d-day75 WOMEN AND D-DAY
Left : A WAAF armourer, based at Coningsby in Lincolnshire, belting up ammunition for a Lancaster, February 1944.
© MoD/Crown copyright 1944
Below : Women working at Bletchley Park, 1943.
“Women volunteered for all forms of work, but from 1941 they were called up to perform essential tasks, such as air raid and fire wardens, bus and lorry drivers, mechanics and the armaments factories – echoing their massive role during the First World War.” Ultimately there were around 650,000 women in the Armed Forces – including the Women’s Royal Auxiliary Air Force (WRAF), the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) and the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the latter listing amongst its many members Junior Commander Elizabeth Windsor.
The 39 female agents were from different countries, classes and backgrounds, but a common link between them was usually their command of the French language. One such SOE operative was Violette Szabo, immortalised in the film “Carve Her Name With Pride”.
Women were essential to the armed forces, plotting shipping and air movements, taking up medical roles for the staggering number of casualties at home and in medic stations in Normandy following the D-Day landings, and helping to provision and run ships.
Operating under constant threat from the secret police, these women evaded the Gestapo, parachuted into warzones, sent radio communications from secret safe houses, supported the French resistance, led various resistance fighters, disrupted, sabotaged and eroded Nazi forces and infrastructure, and carried out countless other extraordinary acts of bravery and courage that helped the Allied forces eventually win the war.
Women pilots were also key to ferrying aircraft between airfields – in doing so Amy Johnson, the intrepid recordbreaking long-distance flyer, lost her life in 1941. In the 19th Century mansion at Bletchley Park, the top-secret centre for British, and subsequently Allied, code breaking, around 75 per cent of the total workforce were women. Initially wary of hiring women, intelligence chiefs had little choice when confronted with an urgent need for staff and the absence of many men. Among those who joined was Joan Clarke – a pioneering cryptanalyst who decoded navy ciphers. Her work, like that of others, often resulted in immediate military action and contributed directly to Allied successes. Clarke was later awarded an MBE for her wartime service and features in the film, The Imitation Game, but the work of other female code breakers at Bletchley, including Margaret Rock, Mavis Lever and Ruth Briggs remains far less known, and in some cases unrecorded.
Some lost their lives; others suffered torture and solitary confinement in prisons and concentration camps – including at Ravensbrück, the Nazis’ only all-female concentration camp, where 130,000 female prisoners passed through the gates. While the Second World War accelerated the progress of women in the forces and wider society, the pace slowed as the war concluded and many women found they were unwelcome in their wartime roles once men were de-mobbed. But they proved that women can not only work like men, but they can fight like them too. Their actions, during the war remain an enduring inspiration on the long road, still travelled, towards equality.
Female special agents also formed part of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), founded in 1940 and mandated by Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze”.
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About the Author Emily Eastman is a freelance writer on women in war