Women Who Served In WWII

By Rachel Vogeleisen

Rachel Vogeleisen is a professional photographer specialising in women’s portraits and fashion. Her fascination with the Second World War was sparked by her discovery as a child that her grandfather, from Alsace, had had to fight for the Germans against Russia. This book, the culmination of ten years of research, is a collection of portraits and testimonials recording the experiences of 21 women who volunteered during World War II, interviewed by the author. The accounts have been left as far as possible in the women’s original words, so that their voices can be heard clearly and faithfully. The women featured in this book are among many who did much behind the scenes without much in the way of recognition. It was not until 2005 that their contribution to the war effort was recognised with a memorial dedicated to the women of World War Two in Whitehall, London. These women are some of the last alive to speak about their wartime experiences in their own words.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mereo Books
• Release date: Apr 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463252567

Book preview

RACHEL VOGELEISEN

WOMEN WHO SERVED

IN WORLD WAR II

In their own words

Copyright © 2020 by Rachel Vogeleisen

Published by Mereo

Mereo is an imprint of Memoirs Publishing

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Land Army Girls

Table of Contents

Thank you note

Foreword

A Word About the Services

The ATS

The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF)

The Auxiliary Transport Aviation

The Women’s Royal Navy Service (WRNS)

The Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI)

The Nursing Services

Request for Secret Work - ULTRA

The Special Operation Executive (SOE)

Women’s Land Army

Women who served

Joy Lofthouse, ATA

Ginger Thomas, WRNS

Gwen Jowitt, WAAF

Barbara Campbell, WAAF

Elizabeth Clifton (née Pauline Guyfaw), WAAF

Esther Pointon, WAAF

Kathleen Cove, WAAF

Jane Eldridge, WRNS

Winifred Armstrong, WAAF

Mary Ellis, ATA

Diana Lindo, WAAF

Dorothea Abbott, Land Army

Nancy Cooper, Land Army

Ruth Bourne, WRNS

Pauline Burke, Pam Goodger, Nora McMinn, Liz Diacon WAAF and WRNS

Beryl E Escott, author

Dorothy Wallis, WAAF

Angela Maria Frampton, ATS

SOE women agents executed at Natzweiler-Struthof

Conclusion

Thank You

This book is dedicated to the people who have taught me history with real passion and shared their experiences of the Second World War: M. Acker, my first history teacher at the collège in Benfeld; Mrs Fabre at the Lycée Notre Dame des Mineurs in Strasbourg; my grandfather, René Hornung, who told me about his campaign in Russia while we were walking along the road up to the village of Biguglia in Corsica; and Suzo (Pascal) Terribile, whose story I have been tracking down for the last fifteen years.

I would like to thank all the women who have taken part in this book for agreeing to pose and be photographed and share their wartime experience over a cup of tea and cake, and for welcoming my project with open hearts.

Thanks to my MA photography teacher, Eti Wade, who always pushed me to go further and my fellow students who encouraged the idea. My thanks to John, Luc, Pierre and James for their support in letting me travel the country and devote time to this project. Also to my parents, who extended my knowledge and curiosity, living in an open-minded house where history and politics were always topics for debate. To my grandmother, Marie Louise, for letting me rummage through her photo box and telling me about her teenage years living under Nazi rule.

To my aunt Lydie for her support, to Jen Davies and Steve O'Neill who helped me kick start this whole project, to Catherine Mandiaux, Amar Grover and Pascale Szwagrzak for their enthusiastic support and precious help with editing. To all the people who have crossed my path for this project and have helped keep things moving forward. To all the men and women who have given their lives for freedom and democracy and made Europe a better place to live.

NB: While the women’s stories have been lightly edited, when presenting them I have as far as possible left their recollections in their own words, so that you may hear their voices as clearly as I did when I was listening to them. Please remember that these are conversational, not literary, accounts.

DISCLAIMER

This book is not intended as a scholarly piece of research, but rather a collection of portraits and testimonials recording the experiences of women who volunteered during World War Two, paying respect to the women who have done their bit. Please note that the numbers and figures in this book might not reflect the latest research done on the subject.

All portraits taken by Rachel Vogeleisen. Uniform photos courtesy of the Volunteers.

Foreword

I have always felt a fascination with the Second World War; I was drawn to it, hooked by the diplomatic struggle happening before it even started. Learning about this historical period was like undoing the knots, one by one, of a very tangled detective story. If you have seen the film The Remains of the Day [1] it gives a good impression of the state of mind of those contemporaries who might have been tempted to endorse National Socialism in the context of the biggest economic crisis of all time. Indeed, it was not only the complicated international relationships that drove my curiosity, it was the secrecy and complexity behind the untold tales, like Fortitude,[2] a whole operation dedicated to making the Germans believe that the Allies were preparing a landing in the Pas-de-Calais. Fortitude was one of a larger network of dummy operations under the Bodyguard [3] umbrella. Even the agents on this mission did not know it was all a deception; effectively they were sacrificed to hide Operation Overlord (the D-Day landings).

Rene Hornung (right), incorporated in the Malgre-Nous

Alsace, the region where I come from in France, paid a high price during this period and was annexed as German territory. When I was ten my grandfather taught me some Russian words he had learnt in Russia during the war. It did not really dawn on me why my grandfather was in Russia at the time, it sounded too complicated to understand. It was only when I started to browse through my grandmother’s photo box that some disturbing images started to emerge of my grandfather in German army uniform with a swastika on his arm. How was it that my French grandfather was involved with the Germans? A shock, to say the least; it contrasted greatly with what I had learnt at school. We were taught that everybody in France was heroic and fought in the Resistance.

At the time I had never heard of the Vélodrome d’Hiver [4]; I would later discover that France’s involvement in the Second World War was not so black and white after all. It was only in 1995 that the then French President Jacques Chirac officially acknowledged the Vichy French government’s public responsibility for the deportation of 13,000 French Jews. Not a single German was involved in this operation. An excellent novel by Tatiana de Rosnay, Sarah’s Key,[5] is a shocking illustration of the atrocities of the ‘Vel d’Hiv’.

In the final year of my baccalaureate I had a history teacher called Mrs Fabre who used to entertain us during class by relating her own experience of the war as a child in German-occupied Strasbourg. She recounted this with amusing sarcasm to help us understand that there were two types of citizen at the time: those who were allowed to speak French and those who were not. Obviously those collaborating with the Germans had the privilege of being allowed to continue speaking French in this part of Germany while everybody else had to conform to the Germanic way, even to the extent of having to change their first name to something less Gallic. Listening to Mrs Fabre was fascinating. I loved the way she made modern history so relevant by adding her own personal experience in the picture, and history quickly became my favourite subject.

The first time I heard about the Malgré-Nous [6] was probably around that time. I had read in the local newspapers about a German prisoner of war camp in Russia called Tambov. Here a number of Alsatians who had been forcibly enrolled in the German army never made it back, despite the efforts of General de Gaulle to try to make the Russians understand that these were French citizens who did not voluntarily fight in the German uniform and were under threat of having their entire family deported if they refused. I guess Stalin had other preoccupations at the time. Alsatians were certainly not the only population enrolled under duress. The last ones were eventually freed in 1956. As a result of this forced enrolment, applied from 25th August 1942 [7] my grandfather René was one of 100,000 Alsatians made to fight Josef Stalin’s army; he spent two years in Russia fighting with the Wehrmacht.

For many years we were taught at school that France fought alongside the Allies against the Axe, General de Gaulle was our hero and that every French person joined the Resistance. This raised many questions about how my family fitted into this seemingly perfect French version of the war. My grandmother, Marie-Louise, remembers how scared she was of men in black uniforms (worn by the Waffen-SS): "They could send you to the Struthof-Natzweiler [8] and had right of life and death over anyone,