945. Andrée B. Wetzler Fifield was born in New York City and raised in Michigan, France, and New York by adoptive parents. She attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, but graduated from a high school in Sayville, Long Island, in 1940. She went on to attend Bryant College, a two-year business school in Providence, Rhode Island, where she met her future husband. After graduation, Fifield moved to York, Pennsylvania, with her family and worked as a secretary at York Safe and Lock Company. She later moved with them to Chicago and worked for the government at the Salary Stabilization Unit. On 13 March 1943, Fifield enlisted in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). She was in one of the first classes assigned to basic training at Cedar Falls, Iowa. After basic training, she was sent to Washington, D.C., where she briefly worked in the National Archives (NARA) while waiting for security clearance to become a secretary in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Fifield went on to work for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon Building and briefly for the Office of the President. She was discharged from the WAVES in October 1945. Andr'e Fifield married Donald Fifield in 1945. After the war they lived in Chicago while he attended school and then worked for Campbell Soup Company. They moved to Boston in 1948 and then to Albany, New York in 1955. Three years later the Fifields moved to Syracuse, New York, where they remained for twenty-two years. During this time Fifield worked as a decorator for Sears Roebuck and gave birth to two children. The Fifields went on to live in New Hampshire and Pinehurst, North Carolina. She died on 18 May, 2011.

Women's History
Military

Navy -- WAVES

World War II era (1940-1946)

World War, 1939-1945
United States. Navy--Women

Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, UNCG University Libraries