Barbara Bagby Battenfeld Oral History

This collection has been digitized in its entirety.

https://uncg.as.atlas-sys.com/repositories/2/resources/1049

September 2010 Oral History transcript.

Barbara Bagby Battenfeld (b. 1919) served in the United States Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) from 1944 to 1946. Barbara Bagby Battenfeld (1919-2016) was born in New York City in 1919. She grew up in Columbus, Georgia; San Antonio, Texas; Annapolis, Maryland; Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and other locations due to her father’s military career. She graduated from Swarthmore High School in 1937, attended college at University of Vermont, and then at University of Iowa. She then worked as a tabulating machine operator for IBM and at Fort Benning, Georgia. Battenfeld entered military service in April of 1944, attending WAVES officer training at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She then worked Squantum Air Station near Boston working in message encoding and decoding, among other tasks. She later worked at the Bureau of Naval Personnel. After being discharged from the WAVES in 1946, Battenfeld went to graduate school at Boston University for teaching, and then worked at the Rowland Hall School for Girls in Salt Lake City, Utah. She died on 9 April 2016 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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