It is surprising that it wasn’t till 60 years after VE Day earlier than the nation honoured the Women of World War II in a monument unveiled by the late Queen Elizabeth in 2005. Her Majesty had served within the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) as a mechanic and driver through the warfare. The enormous bronze monument was erected within the coronary heart of Whitehall, appropriately sufficient nearby of the Cenotaph, the poignant spot the place the nation’s fallen are commemorated each Armistice Day and on Remembrance Sunday.
Standing a formidable 22ft, the monument has 17 completely different sculpted uniforms and helmets to depict the varied roles of the ladies. But even perhaps extra astonishing is the gold-lettered inscription – which reveals {that a} staggering seven million girls served through the course of the Second World War.
Today we’re extra conscious that girls acquired behind the warfare effort and performed their half on the Home Front in a mess of roles; in factories in supplying the Allies with munitions to battle the Nazi warfare machine, in farms and fields with the Land Army to feed the nation, flying navy plane between airbases, and driving buses and hearth engines. The emergency of warfare noticed them step into the forefront of the nation’s survival. Three million girls served with the Red Cross and greater than 650,000 served in uniform with the armed providers. Two-thirds of the ten,000 robust workforce on the codebreaking website Bletchley Park had been girls, with Wrens working the Bombe machines at its sister website Eastcote, close to Ruislip.
The warfare modified eternally the standing of those civilian girls who till then had primarily undertaken conventional roles as homemakers. They had been referred to as to serve they usually did. There is rather more consciousness of the feminine brokers of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organisation that despatched brokers behind enemy traces into occupied Europe on sabotage missions.
An ATS member serving at an anti-aircraft battery in December 1942 (Image: Imperial War Museums through Getty)
Its headquarters had been in London’s Baker Street. Dubbed the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’, it was from right here that well-educated girls had been the mainstay of the alerts division and ready coded poems for brokers, while different girls labored within the Registry in cataloguing a card index database of agent names and their missions.
The first feminine SOE agent was dropped into France in 1942 by WAAF officer Vera Atkins, the agent handler and deputy head of SOE’s French part. Amongst her brokers was Noor Inayat Khan (‘Madeleine’) of Sufi Indian origin and the primary feminine wi-fi operator to hyperlink up with the French Resistance. Noor was betrayed and executed in Dachau focus camp on September 13, 1944. Another courageous agent, Violette Szabo, was the posthumous recipient of the George Cross.
While Odette Sansom (‘Lise’) labored as a courier behind enemy traces in France with the Spindle circuit. She was one of many few survivors of Ravensbrück focus camp. For all that has been positioned on document for ladies in warfare, there’s nonetheless one ignored group whose legacy is just now rising from the shadows of secrecy.
They are the ladies in intelligence and the feminine spies who undertook clandestine roles about which they might by no means discuss as a result of they’d signed the Official Secrets Act. For a long time there was an unconscious perception amongst historians and within the public that if girls’s roles should not evidenced, they’ll’t have been vital.
In my current e book, Women in Intelligence, I spotlight how this might not be farther from the reality. Women operated as heads of spy networks, couriers and ran escape traces. They displayed extraordinary bravery and resilience in operating spy networks and gaining intelligence for the Allies, typically at nice private threat.
They moved invisibly throughout occupied territories in delivering messages in invisible ink, gathering intelligence on German troop actions and Hitler’s secret weapon programme, and escorting Allied airmen and troopers down the escape traces to security, in addition to smuggling out info.
Female munition employees from a London manufacturing facility making ready to placed on a morale-boosting present (Image: Mirrorpix)
Top Secret ‘Y’ Service That Helped Keep Bletchley Park Busy
Codebreaker Pat Owtram with sister Jean, who died in 2023 (Image: Mirror Books)
The story of Bletchley Park, Station X, Alan Turing and the codebreaking minds who helped crack the Enigma code is now firmly fastened within the public consciousness, writes Simon Robinson. So too are the ladies who operated the Colossus and Bombe machines churning the German codes on the repurposed Bucks nation home.
But what of the uncooked materials, the outstations? Who is aware of of the Y service and its secret listeners? As Bletchley Park’s current on-line marketing campaign states: “WHAT WHO Y-stations…”
The ‘Y’ service was mainly a sequence of radio interception websites – about 178 within the UK – run by numerous companies and branches of the navy. Historian Peter Hore refers to them as “Bletchley’s secret Source”. The who’re an estimated 17,000 employees worldwide, largely younger girls of their late teenagers and early 20s. One was Patricia Owtram, now 101, a part of an elite group of Special Duties Y service linguists. She realized German on the outbreak of warfare from two Jewish refugees employed by her household. Pat is believed to be the final of an elite group of 400 Naval Special Duties Wrens.
She signed the Official Secrets Act in 1942 earlier than turning into a Chief Petty officer Wren and was posted first to Withernsea, East Riding, then Scarborough, after which Lyme Regis earlier than reaching probably the most thrilling station of all, Abbots cliff, a lonely home on the Kent coast the place “we could see the reflection of sunlight on the windscreens of the German staff cars on a good day”.
Pat’s job was to take a seat in intense watches “twiddling” the dials of the Halicraftor radio units on the lookout for a repair, then because the crackling voice got here into earshot, the 4 or five-letter code teams can be written down and despatched by teleprinter to Bletchley for decoding. Plain language messages had been despatched to the Admiralty as they generally contained details about mine laying or lighthouse operations. There was the time Churchill visited as Pat got here off obligation and, as she was in trousers and a jersey and the foundations said you would solely salute in a hat, she waved “good morning and they waved back”.
There had been a couple of close to misses from shells and bombs however girls like Pat did their obligation nonetheless. “It was odd to hear so much of the war from the other side,” Pat recollects.
Much is printed in her outstanding memoir, Codebreaking Sisters, however at the moment the GCHQ web site refers back to the Abbots cliff employees as “the women who protected the white cliffs of Dover”. In 2019, Pat was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for her work supporting D-Day. That work remained secret for many years however rightly it’s lastly being accorded the respect it deserves.
- Pat Owtram’s memoirs, Century Sisters: Our Hundred Years; and Codebreaking Sisters, Our Secret War, are each printed by Mirror Books and accessible now
A girl coaching for munitions making duties (Image: Mirrorpix)
It typically got here at nice private price. Their work was each harmful and susceptible to betrayal. So lots of the girls lived and died within the battle for freedom. Back at Bletchley Park, in Whitehall and elsewhere throughout Britain, girls had been serving in uniform in intelligence roles for Army, Air and Naval Intelligence, together with as photographic interpreters, codebreakers and cryptanalysts. They headed intelligence sections and have become specialists of their fields, as consultants on German U-boats, coastal defences, battle plans and German plane.
instance is one Miss Lee who labored in Naval Intelligence in Whitehall. She was revealed in my e book as being in control of the part of the French shoreline from Cherbourg to Le Havre, that took within the space for the D-Day landings. It was this girl – Miss Lee – who was in control of the D-Day intelligence image for the Admiralty. Her true legacy had been buried within the Naval intelligence recordsdata for many years, alongside together with her Christian identify which stays unknown to this present day.
Then there have been the feminine interrogators at secret websites like Latimer House, Buckinghamshire, and Trent Park, North London, the place the conversations of senior German prisoners of warfare had been recorded to realize info for British intelligence. These Wrens operated for the primary time in what had all the time been the male dominated subject of interrogation. What is rising in additional examine of declassified materials is how girls took on within the warfare jobs that in peacetime had been carried out by males.
The girls turned a rising workforce of experience within the civilian companies, MI5 and MI6. In MI5 they took on roles in contra-espionage monitoring down suspected enemy spies in Britain, in postal censorship within the War Office and secret work for Special Branch. Jane Sissmore, for instance, turned MI5’s first feminine officer and an skilled on Communism and Soviet spies.
This thrilling new understanding of what girls have achieved is commonly overshadowed by the continued standard portrayal in our tradition of feminine spies as femmes fatales, as the last word spy seductress who’s unique and charms secrets and techniques from males. Such photographs do an enormous disservice and dishonour to the ladies and are merely not traditionally correct. At the top of the warfare, the overwhelming majority returned to their conventional lives, however it did result in their gradual liberation in civilian life.
Princess Elizabeth served as an ATS mechanic and driver throughout hostilities (Image: Imperial War Museums)
For the ladies who had operated on the planet of espionage, they all the time carried of their hearts the secrecy of their wartime roles that they might by no means talk about, not even to their households. Their tales display how they’d not been robotically restricted by the truth that they had been girls. In the sector of intelligence operations, they had been assigned their roles as a result of they had been one of the best particular person for the job and had the fitting abilities. Some went on to careers in GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.
As we commemorate the eightieth anniversary of VE Day, we should be certain that we have a good time the contribution of ladies within the secret world of intelligence and espionage.
There is not any memorial but to them – and the way ironic that we nonetheless don’t know their exact numbers as a result of they continue to be considerably shrouded in secrecy. What emerges from my historic analysis is a far richer and awe-inspiring image than had been beforehand inherited, and one by which girls contributed throughout all elements of the British warfare effort.
Today we salute and pay tribute to all girls – no matter their roles through the Second World War, whether or not on the Home Front in factories and workplaces, working the land, serving behind enemy traces, or on clandestine operations. They completely made a distinction to the top sport and contributed to victory in Europe. Could we’ve received the warfare with out them?
The reply is a powerful ‘No!
- Dr Helen Fry is the creator of Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two Worlds Wars (Yale University Press, £12.99)
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2049681/Women-at-War-Helen-Fry-SOE