Bea Arthur’s Air Force Bio Purged by Department of Defense

metroweekly.com:

Golden Girls actress Bea Arthur’s military service during World War II was reportedly scrubbed from the U.S. Department of Defense website as part of the Trump administration’s overzealous efforts to purge anything related to diversity or LGBTQ identity.Last week, X user @swiftillery noted that the article on Arthur — first published in October 2021 — had been removed from the Defense Department website.According to The Advocate, the Internet Archive documented a “404 — Page Not Found” message at the URL where the article had been housed.Bonus chapter of Women’s History Month in honor of the program scrubbing DOD web articles.

Meet Bea Arthur, iconic Golden girl actress and one of the first women to join the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve. Her page has been removed.

1/ pic.twitter.com/uMDXChdj5u— tortured marketing department (@swiftillery) March 20, 2025 Although the webpage was later restored to the DOD website by March 24, @swiftillery noted that the letters “DEI” had been added to the Bea Arthur page’s URL, as if someone had tagged it.Those letters have since been removed.The original article details how Arthur enlisted in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve on February 18, 1943, just five days after the military began recruiting women in the middle of World War II.

Between 1944 and 1945, Arthur served by driving a truck and dispatching at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point in North Carolina, rising to the rank of staff sergeant before being honorably discharged in September 1945, after the war had ended.The article noted that Arthur later became a celebrated actress, earning praise for her roles in the Broadway musical Mame — for which she won a Tony Award — and in the TV sitcoms Maude and Golden Girls, for which she.