Millions Like Us

by Virginia Nicholson

  Rumours were abroad from early spring that the Second Front was due. On 2 April a friend of Frances Partridge told her he had it on good authority that the invasion would be launched that very night. Frances lay sleepless for hours, listening to every aeroplane. By May the tension was palpable; everyone knew it was about to happen, but nobody knew when. Up in Scotland, Naomi Mitchison was consumed with anxiety: ‘[There is] this awful ache about the Second Front, the thing one wants and fears so terribly, that is at the back of one’s thought all the time, like a wave, a tidal wave coming in from the horizon blotting out everything.’ Trippers were banned from the coastal zone from East Anglia to Cornwall; its roads were clogged with an endless stream of military traffic. Sherman tanks were to be seen noisily negotiating the cobbled streets of medieval towns, and convoys of despatch riders roared on motorbikes from village to village. Verily Anderson, who had retreated to the country with her small children, confined them to the garden. The lanes were perilous, with tanks crunching indiscriminately into gateposts and gable ends. Two of the little ones nearly got pulverised in their pushchair when a convoy of armoured vehicles swept away the protecting wall beside them. When Vera Brittain went to her Hampshire cottage that spring she ran into ammunition dumps and transports concealed in leafy glades, where they could not be spotted by German reconnaissance aircraft. American soldiers were everywhere in the banned zone – ‘a nuisance to anyone walking alone,’ wrote Mass Observation diarist Shirley Goodhart, who worked in Salisbury.

  Behind the scenes, women played their part in the preparation for this most audacious of campaigns. The routine of Doris Scorer’s life in the Wolverton aircraft factory was disturbed when she and her workmates were unexpectedly taken off repairs and transferred to the woodwork shop. Rumours began to circulate that they were going to work on making gliders. ‘We didn’t have a clue what a glider was.’ Doris and the girls weren’t told, but the light aircraft they were making would be used to carry invading troops over the Channel to France. It was an exacting job, sawing the lengths of wood forming the wing struts to precise lengths, gluing them into the frame and securing them with tiny brass nails. The pace of work was fast and urgent. From Autumn 1943 the WVS were kept busy day and night providing food and hot tea for builders and engineers working on the construction of concrete caissons in the Thames estuary and at other significant ports. From 5 April 1944 a travel ban was imposed on everyone working at Bletchley Park. The women there worked flat out translating intercepts to locate the position of mines laid in the English Channel and decrypting German signals which confirmed that the enemy was being successfully misinformed about the intended landings. As an ULTRA code-breaker, Mavis Lever was able to reassure her superiors that German spies and reconnaissance had failed to spot the construction of the Mulberry harbours: ‘They never once asked what was going on at Southampton or Portsmouth. We were much comforted to know that they didn’t know about them. In a way, the questions the Germans didn’t ask were as important as the things that they were asking. And we knew that they were keeping two Panzer divisions down at Calais, which was a great help.’

  SOE agents in the field, preparing to assist operations behind enemy lines in France, were supported by the FANYs, who were kept busy sewing French tailors’ labels into the clothes that would help to disguise them. It was also the job of the FANYs to offer agents the lethal ‘L’ tablet, to be taken if they were captured.

  Making gliders in the Wolverton workshop: the tools and construction process are evidence of Doris’s memory for detail. But notice also her handbag under the workbench, her hairnet and her heavily nailed clogs.

  Senior Wren Christian Lamb (née Oldham) had been assigned to a post in Whitehall under Admiral Mountbatten. Here she observed the comings and goings of Winston Churchill and a number of scientific boffins. There was a ‘sense of urgency in the atmosphere, humming with activity’, but it was not till years later that Christian understood that these offices in Whitehall were the very heart of Operation Overlord. It was here that the prefabricated floating ‘Mulberry’ harbours were devised; here that the PLUTO pipeline – to run from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg – was conceived, along with the entire programme for the construction and concealment of the caissons, breakwaters, pontoons and floating ramps which would make the invasion feasible. Christian herself was sworn to the utmost secrecy about her job. She was among the few who knew that the landings would be on the Normandy coast. Working from large-scale maps of France pinned up on her office wall, it was her task to identify everything visible that could be seen from the bridge of an approaching invasion craft.

  WAAF Edna Hodgson meanwhile had been allocated to the typing pool of General Eisenhower’s HQ in Bushey Park. Edna had no knowledge of the invasion date. But, as the time got closer, her working hours were prolonged. She often arrived at 8.30 a.m. and worked through till the early hours of the next morning on lunch and a snack, surviving on three or four hours’ sleep a night.

  Some of the Wrens based in the south of England ports – like Maureen Bolster on HMS Tormentor in Southampton – were in on the most closely guarded secret in Britain’s history. Maureen was a faithful correspondent to her beloved fiancé, Eric Wells, who was based in North Africa, but as the time got closer she could do no more than hint to him of her real forebodings:

  1 May 1944

  My dearest

  The first of May – the first of May already. It can’t be long now. I find it hard to take it in that England, my country, is on the verge of her greatest campaign of all time. It’s too immense, too shattering.

  I hardly dare think what it will mean, the lives that will be lost, the numbers of everything involved – ships, planes, armour, men. One waits impatiently, wanting to get the strain of waiting over yet dreading it …

  Everyone is expectant, unsettled …

  On his last leave before the invasion Eddie Parry returned to Moreton and looked up Helen Forrester before rejoining his Commando force. He would be in the forefront of the landings, and Helen tried not to think too hard about his prospects. Returning, Eddie missed the train. The May night was warm, and they walked to the Wirral bus stop together. At the foot of Bidston Hill he stopped, and there, under the starlit sky, asked Helen to marry him: ‘after the war – when I’ve got started again’. It was the last thing she was expecting. Eddie, the foul-mouthed rascal, the tough adventurer; surely holy matrimony was the last thing on his mind? He folded her in his arms. ‘I want to come back to you, Helen. Nobody else.’ Her self-control crumbled. What did she want? A husband, yes. She knew that Eddie was not the conscientious, devoted type. But more than that, she realised she wanted him: ‘desire shot through me’. Perhaps she was being too demanding. Perhaps it would be all right. He would be reckless, forgetful, he would not live up to her dreams – but he would not desert her. ‘ “Yes,” I said, and put my arms round his neck.’ He kissed her solemnly and with passion. The night became cold. Eddie told Helen to go home, kissed her one more time and, without turning round, headed off to catch his bus.

  Through May the sense of expectation intensified. Sylvia Kay, who worked General Eisenhower’s private switchboard (known as the ‘Red Board’), was told that she must prepare to move to an unknown destination. Next morning she and her colleagues were trucked to Cosham near Portsmouth. They were given tented accommodation and detailed to run the switchboard operation under canvas from a base in Cosham Forest; ‘it was a sea of mud’. Just north of Portsmouth, at the operation’s nerve centre of Fort Southwick, ATS volunteer Mary Macleod spent long days working in an underground cavern, typing out meticulous invasion plans, much of them in code. Meanwhile hundreds of firewomen joined their male counterparts to guard ammunition dumps.

  Across the south of England, hospitals had been cleared of civilian patients prior to the invasion. Rows of beds now stood ominously empty. A young Irish nurse, Nancy O’Sullivan, based at a 1,000-bed hospital in Surrey, had been waiting for weeks. She and her colleague
s scrubbed the wards and scrubbed them again. QA Maureen Gara was sent to East Anglia to prepare for D-day. There, she and her colleagues spent their spare time stitching together a huge red cross out of hessian, to serve as a ground marker for air crew, hostile or otherwise. Meanwhile, Monica Littleboy and her fellow ambulance-driving FANYs were posted to the Isle of Wight, where they prepared to be on the receiving end of many thousands of returning casualties.

  On 24 May Elsie Whiteman came home from working in her components factory in Croydon and wrote up her diary: ‘More hordes of bombers over this morning. The invasion seems very imminent and we hardly expect to get our Whitsun holiday.’ But still nothing was announced. ‘Friday 26th May. Everyone anxiously expecting the Second Front every day, but the weekend passed quietly.’ The assault troops were given embarkation leave.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Aileen Hawkins from Dorchester was an ATS sergeant who as a girl had met the ageing Thomas Hardy in his home city. The courteous old poet had approved of her youthful verses; encouraged, she continued to write and publish poetry for the rest of her life. During the war Aileen married Bill, her pre-war sweetheart, now a Commando. As the day of the invasion approached she took time away from her anti-aircraft battery to say goodbye to him, knowing that these might be their last hours together:

  End of D-Day Leave

  Please, hold back the dawn, dear God

  I cannot bear to let him go,

  the world’s a battle field out there

  big distant guns pepper the skies

  a wailing siren stabs the air.

  This moon-washed room our paradise

  where we have had such little time

  to share this precious love of ours.

  My gentle one – a soldier now –

  these years have left their mark on him,

  touching his war-wearied face

  I almost stare into his dreams …

  …

  The clock’s long hand will point the hour

  the train will rattle from my view

  and I will be alone once more

  just longing for his love again.

  ‘God’, as he sleeps close to my heart,

  slowly the end of leave draws near.

  I cannot bear the time to part:

  ‘Hold back the dawn another hour’.*

  From 1 June all the Wrens had their shore leave cancelled. Phone calls were forbidden, and they were confined to barracks. ‘We are gated,’ wrote Maureen Bolster to Eric. She and her friend Rozelle Raynes were kept busy delivering extra ammunition and signals to the ships lying in wait. On 3 June, Maureen passed the soccer field and saw a mass of lads from the Commandos with their kit and tin hats resting in the sun. She was choked at the sight: ‘They looked so young I could hardly bear it and tears ran down my cheeks.’

  D-day had been scheduled for Monday 5 June. But on the 3rd Eisenhower and his generals reluctantly accepted that the weather forecasts they had been given made a provisional postponement necessary, and on Sunday the meteorological advisers were proved right as cloud and wind built up. On the Isle of Wight FANY Monica Littleboy and a friend bicycled out over the chalk downs to the west of the island and climbed up to Tennyson’s monument, from where they looked down at the Armada-in-waiting, lying at anchor on the Solent. ‘A glorious view from here all round, and here we proved that the shipping was even more intensified.’

  Next morning, ‘dull and windy’, the FANYs were given a security lecture and warned that briefed personnel (‘BPs’) could be a risk if they were delirious while being carried as patients. ‘Anything we heard we were to forget.’ The typists working in the Fort Southwick caverns had been instructed to type out two sets of documents, one of which would be signed by the chiefs. The first set gave orders to postpone the invasion, the other set commanded it to go ahead. On the evening of Sunday 4 June, in conference with his colleagues and advisers, Eisenhower heard that the weather was due to improve on Monday afternoon, sufficiently for the armada to sail overnight. The decision was made.

  On 5 June village streets and country lanes in the south of England fell eerily silent. That day the news came through that Rome had fallen to the Allies. Clara Milburn hung up the Union Jack in the orchard and felt cheered; a letter had arrived from Alan that morning. This success meant that the war was a step closer to ending, and he was a step nearer home.

  The Smell of Death

  On the morning of 6 June 1944 Verily Anderson and Julie, her Cockney mother’s help, were tidying up the Gloucestershire cottage when their children came rushing in from the garden:

  ‘Aeroplanes! Two tied together!’ James cried.

  ‘Huge,’ said Marian.

  The sky was vibrating with sound. We ran out on to the lawn. None of us had seen aeroplanes since we came to the Cotswolds. Now they moved in a continuous stream over us.

  ‘They’re towing gliders,’ said Julie. ‘James is right.’

  ‘It’s our invasion!’ I said, jumping up and down. ‘It can’t be anything else. We’ve invaded France!’

  There was no wireless in the cottage. They hurried across to their neighbour, the cowman’s wife, who was listening to the live broadcast:

  ‘Yes, It’s the invasion all right,’ she said. ‘They’ve landed in Portugal. Hundreds of our poor boys killed.’

  ‘Portugal?’ I repeated.

  ‘Some such name …’

  ‘Could it be Normandy?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, Normandy. Same thing no doubt. They’re all foreign places.’

  All that day the planes streamed towards the coast, wing to wing, dropping an oily smoke screen as they went. Sheets hung out to dry that June morning were stained with black grease blown across by the gusty Channel breeze. Sheila Hails, marooned with her young baby in an isolated cottage near Lulworth on the Dorset coast, climbed the cliff that morning and saw an amazing sight:

  I went up the grassy hill, and then I stood and blinked. There was an endless queue of ships sailing across the Channel. It was incredible, fantastic really, and I knew the invasion was happening.

  That Tuesday Verily, Sheila and many thousands of others had to be content with newspapers, wireless broadcasts and prayers to compensate for the feelings of hope and helplessness that dominated everyone’s waking hours. Yet again, it was woman’s lot to be the one who watched, waited and prayed. Orderly queues formed to buy the evening editions, while others waited in line to give blood. The King addressed the nation. Mollie Panter-Downes tried to describe D-day to her New York readers. She sensed a mood of grim revenge among Londoners watching the fleets of aircraft roaring coastwards: ‘Now they’ll know how our boys felt on the beaches at Dunkirk.’ But she also sensed a lack of connection between the heroism and suffering taking place ‘over there’ and the everyday mundanities she observed on the street: ‘men and women going to the office, queuing up for fish, getting haircuts, and scrambling for lunch’. With her customary eye for minutiae, she noted the typists in their summer dresses going into Westminster Abbey to pray by the tomb of the Unknown Soldier – were their sweethearts sharing his fate? – the flower-sellers peddling patriotic buttonholes and the curious hush which descended on the city, ‘[like] a wet Sunday afternoon’.

  For London-based Frenchwoman Madeleine Henrey the anxiety was unusually heightened. Might the invasion finally mean a reunion with her beloved mother? St Malo in 1940 had seen the little family wrenched apart from each other. Abandoned on the quayside, Madame Gal had been close to despair, convinced that the steamer on which Madeleine and her grandchild had sailed away had met with disaster until, eventually, a letter from Madeleine got through. Four years had passed, during which Madame Gal scraped a living with her needle, finding lodging with a humane widow based in Versailles and living for the day when they would all be together again in Normandy. But what had become of Madeleine’s fairy-tale farmhouse, her little patch of heaven at Villers-sur-Mer? Situated just twenty miles to the east of Sword beach, it lay full in the path
of the invasion. If it hadn’t already been pillaged by the Germans, Madeleine was left to imagine how the Allies might vandalise what was left.

  *

  All around us the great armada was on the move …

  wrote Wren stoker Rozelle Raynes, who was based at Southampton with her friend Maureen Bolster. For them, the thrill of being close to the action left them with indelible memories. Rozelle would have given anything to be setting out with those men. As it was, she had to be content with a smaller adventure. Three Wren stokers, including her, were summoned in the early hours to help rescue three landing craft that had broken down near the Needles. Being aboard her tug steaming towards the Isle of Wight was the nearest she got to experiencing the invasion:

  There were all the ships we knew so well … armed merchant cruisers, destroyers, minesweepers, corvettes, trawlers and ocean tugs, every one of them moving towards Normandy and a fate unknown.

  At last the great day had come; the tension was broken, and the soldiers and sailors laughed and cheered as our little tug kept pace with them, clouds of rainbow-tinted spray breaking over her stubborn black bows. One man leaned over the stern of his landing craft as it gathered way and called out to us: ‘You’re the last bit of Old England we’ll see for a while, girls, and you sure look worth fighting for!’

  From the Isle of Wight, Monica Littleboy had a grandstand view of the immense fleet:

  All day [the ships] went by, with never a stop and not more than 100 yards between each vessel … We knew this was no exercise … our hearts were with these men. The cold grey choppy sea and the strong wind that was blowing almost seemed as if it would tear the little barrage balloons away. There were tugs and tankers, masses of them, landing craft of every kind, all towing one another and bouncing about like peas on a drum. Thousand upon thousand. We could see the boats loaded with tanks and trucks and low in the water. Then came the troop ships, dwarfing everything else, solid, full, we knew of Canadians etc, men who had been to parties in this very house – personal friends. And we waved and cheered and knew that the great moment had come.