Women in Combat during WW2
British women during the Second World War were often involved in direct combat, and approximately 700 were killed. By Tessa Dunlop.
During the Second World War, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) at its peak consisted of nearly 300,000 women, the majority of whom were conscripted. The author of a bestselling new book of oral history spent lockdown talking to seventeen veterans about their experience. Although restricted from front-line duty, more than 700 women were killed during the war, and here she talks to two, Daphne and Grace, as they describe life at Anti-Aircraft batteries.
Daphne is 98 years old; the war was a long time ago but there are some things you never forget. ‘My mother didn’t want me to go into the ATS, and nor did Reg. He worked with service girls, he said he knew what they were like.’ Reg was Daphne’s boyfriend and the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) provided female uniformed support for the British army during World War II. By 1941 it had been rebranded the Auxiliary Tarts Service in popular discourse and was stymied with the worst reputation of the three military services for women. Daphne shakes her head, ‘it was most unfair, we all worked very hard.’ She is fiercely protective of the service she credits with changing her life but retrospectively has some sympathy for Reg’s concern and concedes that ‘perhaps he felt I might meet somebody if I signed up, that he wouldn’t have me to himself anymore. I would no longer be in Feltwell waiting for him.’ From her armchair, Daphne neatly articulates the conundrum that bedevilled military thinking in the first half of the war: what were men fighting for if girls were forced to serve alongside them? The sanctity of home and its fecund promise of plenty and peace was a tantalising prospect for thousands of men living off thin rations in mean barracks. Labour MP Agnes Hardie argued that ‘war is not a woman’s job... women share the bearing and rearing of children and should be exempt from war.
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