Why We Didn’t Lose World War II
I have just read this article on the BBC about building a Wellington bomber in under 24 hours. It was not so much that we did it, but how we did it.
This paragraph in the article sums up why we held the fort long enough for the Japanese to attack the Americans at Pearl Harbor.
“Women were absolutely vital – first of all to the war effort as a whole, and to aircraft production,” says historian Sir Max Hastings, author of the book Bomber Command. “They were very good at what they did. Britain mobilised women more efficiently than any other wartime nation, except perhaps the Russians.”
Hitler never mobilised the German women and this was one of his biggest mistakes. But what do you expect from a power-crazed racist idiot? Not sound sense!
Women did virtually everything to support the war effort in the UK. They may not have flown combat missions, but a lot of the delivery of planes to and from front line squadrons was performed by pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary, of whom in one in eight were women. Interestingly, women pilots were paid the same as the men. In fact the Air Transport Auxiliary is another of those organisations we created that made the most of scant resources. When they were disbanded after the war, Lord Beaverbrook said this.
“Without the ATA the days and nights of the Battle of Britain would have been conducted under conditions quite different from the actual events. They carried out the delivery of aircraft from the factories to the RAF, thus relieving countless numbers of RAF pilots for duty in the battle. Just as the Battle of Britain is the accomplishment and achievement of the RAF, likewise it can be declared that the ATA sustained and supported them in the battle. They were soldiers fighting in the struggle just as completely as if they had been engaged on the battlefront.”
I once asked my father, who at some time may have been an aide to Lord Beaverbrook, why women didn’t fly combat in the Second World War. He said it wasn’t about competence, but because if they had and it had been known, it would have had a bad effect on the morale of the population.
But in one story I’ve read, women would have been called upon to fight in the air. If the Germans had landed, one of the lines of defence was what best is described as a immense swarm of Tiger Moths. I read about this in a history of the Mosquito. Hundreds of Tiger Moths were fitted with bomb racks by de Havilland and assigned a pilot and a support truck and personnel. They were to fight tanks from the lanes. The rag-bag collection of pilots would have included women.
As my next door neighbour, a retired British Army Colonel, once said, “in case of war, ignore all the rules!”
We could all do to look closely at the lessons of history!
The Anonymous Widower 
thank you for the interesting article. We always hear about how women helped out by taking the jobs the men had to abandon. But we never learn of how they directly helped with the war effort. An interesting fact that deserves more exposure!
Comment by charisian | September 14, 2010 |
I’ve heard so many stories. Sometimes it’s difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. We have to document them now, as within a few years, everybody who knows the truth will have passed on.
Comment by AnonW | September 14, 2010 |
[…] This Pilot Marion Wilberforce? My post about our use of women in World War II, Why We Didn’t Lose World War II has got me thinking about the Air Transport Auxiliary 52.245212 […]
Pingback by Was This Pilot Marion Wilberforce? « The Anonymous Widower | September 14, 2010 |
An obvious exception to Germany’s under-use of women in WWII was test pilot Hanna Reitsch whose autobiography (The Sky My Kingdom) I read last year. She had an extraordinary flying career which included:
• surviving being caught in a cumulonimbus cloud when flying a glider in her teens,
• flying the first functional helicopter in 1938 (indoors!),
• test-flying the rocket-propelled Messerschmitt Me163 Komet (during which she was badly injured),
• test-flying the V1 flying bomb (modified for manned flight),
• and so on.
Her reputation is of course seriously marred by her wartime enthusiasm for Hitler and Nazism. She was the first founding member of a German suicide squadron which, as it turned out, never went into operation. She was one of the last people to see Hitler in his bunker towards the end of the war when she managed to fly a light aircraft into a devastated Berlin to deliver the new head of the Luftwaffe to Hitler in his Fuhrerbunker.
She continued flying after the war. During the 1960s she lived in Ghana where she founded the first black African national gliding school.
Comment by SpencerH | September 14, 2010 |