The Girls Who Went to War: Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’s forces. Duncan Barrett

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Preface

      In the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone against Germany. One by one, the other Allied nations – France, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark and Poland – had all surrendered, and America and the Soviet Union were yet to join the war. But for all the brave talk of fighting the enemy on the beaches, the country was outgunned – and outmanned as well. The British Army stood at just over one and a half million men, while the Germans had three times that many, plus a population almost twice the size of Britain’s from which to draw new waves of soldiers.

      Clearly, in the fight against Hitler, manpower alone wasn’t going to be enough.

      During the First World War, all three branches of the British military had formed a female auxiliary service, but the new organisations had been mothballed soon after hostilities came to a close. In the build-up to a second global conflict they were hastily recalled to life, and it was now that the women’s forces really came into their own.

      Initially, both the Army and the RAF were supported by the Auxiliary Territorial Service, or ATS, but two months before Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) split off and became a separate organisation. Fulfilling an equivalent role in relation to the Navy was the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Among the women’s forces, the WRNS was considered the ‘senior service’, just as the Navy was among the three male forces. Its members – thanks to its unwieldy acronym – were known as ‘Wrens’.

      In fact, settling on a suitable name for the organisation had proved quite a minefield. It came close to being christened the Women’s Auxiliary Naval Corps, until someone realised that the abbreviation ‘WANC’ might provoke jibes from the sailors its members worked alongside.

      Of the three services, the WRNS was generally regarded as the classiest, and was by far the hardest to get in to, unless you had the right naval connections. Being a Wren was seen as rather glamorous, in part thanks to the distinctive navy blue uniform, which had been designed by the celebrated couturier Edward Molyneux. While the WAAF and ATS outfits featured belted waists and pleated pockets that were unflattering on the hips, the WRNS jacket was straight and streamlined, and the officer’s tricorne hat was much admired. To top it off, the Navy girls were even allowed to wear black silk stockings – when asked why he had permitted such extravagance, the First Lord of the Admiralty joked, ‘The Wrens like the feel of them, and so do my sailors.’

      By the time war was actually declared in September 1939, all three of the women’s services had been deluged with applicants, and tens of thousands of young women were soon donning their distinctive new uniforms – khaki for the ATS, Air Force blue for the WAAF, and navy for the WRNS. When conscription for women was introduced in the National Service Act of 1941, the ranks of the services were swelled further, as many girls chose the rigours of military life over hazardous work in a munitions factory or the hard labour of tilling the fields with the Land Army. There were some who refused to be drafted – 257 female conscientious objectors found themselves imprisoned as a result of their principles – but most girls reported for duty reasonably willingly and did their best to fit into life in the forces, however alien the military environment might seem to them.

      In many ways, the girls in uniform were aspirational figures, and during the war their image was appropriated by advertisers keen to appeal to young, independent-minded women. But they were far from universally popular. Old sweats in the military were often mistrustful of their new colleagues, and anxious about sharing facilities with them. One veteran RAF officer told the BBC of his horror at the thought of ‘petticoats’ on his air base, and General Eisenhower himself was initially opposed to working alongside women, although the competence and professionalism he saw at his HQ in London were enough to make him change his mind.

      Some men, whether military or civilian, feared that girls in uniform were getting ideas above their station. ‘The menace,’ fumed one magazine editor, ‘is the woman who thinks she ought to be flying a high-speed bomber when she really has not the intelligence to scrub the floor of a hospital properly, or who wants to nose around as an air-raid warden and yet can’t cook her husband’s dinner.’ Others complained that servicewomen were encroaching into previously male-dominated spaces – most shocking of all, they were seen accepting drinks from strangers in pubs.

      The government attempted to calm the male population with a pamphlet that asserted reassuringly, ‘The girls look healthy and happy, and clearly most of them will make better wives and mothers and citizens, if only because they have had some physical and mental training.’ But many British people – men and women alike – were unconvinced. The confidence that many girls exuded when they put on a military uniform was seen by some as unladylike, and they were frequently accused of having loose morals – in fact many civilians fervently believed that women in the forces were little more than prostitutes. In popular slang, the letters ATS were said to stand for a number of lewd expressions, from ‘Any time, Sergeant!’ to ‘American Tail Supply’. Army girls were referred to colloquially as ‘officers’ groundsheets’, while WAAFs were labelled ‘pilots’ cockpits’ and the girls in the Navy were the butt of a popular expression – ‘Up with the lark and to bed with a Wren.’

      The tabloid press didn’t help matters. ‘TOO MANY MISFITS IN THE ATS AND WAAF,’ thundered the Express, while the Daily Mail ran a poll on what their readers hated most about the war, in which ‘women in uniform’ came top.

      Such was the strength of feeling among the public that Parliament set up a committee to look into the alleged moral failings of the women’s forces. In August 1942 the social reformer Violet Markham reported confidently that the accusations levelled against the girls were groundless. Although some servicewomen had been discharged for illegitimate pregnancies – in the ATS this was known as ‘going para 11’, after the section of the rulebook that dealt with such cases – the illegitimate birth rate in the services was in fact lower than among the civilian population at the time, and the rate of venereal disease among servicewomen was half that among men.

      It seems particularly unfair that so many civilians looked down on the girls in uniform, since the part they played in winning the war was a crucial one. Without the contribution made by the WAAF, for example, the Royal Air Force would have needed an extra 150,000 men – a figure all but impossible to muster. And although the girls of the three forces were forbidden by Royal Proclamation from personally firing deadly weapons, they were closely involved in many of the key events of the war, and frequently found themselves in harm’s way. In 1940, ATS ambulance drivers serving with the British Expeditionary Force in France were caught up in the frantic rush to evacuate at Dunkirk. Four years later, WAAF medical orderlies СКАЧАТЬ