WOMEN OF WAR

We take a look at the role women played in Operation Overlord, with author Sarah Rose

since women were not permitted to take on combat roles in any of the western Allied forces, it might be easy to overlook their contribution to the war effort as a whole. And by that we don’t just mean the work done on the home fronts where women needed to step into factories and workshops to take the place of men drafted into service. Women aged 17 to 43, in Britain, could also opt to join one of the auxiliary branches of the military or serve in special operations as part of the SOE or OSS. While such work wouldn’t put them on the front line, it wouldn’t mean they were out of harm’s way either.

In terms of espionage work, women were ideal candidates off the bat for occupied

France according to author Sarah Rose. “The demographic of war is overwhelmingly female. We think of war as a very macho space, it’s a very GI Joe type environment. But in an occupied country the men in France were in POW camps or had been shipped off as slave labour to Germany. There were very few men left. If there was a man who was fighting fit and of a draftable age then what was he doing in France on a bicycle? Whereas a woman blended

in.” Rose has chronicled the experiences of three such women in her book D-day Girls.

Still, in this era, there was a taboo around having women serve in the military and those behind enemy lines would have been in the minority. That being said, there is still a tendency to downplay the contribution made elsewhere, according to Rose. “There are many factors in why women’s contributions haven’t been recognised. One is that their work tends to get dismissed as clerical or secretarial, when in fact when you are receiving arms and you are using them you’re a soldier as much as anybody else. When you are hiding Resistance forces, you are working in the Resistance. So some of it was just a reclassification.”

And this applies just as aptly to the more official military posts available such as the Women’s Army Corps in the US where 150,000 women served or the Auxiliary Territorial Service in Britain where 190,000 women joined the war effort. Such services were not just secretaries back home either, with nurses on the ships heading across the Channel, pilots getting planes where they needed to be for the RAF and getting the injured back home for medical attention, radar operators, code breakers, weapon analysts, electricians, mechanics, cooks, clerks and so much more. Women were not always a visible part of Operation Overlord, but their contribution needs to be acknowledged.

It’s just a shame that in some cases it is only recently that these efforts were being recognised, but Rose understands where some of that resistance was coming from. “We want to respect those who fell on the beaches, we want to acknowledge the heroes and there is a bit of defensiveness, that if we start saying the women were heroes too we’re somehow taking the heroism away from the men on the beaches,” she concludes. “It’s as if there isn’t enough to go around, but the truth is there is. They were all heroes and it does not diminish the role of anyone to acknowledge someone else’s role.”