Those brave women who did their bit for Blighty
IN the summer of 1940 when Britain stood alone against Germany with less than a third of the men the Nazi army had it was clear manpower was not going to be enough.
But as the country teetered on the brink of invasion, more than 500,000 women answered the call to arms.
Jessie Denby, now 92, was living in Holbeach Bank, Lincs, when war broke out and joined the ATS.
Posted to an anti-aircraft battery – one of the first women to do so – she was sent to gun sites all over Britain, putting her life at risk night after night in intense bombing raids. Her story is one scores told in The Girls Who Went To War by Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi. Jessie said: “The worst thing was the flak coming down. Hot metal used to come down from 12,000ft.”
In Hamburg she saw the destruction caused by Allied bombing. “There were 45,000 people killed and ruins as far as you could see.”
Later she was posted to Belgium to defend Antwerp from V1 rocket attacks. She was there for VE Day and partied in the streets.
Margery Harley, 95, from Portsmouth, joined the women’s auxiliary air force. Recalling that first night, she said: “I could hear someone in the next bed weeping, so I got out of bed and hugged and comforted her and said it would all get better.”
Kathleen Skin, 94, then a young nanny from Cambridge, joined the ambulance service where she spent her nights pulling bodies from bombed out houses.
She said: “On my first night we found this poor old man with half his head blown off. He was still alive but by the time we got him out he was dead.”
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