In 1938, Sir Gerard John Regis Leo d'Erlanger, a member of a renowned banking family and an accomplished pilot, became convinced that Great Britain urgently needed the help of its amateur pilots to wage a war he saw coming.
When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the plan was suddenly taken seriously. D’Erlanger was by then the director of British Airways, so the company was asked to oversee the initiative. Letters were sent to about 1,000 male pilots asking if they wanted to serve their country by ferrying airplanes. About 100 replies came back, and after interviews and flight tests, the first 30 men were picked that September for what became the Air Transport Auxiliary, or ATA (which d’Erlanger joked stood for Ancient and Tattered Airmen). But what was most unusual—even radical—was the decision two months later [December, '39?] to satisfy the increasing demand for ferry services by including female pilots. On December 16, 1939, the first group of twelve women pilots were assembled at Whitchurch, and flight-tested in a Gypsy Moth. From this group of twelve, eight were selected and appointed as Second Officers.
It was the first time in British history that women were hired to fly military aircraft.
Pauline Gower, daughter of a parliamentarian, Sir Robert Gower, was asked to organize the ATA’s women’s division. In January 1940, Gower was given the authority to recruit eight experienced female pilots to transport two-seat Tiger Moth trainers from the de Havilland factory in Hatfield, north of London, to bases in the United Kingdom. The team members came from a wide range of backgrounds: Rosemary Rees was a former ballet dancer; Mona Friedlander, an international ice hockey player; and Winifred Crossley, the daughter of a doctor. Marian Wilberface was a pilot with her own Gipsy Moth. Joan Hughes had been Britain’s youngest pilot; she started flying at 15, before age restrictions were established. Margaret Cunnison and Gabrielle Patterson were both flight instructors (the first woman to instruct, Patterson also was a member of the National Women’s Air Reserve, a group that provided aid in national emergencies).
Some of the later recruits, such as Diana Barnato Walker, came from privileged backgrounds. Heiress to the DeBeers mining fortune, Walker grew up riding horses and attending lavish parties hosted by her father, race-car driver Woolf Barnato.
One recruit, Molly Rose, had taken her first flight from her own back yard. One of her older brothers, Arthur, had learned to fly at Cambridge and used the fields behind their house to take off and land his Tiger Moth.
From 1941 all unmarried women between 20 and 30 years old were called up to join one of the auxiliary services. These were the Auxilliary Territorial Service (ATS), the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and the Women’s Transport Service. Later this conscription was extended to some married women. They were not intended to serve in the front line of battle – but for much of the war the front line was indistinguishable from the home front, especially with regard to Anti Aircraft gunnery. 731 women died serving in these Auxilliary units during the war.
Mary Latham was just one of hundreds of thousands of young women who suddenly found their lives completely transformed:
The year was 1942. I was a hairdresser in Chorley, Lancashire. As hairdressing was considered to be a luxury trade in wartime and I was 18 years old, I was given the choice of munitions work or joining one of the forces.
My friend May and I travelled to Preston to sign up in the forces and received the King’s Shilling. Two weeks later we were notified to go to Lancaster. We were met at Preston station by a sergeant, taken to Lancaster and fitted out with our uniforms.
How different my life changed in the next 4 years. We moved from Lancaster to Arborfield, where we did 6 weeks of intensive training all at the double. Each one was assessed for:
* Fitness
* Hearing
* Eyesight
* Nerves (in Ack-Ack action)
It was necessary to pass all the tests.
Fortunately I passed as a Predictor operator No.3 – which involved looking through a telescope, keeping the target on the horizon line. This demanded steady nerves under gunfire and we needed a lot of practice. At the end of the day, we were mentally and physically exhausted. We lost our voices as all orders were shouted as loudly as possible.
The procedure was as follows:
The predictor (Kerry – called after its inventor) [Major A.V. Kerrison at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, Teddington] passed the information we put in on to the guns (3.7) then the gunners fired the shells. We worked in 2 groups – A and B. I was in B group – 5 on the predictor, 3 on height-finding.
Plotters were on duty for 24 hours underground. The plotting room was always ready for any aircraft flying overhead.
We were well looked after with health inoculations every 3 months, regular dental care, F.F.I. (Free From Infection) each Friday.
We (14 girls in each hut) were confined to our billets on Friday nights. We had to clean all our equipment, even to the studs on the bottom of our boots.
After 6 weeks practice in Arborfield, we were sent to Bude in Cornwall. This was our first Gun-Site this was not operational, but it gave us a taste of what was to come.
The only description of the gunfire (4 guns firing in a semi-circle with the predictor 20 yards away) was like hell let loose. However, we got used to it.
Our battery was moved to 36 different sites along the East and South coasts of England.
…
During our time in Hull we shot down one of our own aircraft (a Wellington). The crew gave us the wrong signal. Fortunately they landed safely – just the tail missing. We were commended for our accurate firing but the crew were not impressed. Hull was badly hit at the time.
At Caister, near Yarmouth, 25 A.T.S.s were killed by machine-gun fire. The enemy aircraft flew over in the early morning at sunrise, when it was impossible to see them and peppered the coast with gun-fire. It was a frightening sight to see Focke Wulfs diving down while we tried to pay our respects, standing to attention during the playing of the Last Post, to those who had been killed.
'Ack Ack Girls' were members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) that helped operate Anti-Aircraft Guns in the defense of Britain from German bombing raids during World War 2.
From 1941 onward all unmarried British women aged 20 to 30 were required to join one of the Auxiliary services, which included the ATS. One of the most dangerous and exciting ATS roles was to be selected for 'Ack Ack' duty, manning the Anti-Aircraft guns known for their distinctive ack-ack sound as they fired. The idea to use women in gun crews was first proposed by British engineer Caroline Haslett and was eagerly approved by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Churchill's own daughter, Mary Soames, was one of the first Ack Ack volunteers and served at a gun site in London's Hyde Park.
As a royal proclamation forbade women from operating deadly weapons, Ack Ack Girls worked as part of mixed-gender squads where men would load and fire the weapons with the women's support. The three main roles of the women were Spotters who used binoculars to find enemy planes, Range-Finding teams who calculated the distance a gun shell would have to travel to hit the target, and Predictor teams who worked out the length of the fuse necessary to make sure the shell exploded at the right height.
Women were subject to the same intensive training as men and had to undergo rigorous testing in terms of fitness, hearing, eyesight and nerves in order to be accepted. This was essential for enduring the hard conditions at the gun emplacements and to keep on task while bombs fell all around them. When the Germans deployed V1 flying bombs against Britain, 369 Ack Ack Girls were killed in just 3 months. Their sacrifice and dedication proved invaluable to the war effort, as well as providing a boost to civilian morale, the sound of the Ack Ack guns becoming a well-recognised symbol of British resistance.
A battery of 4.5 inch anti-aircraft guns in action at night. In the foreground is an ATS section operating the height finder.
Some time during December 1942 the War Office photographers were out with their colour film again. Given the difficulty of their subject matter, including gunfire, they made a pretty impressive job of it.
From 1941 all unmarried women between 20 and 30 years old were called up to join one of the auxiliary services. These were the Auxilliary Territorial Service (ATS), the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and the Women’s Transport Service. Later this conscription was extended to some married women. They were not intended to serve in the front line of battle – but for much of the war the front line was indistinguishable from the home front, especially with regard to Anti Aircraft gunnery. 731 women died serving in these Auxilliary units during the war.
Mary Latham was just one of hundreds of thousands of young women who suddenly found their lives completely transformed:
The year was 1942. I was a hairdresser in Chorley, Lancashire. As hairdressing was considered to be a luxury trade in wartime and I was 18 years old, I was given the choice of munitions work or joining one of the forces.
My friend May and I travelled to Preston to sign up in the forces and received the King’s Shilling. Two weeks later we were notified to go to Lancaster. We were met at Preston station by a sergeant, taken to Lancaster and fitted out with our uniforms.
How different my life changed in the next 4 years. We moved from Lancaster to Arborfield, where we did 6 weeks of intensive training all at the double. Each one was assessed for:
* Fitness
* Hearing
* Eyesight
* Nerves (in Ack-Ack action)
It was necessary to pass all the tests.
Fortunately I passed as a Predictor operator No.3 – which involved looking through a telescope, keeping the target on the horizon line. This demanded steady nerves under gunfire and we needed a lot of practice. At the end of the day, we were mentally and physically exhausted. We lost our voices as all orders were shouted as loudly as possible.
The procedure was as follows:
The predictor (Kerry – called after its inventor) [Major A.V. Kerrison at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, Teddington] passed the information we put in on to the guns (3.7) then the gunners fired the shells. We worked in 2 groups – A and B. I was in B group – 5 on the predictor, 3 on height-finding.
Plotters were on duty for 24 hours underground. The plotting room was always ready for any aircraft flying overhead.
We were well looked after with health inoculations every 3 months, regular dental care, F.F.I. (Free From Infection) each Friday.
We (14 girls in each hut) were confined to our billets on Friday nights. We had to clean all our equipment, even to the studs on the bottom of our boots.
After 6 weeks practice in Arborfield, we were sent to Bude in Cornwall. This was our first Gun-Site this was not operational, but it gave us a taste of what was to come.
The only description of the gunfire (4 guns firing in a semi-circle with the predictor 20 yards away) was like hell let loose. However, we got used to it.
Our battery was moved to 36 different sites along the East and South coasts of England.
…
During our time in Hull we shot down one of our own aircraft (a Wellington). The crew gave us the wrong signal. Fortunately they landed safely – just the tail missing. We were commended for our accurate firing but the crew were not impressed. Hull was badly hit at the time.
At Caister, near Yarmouth, 25 A.T.S.s were killed by machine-gun fire. The enemy aircraft flew over in the early morning at sunrise, when it was impossible to see them and peppered the coast with gun-fire. It was a frightening sight to see Focke Wulfs diving down while we tried to pay our respects, standing to attention during the playing of the Last Post, to those who had been killed.
'Ack Ack Girls' were members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) that helped operate Anti-Aircraft Guns in the defense of Britain from German bombing raids during World War 2.
From 1941 onward all unmarried British women aged 20 to 30 were required to join one of the Auxiliary services, which included the ATS. One of the most dangerous and exciting ATS roles was to be selected for 'Ack Ack' duty, manning the Anti-Aircraft guns known for their distinctive ack-ack sound as they fired. The idea to use women in gun crews was first proposed by British engineer Caroline Haslett and was eagerly approved by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Churchill's own daughter, Mary Soames, was one of the first Ack Ack volunteers and served at a gun site in London's Hyde Park.
As a royal proclamation forbade women from operating deadly weapons, Ack Ack Girls worked as part of mixed-gender squads where men would load and fire the weapons with the women's support. The three main roles of the women were Spotters who used binoculars to find enemy planes, Range-Finding teams who calculated the distance a gun shell would have to travel to hit the target, and Predictor teams who worked out the length of the fuse necessary to make sure the shell exploded at the right height.
Women were subject to the same intensive training as men and had to undergo rigorous testing in terms of fitness, hearing, eyesight and nerves in order to be accepted. This was essential for enduring the hard conditions at the gun emplacements and to keep on task while bombs fell all around them. When the Germans deployed V1 flying bombs against Britain, 369 Ack Ack Girls were killed in just 3 months. Their sacrifice and dedication proved invaluable to the war effort, as well as providing a boost to civilian morale, the sound of the Ack Ack guns becoming a well-recognised symbol of British resistance.
From 1941 all unmarried women between 20 and 30 years old were called up to join one of the auxiliary services. These were the Auxilliary Territorial Service (ATS), the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and the Women’s Transport Service. Later this conscription was extended to some married women. They were not intended to serve in the front line of battle – but for much of the war the front line was indistinguishable from the home front, especially with regard to Anti Aircraft gunnery. 731 women died serving in these Auxilliary units during the war.
Mary Latham was just one of hundreds of thousands of young women who suddenly found their lives completely transformed:
The year was 1942. I was a hairdresser in Chorley, Lancashire. As hairdressing was considered to be a luxury trade in wartime and I was 18 years old, I was given the choice of munitions work or joining one of the forces.
My friend May and I travelled to Preston to sign up in the forces and received the King’s Shilling. Two weeks later we were notified to go to Lancaster. We were met at Preston station by a sergeant, taken to Lancaster and fitted out with our uniforms.
How different my life changed in the next 4 years. We moved from Lancaster to Arborfield, where we did 6 weeks of intensive training all at the double. Each one was assessed for:
* Fitness
* Hearing
* Eyesight
* Nerves (in Ack-Ack action)
It was necessary to pass all the tests.
Fortunately I passed as a Predictor operator No.3 – which involved looking through a telescope, keeping the target on the horizon line. This demanded steady nerves under gunfire and we needed a lot of practice. At the end of the day, we were mentally and physically exhausted. We lost our voices as all orders were shouted as loudly as possible.
The procedure was as follows:
The predictor (Kerry – called after its inventor) [Major A.V. Kerrison at the Admiralty Research Laboratory, Teddington] passed the information we put in on to the guns (3.7) then the gunners fired the shells. We worked in 2 groups – A and B. I was in B group – 5 on the predictor, 3 on height-finding.
Plotters were on duty for 24 hours underground. The plotting room was always ready for any aircraft flying overhead.
We were well looked after with health inoculations every 3 months, regular dental care, F.F.I. (Free From Infection) each Friday.
We (14 girls in each hut) were confined to our billets on Friday nights. We had to clean all our equipment, even to the studs on the bottom of our boots.
After 6 weeks practice in Arborfield, we were sent to Bude in Cornwall. This was our first Gun-Site this was not operational, but it gave us a taste of what was to come.
The only description of the gunfire (4 guns firing in a semi-circle with the predictor 20 yards away) was like hell let loose. However, we got used to it.
Our battery was moved to 36 different sites along the East and South coasts of England.
…
During our time in Hull we shot down one of our own aircraft (a Wellington). The crew gave us the wrong signal. Fortunately they landed safely – just the tail missing. We were commended for our accurate firing but the crew were not impressed. Hull was badly hit at the time.
At Caister, near Yarmouth, 25 A.T.S.s were killed by machine-gun fire. The enemy aircraft flew over in the early morning at sunrise, when it was impossible to see them and peppered the coast with gun-fire. It was a frightening sight to see Focke Wulfs diving down while we tried to pay our respects, standing to attention during the playing of the Last Post, to those who had been killed.
The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was the name of the British Army in Western Europe from 1939 to 1940, in the early stages of the Second World War.
During the 1930s, the British government planned to deter war by rearming from the very low level of readiness of the early 30s and abolished the Ten Year Rule^^. The bulk of the extra money went to the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force but plans were made to re-equip a small number of Army and Territorial divisions, potentially for service overseas.
The BEF had been established in 1938, in readiness for war, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938 and made claims on Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, that led to the Munich Agreement (30 September 1938), ceding Sudetenland to Germany and the German occupation of Czechoslovakia (15 March 1939). After the French and British governments had promised to defend Poland, the German invasion of Poland began on 1 September and on 3 September, after the expiry of an ultimatum, the British and French declared war on Germany.
The BEF (General Lord Gort) began moving to France in September 1939. The British assembled along the Belgian–French border on the left of the French First Army as part of the French 1er groupe d'armées (1st Army Group) of the Front du Nord-est (North-Eastern Front). Most of the BEF spent the Phoney War digging field defences on the French–Belgian border before the Battle of France (Fall Gelb) began on 10 May 1940. The BEF constituted 10 percent of the Allied forces on the Western Front. The BEF participated in the Dyle Plan, a rapid advance into Belgium to the line of the river Dyle but had to retreat through Belgium and north-western France, with the rest of the 1 er groupe d'armées, after the German breakthrough further south at the Battle of Sedan. The BEF, French and Belgian forces were evacuated from Dunkirk on the French North Sea coast in Operation Dynamo.
Saar Force, the 51st (Highland) Infantry Division (with reinforcements), had been detached for service along the Maginot Line as part of a plan for the BEF units to gain experience. The force fought with local French units after 10 May, then joined the Tenth Army along with the improvised Beauman Division and the 1st Armoured Division, to fight in the Battle of Abbeville (27 May – 4 June) on the south side of the Somme. The British government attempted to re-build the BEF with divisions training in Britain, troops from France and lines-or-communications troops south of the Somme river (informally known as the 2nd BEF) but after the success of the second German offensive in France (Fall Rot) over the Somme and Aisne rivers, the troops were evacuated from Le Havre in Operation Cycle (10–13 June) and the French Atlantic and Mediterranean ports in Operation Ariel (15–25 June, unofficially to 14 August).
^^ The Ten Year Rule was a British government guideline, first adopted in August 1919, that the armed forces should draft their estimates "on the assumption that the British Empire would not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years".
The suggestion for the rule came from Winston Churchill, who in 1919 was Secretary of State for War and Air. Former Prime Minister Lord Balfour unsuccessfully argued to the Committee of Imperial Defence which adopted the rule that "nobody could say that from any one moment war was an impossibility for the next ten years… we could not rest in a state of unpreparedness on such an assumption by anybody. To suggest that we could be nine and a half years away from preparedness would be a most dangerous suggestion".
In 1928 Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, successfully urged the Cabinet to make the rule self-perpetuating and hence it was in force unless specifically countermanded. In 1931 the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald wanted to abolish the Ten Year Rule because he thought it unjustified based on the international situation. This was bitterly opposed by the Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson who succeeded in keeping the rule.
There were cuts in defence spending as a result of this rule, with defence spending going down from £766 million in 1919–20, to £189 million in 1921–22, to £102 million in 1932.[4] In April 1931 the First Sea Lord, Sir Frederick Field, claimed in a report to the Committee of Imperial Defence that the Royal Navy had declined not only in relative strength compared to other Great Powers but "owing to the operation of the 'ten-year-decision' and the clamant need for economy, our absolute strength also has...been so diminished as to render the fleet incapable, in the event of war, of efficiently affording protection to our trade". Field also claimed that the navy was below the standard required for keeping open Britain's sea communications during wartime and that if the navy moved to the East to protect the Empire there would not be enough ships to protect the British Isles and its trade from attack and that no port in the entire British Empire was "adequately defended".
The Ten Year Rule was abandoned by the Cabinet on 23 March 1932, but this decision was countered with: "...this must not be taken to justify an expanding expenditure by the Defence Services without regard to the very serious financial and economic situation" which the country was in due to the Great Depression.
A group of retired admirals have called the planned decade-long gap between the retirement of the Ark Royal and the coming into service of the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers a new "10-year rule"
