Susan Ahn Cuddy

Susan Ahn Cuddy (born January 16, 1915, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died June 24, 2015, Los Angeles) was the first Asian American woman to become an officer in the U.S. Navy. She was also the navy’s first woman gunnery officer, becoming an expert on the use and maintenance of various weapons. Her career helped build the foundation for women and Asian Americans entering the U.S. military.

Family history

The early 1900s witnessed significant Japanese colonial expansion in Asia, including Japan’s use of Korean territory to wage war against Russia. In 1910 the Japanese Empire claimed Korea as a colony. Against this backdrop Susan Ahn’s parents left Korea for San Francisco in 1902. They became the first married couple from Korea to immigrate to the United States.

Ahn’s father, Ahn Chang Ho (also called Dosan), played a significant role in the Korean nationalist movement, an anti-colonial response that drew supporters from throughout the Korean diaspora. In the United States he was a Korean community leader credited with establishing the first Koreatown in the United States, which was located in Riverside, California. He set up many organizations to help immigrants settle in California. One of them, the Young Korean Academy, was for a short while headquartered in Ahn’s family’s home in Los Angeles. The residence is now the University of Southern California’s Korean Studies Institute.

Ahn Chang Ho strongly opposed Japan’s occupation of Korea and left the United States several times to fight for Korean independence. In 1919 he helped to establish the Korean Provisional Government in Shanghai. Japanese authorities in Korea arrested him multiple times, and he died there in 1938 while in custody.

Early life

Susan Ahn was the third of five children, born to Ahn Chang Ho and Yi Hye Ryon (also known by her Anglicized name, Helen Ahn) a year after the Ahns moved to their Los Angeles home in 1914. She had two elder siblings, Philip and Philson, and two younger, Soorah and Ralph. All were born and raised in California. Susan Ahn graduated from Belmont High School, where she played baseball, basketball, and field hockey. She continued to play baseball at Los Angeles City College, becoming its first Asian American baseball player. She later transferred to San Diego State College (now San Diego State University), where she earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1940.

In December 1941 the United States entered World War II after the Japanese bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Ahn considered it her duty to fight against the Japanese in honour of the United States, Korea, and her father. However, anti-Asian sentiment was high in the United States, and many white Americans were distrustful of people of Asian heritage. In 1942—the same year that U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 resulted in the detention and relocation of about 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent to camps across the United States—she enlisted in the U.S. Navy’s WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) unit. Her initial application was rejected. Unaware until much later that she had been discriminated against on the basis of race, she reapplied later that year. This time she was accepted.

Military training and career

Ahn began her initial WAVES training at a facility in Iowa. From there she went to Georgia for training on flight simulators so she could teach pilots to use the simulators to improve their flying skills. Her next assignment was as an aerial gunnery instructor teaching aircraft crews how to aim at moving targets. One of Ahn’s superiors recognized her hard work and dedication and recommended her for officer training school.

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In 1943 Ahn took an officer training course at Smith College in Massachusetts, and she was commissioned an officer in the WAVES. Training in Florida on the use of various weapons enabled her to become the first woman gunnery officer in the U.S. Navy. She also trained air crews in the use and maintenance of weapons.

Soon after, Ahn transferred to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C. Her knowledge of the Korean language proved useful in her work. At first her coworkers were suspicious of her because of her Korean heritage, and she was refused access to classified documents. Ahn persisted, however, and soon became a valued member of the team. Eventually, the Office of Naval Intelligence selected her to work with the Library of Congress. Ahn retired from the U.S. Navy in 1946.

In 1947 Ahn began working for the organization that would become the National Security Agency (NSA). She had various roles, including code breaker, and she often worked on classified projects. In the 1950s she oversaw a think tank that collected and analyzed intelligence on the Soviet Union as part of American efforts in the Cold War. She was a recipient of an NSA fellowship to study at the University of Southern California in 1956, where her focus was Vietnam and Indochina relations. She left government work in 1959.

Marriage and later life

During her time at the Office of Naval Intelligence, Ahn met her future husband, Francis X. Cuddy, an Irish American. As a chief petty officer and a codebreaker who was fluent in Japanese, Cuddy had taken part in supplying military intelligence for the Battle of Midway. Both later went on to work for the NSA. The couple married on April 25, 1947. To avoid persecution under Virginia’s laws banning interracial relationships, the two wed on a naval base in Washington D.C. (Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws would not be overturned until 1967.)

Following her retirement in 1959, she and her husband moved from the East Coast to Los Angeles. There, until its closure in 1990, she helped run her family’s restaurant in the San Fernando Valley. The couple had two children, Christine and Philip (Flip). She died at age 100 at her home in Los Angeles.

Susan Ahn Cuddy told an interviewer in 1993 that fighting the Japanese and resisting their occupation of Korea had motivated her to join the U.S. Navy during World War II. But, as the prospects of Korean independence became more complicated after the war, she and her family remained in the United States. Looking back in her 70s, she reflected on her experiences as a pioneer in the U.S. military:

[There was] never one moment that I ever wished that I was Korean in Korea. I pride myself in my heritage but being American is the thing that I really cherish. I’m very grateful, very grateful to this land for the way I’ve lived and the way I can think and the way I can speak.…People who don’t understand the lack of freedom can not really appreciate this country.