It is shocking that it wasn’t until 60 years after VE Day before the nation honoured the Women of World War II in a monument unveiled by the late Queen Elizabeth in 2005. Her Majesty had served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) as a mechanic and driver during the war. The huge bronze monument was erected in the heart of Whitehall, appropriately enough within sight of the Cenotaph, the poignant spot where the nation’s fallen are commemorated every Armistice Day and on Remembrance Sunday.
Standing an impressive 22ft, the monument has 17 different sculpted uniforms and helmets to depict the diverse roles of the women. But perhaps even more astonishing is the gold-lettered inscription – which reveals that a staggering seven million women served during the course of the Second World War.
Today we are more aware that women got behind the war effort and played their part on the Home Front in a multitude of roles; in factories in supplying the Allies with munitions to fight the Nazi war machine, in farms and fields with the Land Army to feed the nation, flying military aircraft between airbases, and driving buses and fire engines. The emergency of war saw them step into the forefront of the nation’s survival. Three million women served with the Red Cross and more than 650,000 served in uniform with the armed services. Two-thirds of the 10,000 strong workforce at the codebreaking site Bletchley Park were women, with Wrens operating the Bombe machines at its sister site Eastcote, near Ruislip.
The war changed forever the status of these civilian women who until then had mainly undertaken traditional roles as homemakers. They were called to serve and they did. There is much more awareness of the female agents of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organisation that sent agents behind enemy lines into occupied Europe on sabotage missions.
An ATS member serving at an anti-aircraft battery in December 1942 (Image: Imperial War Museums via Getty)
Its headquarters were in London’s Baker Street. Dubbed the ‘Baker Street Irregulars’, it was from here that well-educated women were the mainstay of the signals department and prepared coded poems for agents, whilst other women worked in the Registry in cataloguing a card index database of agent names and their missions.
The first female SOE agent was dropped into France in 1942 by WAAF officer Vera Atkins, the agent handler and deputy head of SOE’s French section. Amongst her agents was Noor Inayat Khan (‘Madeleine’) of Sufi Indian origin and the first female wireless operator to link up with the French Resistance. Noor was betrayed and executed in Dachau concentration camp on September 13, 1944. Another brave agent, Violette Szabo, was the posthumous recipient of the George Cross.
While Odette Sansom (‘Lise’) worked as a courier behind enemy lines in France with the Spindle circuit. She was one of the few survivors of Ravensbrück concentration camp. For all that has been placed on record for women in war, there is still one overlooked group whose legacy is only now emerging from the shadows of secrecy.
They are the women in intelligence and the female spies who undertook clandestine roles about which they could never talk because they had signed the Official Secrets Act. For decades there has been an unconscious belief amongst historians and in the public that if women’s roles are not evidenced, they can’t have been important.
In my recent book, Women in Intelligence, I highlight how this could not be further from the truth. Women operated as heads of spy networks, couriers and ran escape lines. They displayed extraordinary bravery and resilience in running spy networks and gaining intelligence for the Allies, often at great personal risk.
They moved invisibly across occupied territories in delivering messages in invisible ink, gathering intelligence on German troop movements and Hitler’s secret weapon programme, and escorting Allied airmen and soldiers down the escape lines to safety, as well as smuggling out information.
Female munition workers from a London factory preparing to put on a morale-boosting show (Image: Mirrorpix)
Top Secret ‘Y’ Service That Helped Keep Bletchley Park Busy
Codebreaker Pat Owtram with sister Jean, who died in 2023 (Image: Mirror Books)
The story of Bletchley Park, Station X, Alan Turing and the codebreaking minds who helped crack the Enigma code is now firmly fixed in the public consciousness, writes Simon Robinson. So too are the women who operated the Colossus and Bombe machines churning the German codes at the repurposed Bucks country house.
But what of the raw material, the outstations? Who knows of the Y service and its secret listeners? As Bletchley Park’s recent online campaign states: “WHAT WHO Y-stations…”
The ‘Y’ service was basically a series of radio interception sites – about 178 in the UK – run by various agencies and branches of the military. Historian Peter Hore refers to them as “Bletchley’s secret Source”. The who are an estimated 17,000 staff worldwide, mostly young women in their late teens and early 20s. One was Patricia Owtram, now 101, part of an elite group of Special Duties Y service linguists. She learned German at the outbreak of war from two Jewish refugees employed by her family. Pat is believed to be the last of an elite group of 400 Naval Special Duties Wrens.
She signed the Official Secrets Act in 1942 before becoming a Chief Petty officer Wren and was posted first to Withernsea, East Riding, then Scarborough, and then Lyme Regis before reaching the most exciting station of all, Abbots cliff, a lonely house on the Kent coast where “we could see the reflection of sunlight on the windscreens of the German staff cars on a good day”.
Pat’s job was to sit in intense watches “twiddling” the dials of the Halicraftor radio sets looking for a fix, then as the crackling voice came into earshot, the four or five-letter code groups would be written down and sent by teleprinter to Bletchley for decoding. Plain language messages were sent to the Admiralty as they sometimes contained information about mine laying or lighthouse operations. There was the time Churchill visited as Pat came off duty and, as she was in trousers and a jersey and the rules stated you could only salute in a hat, she waved “good morning and they waved back”.
There were a few near misses from shells and bombs but women like Pat did their duty nonetheless. “It was odd to hear so much of the war from the other side,” Pat recalls.
Much is outlined in her remarkable memoir, Codebreaking Sisters, but today the GCHQ website refers to the Abbots cliff staff as “the women who protected the white cliffs of Dover”. In 2019, Pat was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for her work supporting D-Day. That work remained secret for decades but rightly it is finally being accorded the respect it deserves.
- Pat Owtram’s memoirs, Century Sisters: Our Hundred Years; and Codebreaking Sisters, Our Secret War, are both published by Mirror Books and available now
A woman training for munitions making duties (Image: Mirrorpix)
It often came at great personal cost. Their work was both dangerous and prone to betrayal. So many of the women lived and died in the fight for freedom. Back at Bletchley Park, in Whitehall and elsewhere across Britain, women were serving in uniform in intelligence roles for Army, Air and Naval Intelligence, including as photographic interpreters, codebreakers and cryptanalysts. They headed intelligence sections and became specialists in their fields, as experts on German U-boats, coastal defences, battle plans and German aircraft.
A good example is one Miss Lee who worked in Naval Intelligence in Whitehall. She was revealed in my book as being in charge of the section of the French coastline from Cherbourg to Le Havre, that took in the area for the D-Day landings. It was this woman – Miss Lee – who was in charge of the D-Day intelligence picture for the Admiralty. Her true legacy had been buried in the Naval intelligence files for decades, along with her Christian name which remains unknown to this day.
Then there were the female interrogators at secret sites like Latimer House, Buckinghamshire, and Trent Park, North London, where the conversations of senior German prisoners of war were recorded to gain information for British intelligence. These Wrens operated for the first time in what had always been the male dominated field of interrogation. What is emerging in further study of declassified material is how women took on in the war jobs that in peacetime had been carried out by men.
The women became a growing workforce of expertise in the civilian agencies, MI5 and MI6. In MI5 they took on roles in contra-espionage tracking down suspected enemy spies in Britain, in postal censorship in the War Office and secret work for Special Branch. Jane Sissmore, for example, became MI5’s first female officer and an expert on Communism and Soviet spies.
This exciting new understanding of what women have achieved is often overshadowed by the continued popular portrayal in our culture of female spies as femmes fatales, as the ultimate spy seductress who is exotic and charms secrets from men. Such images do a huge disservice and dishonour to the women and are simply not historically accurate. At the end of the war, the vast majority returned to their traditional lives, but it did lead to their gradual liberation in civilian life.
Princess Elizabeth served as an ATS mechanic and driver during hostilities (Image: Imperial War Museums)
For the women who had operated in the world of espionage, they always carried in their hearts the secrecy of their wartime roles that they could never speak about, not even to their families. Their stories demonstrate how they had not been automatically restricted by the fact that they were women. In the field of intelligence operations, they were assigned their roles because they were the best person for the job and had the right skills. Some went on to careers in GCHQ, MI5 and MI6.
As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of VE Day, we must ensure that we celebrate the contribution of women in the secret world of intelligence and espionage.
There is no memorial yet to them – and how ironic that we still don’t know their precise numbers because they remain somewhat shrouded in secrecy. What emerges from my historical research is a far richer and awe-inspiring picture than had been previously inherited, and one in which women contributed across all aspects of the British war effort.
Today we salute and pay tribute to all women – whatever their roles during the Second World War, whether on the Home Front in factories and offices, working the land, serving behind enemy lines, or on clandestine operations. They absolutely made a difference to the end game and contributed to victory in Europe. Could we have won the war without them?
The answer is a resounding ‘No!
- Dr Helen Fry is the author of Women in Intelligence: The Hidden History of Two Worlds Wars (Yale University Press, £12.99)
