Hell Hath No Fury (21 page)

At the beginning of the war there were only five “trades” in the ATS.
Conscription
(see Chapter 6), introduced in December 1941, was soon to change all that. By 1945, women had replaced men in more than one hundred trades, seventy-seven of them skilled. Secretarial, catering, and domestic work were all traditional areas of employment for women, but the demands of war quickly demonstrated that they were more than capable of shouldering responsibilities that would have been unthinkable in prewar days. In 1942 approximately 50 percent of the new recruits in the ATS were destined to serve in Britain's
mixed antiaircraft batteries
(see Chapter 7).

Of the rest, 17 percent became drivers in an era when most men could not drive, 10 percent telephone and teleprint operators, 9 percent cooks, 9 percent domestic workers, and 5 percent clerks. By the summer of 1943, when there were 210,308 women in the ATS, it was estimated that 80 percent of army driving in the United Kingdom was performed by women, who also maintained and repaired all types of vehicles, from staff cars to three-ton trucks and gun limbers. One of them was Princess Elizabeth, the future queen of England, who became a subaltern in the ATS in 1945. Women also became armorers, carpenters, coach trimmers, draftsmen, electricians, plotters, radiographers, sheet-metal workers, and welders, to mention only a few of the trades that became open to them. They undertook secret work, including gunnery and ammunition tests.

Life in the ATS was often tough for new recruits. One of them, Eileen Nolan, was called up in 1942 and posted to Halifax, in Yorkshire. The young women were housed in a Victorian barracks that Nolan later described as “cold, grim and demoralising for raw recruits thrust into a foreign environment where their lives were ordered from minute to minute.” The recruits carried their eating implements wherever they went, fearful of theft, and never walked on the linoleum floors because they had to polish them.

Married women with children were exempt from the draft. What were the sexual implications of women serving with other women, almost all single, separated, or divorced? The number of cases of lesbianism reported in the ATS was small. Unlike homosexuality, lesbianism was not a criminal offense in Britain at the time, but the disciplinary aspect had to be considered, especially the vexed question of relations with other ranks. The ATS moved in this minefield with some circumspection, producing a memorandum entitled “A Special Problem,” which was not issued generally but could be supplied to any senior ATS officer who was concerned about relationships that might have an undermining effect on the women under her command. The most frequent approach was a judicious posting. Only a few promiscuous lesbians had to be discharged from the service, in a surprisingly calm response to same-sex relationships for the time.

In the winter of 1939–40, three hundred women of the ATS were posted to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force. In May 1940 they were caught up in the Battle of France and in the evacuations from Dunkirk and other ports. The last ATS unit—some twenty-five women—set sail for England from St. Malo on June 22, the day France surrendered.

But as the tide of war turned, the ATS was back, active again in Normandy in 1944 and in the victorious Allied drive through northwest Europe and into Germany. The women in mixed anti-aircraft batteries had a particularly hectic time in the autumn of 1944, when the Belgian port of Antwerp, vital to Allied supply, came under heavy attack by V-1 flying bombs. By June 1945, there were some 9,550 ATs serving in northwest Europe.

During the course of the war, 375 members of the ATS lost their lives, 302 were wounded, 94 went missing, and 22 became prisoners of war. Among the honors and decorations awarded to members of the ATS were 238 Mentions in Dispatches, one French Croix de Guerre with silver star, four US Bronze Stars, and three US Bronze Stars with Mention in Dispatches.

Not all the women serving in the ATS were willing members, and the maintenance of discipline was made harder in these cases by the fact that miscreants were treated more lightly than their male counterparts. For some offenses, a soldier was liable to trial by court-martial and, if found guilty, could face a detention of up to three years, but an ATS woman could not even be brought before a court-martial unless she chose to appear of her own accord. Even if an offender opted for this, sentences for females were limited to confinement to camp or forfeiture of pay.

The usual tactic adopted by recalcitrant members of the ATS was to go absent without leave. Women who chose to remain in the ATs but to ignore any attempt to discipline them were often an even bigger headache for those in charge. Three unruly recruits left their mark when, among other outrages, they mobbed a regimental sergeant major on parade while wearing their pajamas. Contrary to standing orders, the women were placed under lock and key. Their response was to utterly destroy the cells in which they had been confined, a feat that had defied the efforts of generations of soldiers.

Nevertheless, for many women, wartime service in the ATS was a liberating experience. As one of them recalled: “It was an unexpected opportunity to do something different, something really good for the country, a chance to get away from all the dull jobs women had always had to do. It was a step thousands took to escape having to go into domestic service.”

Reference: Dorothy Calvert,
Bull, Battledress, Lanyard and Lipstick,
1978.

CIVIL DEFENSE

United Kingdom, World War II

Mainland Britain had come under aerial bombardment by German zeppelins for the first time in January 1915. On June 13, 1917, London was attacked when fourteen Gotha IV heavy bombers dropped seventy-two bombs near Liverpool Street station. In World War I, Germany mounted a total of 103 air raids against Britain, most of them on London, killing 1,413 people.

In 1924 the British Home Office drew on the experience of World War I by establishing a committee, under the chairmanship of Sir John Anderson, to examine the German bombing campaign and formulate future policy. This was the beginning of what became known as Air Raid Precautions (ARP).

In the 1930s a new generation of bombers cast a long shadow over Europe. Analyzing the experience of World War I and the Spanish Civil War, British air planners pessimistically concluded that any future armed conflict would open with devastating bombing raids on centers of population, causing millions of physical and psychological casualties and leading to the breakdown of entire societies. The side that delivered the so-called knockout blow first would emerge as the victor.

At the same time, twelve autonomous Civil Defense regions were established. London—the major target in any anticipated bombing campaign—counted as a single region. The chain of command ran down from the regional headquarters, through group headquarters, to individual boroughs in each county. The borough headquarters was usually located in a town hall, integrating the civil defenses with local government. In most towns, council staff shared civil defense responsibilities with a small number of full-time civil defense personnel and many local volunteers. Below the borough lay the district and, at the bottom of the pyramid, the air raid wardens' posts.

In theory each post, heavily sandbagged and clearly marked, was supposed to cover an area containing approximately five hundred people. In London there were about ten posts per square mile. In an air raid, the air raid warden was to act as the eyes and ears of the local Civil Defense Control Center, patrolling the streets to enforce the blackout regulations, imposed from sunset to sunrise, and controlling “incidents,” the bureaucrats' euphemism for every sort of disaster likely to be visited upon Britain's civilian population by an air raid. The warden's report of an “incident” would set in motion the civil defense team, summoning stretcher parties, fire engines, heavy-rescue units, and mobile canteens operated by the Women's Voluntary Service (WVS)—all the services required to care for the injured, comfort the survivors, and dispose of the dead.

In 1939 there were some 1.5 million civil defense personnel. Over two-thirds of them were volunteers, and many of them were women. Initially, full-time male workers were paid three pounds a week and their female counterparts two pounds (raised by an extra five shillings in the summer of 1940). When they were on “standby,” the full-time men worked a seventy-two-hour week and the women forty-eight hours. By June 1940 there were more than fifty thousand women in full-time civil defense work. They were to play a vital role in the Blitz, the German bombing campaign against mainland Britain, which lasted from September 1940 to May 1941. Throughout the Blitz, women served as firewomen in the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), which had been established in 1938 to augment Britain's regional brigades, and as fire guards, ambulance drivers, dispatch riders, nurses staffing first-aid posts, and air raid wardens. At the start of the Blitz there were more than five thousand women serving in London's AFS as drivers, mechanics, wireless operators, cooks, and control-room staff. At the height of the Blitz, in the winter of 1940–41, one air raid warden in every six was a woman.

In December 1940, full-time ARP staff peaked at 131,700, of whom some 19,500 were women. In 1941 the ARP service changed its title to Civil Defense to reflect the wider range of roles it was undertaking. By 1944, its full-time staff numbered just under 70,000, of whom approximately 10,000 were women. Another 799,400 men and 180,00 women served as volunteers in their spare time.

Reference: Tom Harrisson,
Living Through the Blitz,
1976.

CONSCRIPTION

United Kingdom, World War II

In the spring of 1941, an Order of the British Government, the Registration for Employment, required all women between the ages of eighteen and fifty to register in one of two categories, “mobile” and “immobile.” The women in the latter category were usually those with dependents or with husbands serving in the armed forces or merchant navy. The “mobile” category comprised single women and married women with no dependents.

The Registration for Employment Order was followed by the National Service Act of December 1941. The act empowered the government to conscript unmarried or widowed women between the ages of twenty and thirty, and in 1942 women of nineteen became liable for conscription. In 1943 the upward age limit was raised to fifty-one, principally to release younger women for work in aircraft production. Married women who were not living apart from their husbands were wholly exempt, as were women with children under the age of fourteen.

The conscripts were given a choice between serving in the auxiliary services—the
Auxiliary Territorial Service
(ATS, see Chapter 6), the WRNS (
Women's Royal Naval Service,
see Chapter 6), and the
Women's Auxiliary Air Force
(WAAF, see Chapter 6),
civil defense
(see Chapter 6), or industry. The women who chose the auxiliary services were not required to handle a lethal weapon unless they signaled their willingness to do so in writing. About 25 percent of Britain's “mobile women”—some 460,000—chose the auxiliary services. A social survey conducted in 1942 revealed that 97 percent of women “emphatically agreed” that they should undertake war work.

By mid-1943, the proportion of British women who were serving in the forces, munitions work, and essential industries was double that of 1918, and the number of married women engaged in war work had risen from the 1939 level of 1.25 million to 3 million. Nine out of ten single women between the ages of twenty and forty were in the services or industry. It was almost impossible for a woman under forty to avoid war work unless she had heavy family responsibilities or was looking after a war worker billeted on her. (See also
Rosie the Riveter,
Chapter 6.)

Reference: His Majesty's Stationery Office,
Manpower: The Story of Britain's Mobilisation for War,
HMSO, 1944.

DACOWITS, see Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, see below.

DEFENSE ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON WOMEN IN THE SERVICES

DACOWITS, United States, 1951–Present

In 1951, with the United States engaged in the Korean War, the US secretary of defense, General George C. Marshall, enlisted the aid of a number of prominent women with the aim of bringing more women into the armed forces, encouraging them to stay in the services, and giving them a wider range of career opportunities.

At the outset, DACOWITS comprised some forty women, the majority of whom had professional or academic experience. It also included women who had held key posts in the women's corps during World War II, but with the passing of the years the number of women serving on DACOWITS has declined. Marshall conferred the protocol rank of three-star general on the original members (a tradition that continues today), and in its first year of existence, it made fifteen official recommendations to the secretary of defense. But for the next twenty years, until the final phase of the American involvement in Vietnam, DACOWITS languished, a reflection of the low priority given by successive administrations to the role of women in the US military.

The next development came in the 1990s, when under the Clinton administration efforts were made to review the changing nature of the US armed forces, which by 1994 comprised 16 percent female recruits, and their possible employment in direct ground combat. Once again DACOWITS gained a higher profile and played a part in the lifting of the existing restrictions on the number of women in the services and the ranks they could attain. There was much talk among conservative critics of the Clinton administration of DACOWITS being in thrall to the liberal agenda advanced by “Pentagon feminists” such as Sara Lister, assistant secretary of the army for manpower and reserve affairs, who resigned in October 1997 after making a speech in which she referred to the US Marine Corps as “extremists” totally disconnected from society. To everyone's surprise, however, DACOWITS came out against the commitment of women to front-line combat.