Women Wartime Spies

by Ann Kramer

  But in reality women wartime spies have rarely been sexual vamps or passive dupes. There was nothing passive or subordinate about the patriotic Belgian and French women of La Dame Blanche who risked their lives and the lives of their families to spy on the Germans in occupied Belgium and France and send back valuable military intelligence to Britain during the First World War. Nor did they get financial gain for taking such risks. Similarly there was nothing passive, subordinate or vampish about women such as Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo and Yvonne Cormeau who also risked – and in some cases lost – their lives working undercover in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. In both instances the women involved in undercover operations were both patriotic and extremely brave. There was opposition to using women as undercover agents during the Second World War – the dangers were enormous and, from instructors’ reports during training, there were men who had serious doubts about the women’s abilities and others who considered such work was not appropriate for women but eventually it was decided to use them. And, of course, women make excellent spies during wartime; on a practical level they can operate unnoticed more easily than men, they are often able to establish information networks more easily than men, and according to Selwyn Jepson, who recruited women for the SOE, women are capable of a greater and lonelier courage than men, which is certainly something women spies have frequently demonstrated. Sadly, however, many women’s achievements in the field, and even their names have either been lost or ignored; only a few have won their way to some sort of fame. Most people know about Violette Szabo, heroic winner of the George Cross; far fewer know about the gentle Noor Inayat Khan who also won the George Cross, and probably even fewer about Madeleine Damerment or her French colleagues, who had previously risked their lives with the Resistance before signing up for special operations.

  Operating from a safer base were hundreds of women during both world wars, who might not have risked their lives in the field but also contributed to the secret war of espionage, gathering spy catching material, coding and decoding sensitive intelligence and listening into the enemy. Their contribution to the creation and development of the British Secret Service has frequently been overlooked, particularly those who did this work during the First World War. Their achievements and dedication were remarkable but few people know their names. Those who staffed the great bombes and decoding machines during the Second World War also made an enormous contribution to the secret intelligence war, something that was recognized at the time but in this field too most of their names are unknown.

  Uncovering the women who worked as spies during the First and Second World Wars, and those who worked behind the scenes during both wars, most of whose names I had not come across before has been a fascinating experience for me. Reading their files in The National Archives and tracking their achievements was enthralling. Far from being passive dupes, the women that I encountered in my research were clear-thinking, determined women who actively made their own decision to put themselves in great danger in order to fight for an ideal or patriotism or both. They also took the need for secrecy very seriously; in contrast to the received image of women as unthinking gossips, these women kept their mouths closed no matter what was done to them. They did their dangerous work, and some of them died as a result. Their names and achievements deserve to be better known than they are.

  I am indebted to Tammy Proctor, whose excellent book Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War first introduced me to the little-known La Dame Blanche intelligence gathering network about which I knew nothing at all when I started this book and which led me to Captain Landau’s lively account, and also for her sharp analysis of the stereotyping and ideologically driven perceptions of women spies. I would also like to thank Madeleine (Maddy) Brooke for her time, patience and kindness in sharing information with me about her remarkable family and in particular her aunt, Madeleine Damerment, who worked with SOE and died with three other women at Dachau in 1944. I am most grateful to her as well for allowing me access to her family’s papers and memorabilia; I know it is not easy for her to talk about this subject. I am grateful to Helen Currie for talking to me about her life as an ATS working on the Tunney machines at Bletchley Park and for allowing me to quote material from her personal account, and also to Cynthia Waterhouse for permission to quote extracts from her private papers which are held in the Imperial War Museum, Documents Department. Thanks also to the staff at The National Archives; the archives are a fantastic resource, it would be only too easy to disappear into them and never re-emerge; the staff are incredibly helpful. Likewise I would like to thank the staff of the Documents Department at the Imperial War Museum, who never fail to answer questions and provide help. And finally my thanks to St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge, for providing me with photographs of the WTS Memorial and to Simon Adams who clambered onto his bicycle and braved a rainy day to take photographs of the Violette Szabo mural and blue plaque in Stockwell. I am most grateful.

  Chapter 1

  Women and War

  ‘Upon women the burden and horrors of war are heaviest.’

  MARGARET SANGER

  War impacts profoundly on women’s lives, whether on the home front, in occupied territories, or on the battlefield. With the advent of total war and the mass mobilization of civilian populations during the twentieth century, women’s formal involvement in war increased enormously. The two World Wars had an impact on women’s lives that was far greater than in previous wars, not least because aerial bombardment, invading armies and the enlistment of whole populations brought war directly into the home, affecting civilians on the home front – a term that was coined during the First World War – just as much as soldiers on the frontline. During both World Wars women were involved in myriad roles: maintaining homes and families, doing war work, in caring roles as nurses and doctors, working within the armed forces – and as information gatherers, spies and resistance fighters. Many, although not all, were roles previously only held by men, or believed to be suitable only for men.

  Opening the Doll’s House: women’s war work

  Writing in 1917 about women’s involvement in the war, American journalist and feminist Mabel Potter Daggett declared: ‘I think we may write it down in history that on 4 August 1914, the door of the Doll’s House opened… For the shot that was fired in Serbia summoned men to their most ancient occupation – and women to every other’. To some extent she was correct; between 1914-1918 and even more so between 1939-1945, the demands of war meant that women were pulled out of their more traditional roles as homemakers and carers and plunged into activities previously dominated by men.

  In Britain, when the First World War broke out, large numbers of women, including several who had spent the pre-war years fighting the British government for the right to vote, now demanded the right to be involved in the war effort. Leading suffragist, Millicent Fawcett writing in The Common Cause urged: ‘Women your country needs you… let us show ourselves worthy of citizenship whether our claim to it be recognized or not.’ Emmeline Pankhurst too, charismatic leader of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), called an end to suffragette activities and threw her influence behind the British government, actively helping to recruit men – she and her supporters were reputedly involved with the appalling white feather movement – and urging the government to use women in the war effort. These calls on women to back the government split the women’s movement but even so as increasing numbers of men were left to die in the trenches, an estimated two million women entered the labour force, working for the first time as bus and tram drivers, painters and decorators, postal workers, bank clerks, butchers and munition workers producing thousands of shells while their faces and hair turned yellow from the DDT. Women worked as chimney sweeps, delivered milk, toiled on the land in the newly-formed Women’s Land Army and were employed as communication workers and police. By the end of the First World War, women in Britain and some of the other warring
countries were doing just about every job imaginable to help the war effort – and this at a time when, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, women did not have the vote, nor did many people believe they should have. Their involvement in war work did not necessarily open the doll’s house but despite considerable male prejudice it challenged the conventional view that a woman’s place was only in the home, so much so that in January 1919 The Times featured an article about a forthcoming exhibition on women’s wartime work to be held at the Imperial War Museum, which would inform the public of the ‘extraordinary range and variety’ of the work that women had done on the home front and in military hospitals.

  The guns of the First World War fell silent on 11 November 1918 and as surviving soldiers returned from fighting, women were encouraged to give up the waged work they had done during the war, and return to their domestic roles. Most did so, some with relief, but nothing was ever quite the same again. During the inter-war years women in Britain, the United States and various other countries finally gained the vote. More women enrolled in universities and an increasing number of occupations began to open up for women. The First World War had also left a specific legacy: many women had lost husbands and fiancés, leaving a considerable number of single women, many of whom forged independent lives. From the mid-1930s however worldwide economic depression, coupled with the rise of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany were ominous signs, and as the decade wore on it appeared that a second major conflict was emerging. In Britain, from 1938, the government began to make plans to put the country onto a war footing.

  To some extent women’s involvement in war work during the First World War was voluntary, fed by a wave of patriotism and government propaganda as well as by the need for women to replace the men who had gone to fight. During the Second World War Britain organized for ‘total war’ and government recruitment drives for women workers were even more intense, with propaganda and radio broadcasts urging women to come into the factories and ‘do their bit’. From spring 1941 every woman in Britain aged between 18-60 had to register with employment exchanges and those who were suitable had to choose from a range of possible wartime occupations. So urgent was the need for women to be involved in the war effort that in December 1941, under the National Services Act (2), the British government took the unprecedented step of introducing conscription for single women aged 20-30, although it was emphasized that women would not be required to bear arms. By the end of the war the total number of British women in war work was around 7,750,000, two million more than in 1939. Once again, women did every job imaginable, working on the railways, in shipyards, in transport and factories. Some 80,000 women also worked on the land in the Women’s Land Army and Women’s Timber Corps, helping to bring in 70 per cent of the nation’s food by June 1943. Women worked as engineers, welders, carpenters and electricians; they built roads and barrage balloons; drove tractors and farmed the land; and helped to produce millions of tons of armaments but, despite doing the same work as their male counterparts, women consistently received less pay.

  Women’s entry into male-defined areas of work, whether agriculture or industry, did not go without comment and during both wars women workers faced considerable opposition and discrimination not least from male trade unions, who feared that the employment of women would jeopardize male status and wages. During the First World War women workers were frequently lampooned in magazines such as Punch and there were considerable fears that involvement in work considered to be more suitable for men would harm a woman’s frail femininity at best, and undermine her morals at worst. There were considerable debates within the press and parliament about women’s work, particularly the use of married women; during the Second World War for instance, wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill expressed his concern that women’s involvement in factory production would seriously damage family life. Even so, by 1943 in Britain, nine out of ten single women and eight out of ten married women were officially involved in the war effort, whether on the land, in war industries or in the armed forces.

  Forces women

  From 1917 British and American women were also enlisted into the armed forces to free up more men for combat. In Britain the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) and the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) were set up in 1917; one year later the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) was also formed. Women wore uniform and learned to drill and take orders but then, as now, were not allowed to fight. Instead they provided a host of support duties, such as clerical and catering work. They worked as telephone operators and also worked in signals intelligence, listening into and passing on messages, some of them intercepted from enemy sources.

  When war broke out again in 1939, women in Britain flocked to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women’s section of the army, the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), or the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). There was also the Women’s Transport Service (WTS). By 1943 more than 500,000 women were serving in the ATS, WRNS and WAAF combined. In the United States women served in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and were sent to all theatres of war. Once again, women in the auxiliary services were not allowed to engage in combat but they worked as drivers, cooks and clerks, freeing men to go and fight. As war progressed, however, forces women worked in command centres and operation rooms as telephone operators or using radar and radio to plot ships and planes. There might have been a veto on women picking up arms but women worked alongside men on the anti-aircraft guns; they may not have been allowed to fire the guns but this was a moot point, they certainly pinpointed the targets.

  Women on the front line

  It is often assumed that women do not engage in combat and certainly in Britain and the United States, to this day, women in the armed forces are forbidden to pick up arms. However, the reality for many women during times of war has been quite different. Throughout history there have been warrior queens, such as Boudicca, while individual women have also defied convention to fight alongside men on the front line. One notable example during the First World War was Englishwoman Flora Sandes, who fought with the Serbian Army and eventually gained the rank of captain. During the First World War Russian women fought on the frontline in the so-called Battalion of Death; led by Maria Botchkareva a battalion of some 300 Russian women fought at the front side by side with men; they suffered heavy casualties. During the Second World War Soviet women pilots, known as the ‘Night Witches’, carried out more than 23,000 night bombing raids over German territory, targeting railways, ammunition dumps and artillery positions. In occupied territories too, where women are particularly vulnerable to deprivation and abuse, women have picked up arms to defend themselves and their families and have joined resistance movements, harrying and killing the enemy. The view of women as non-combatants therefore is not strictly accurate.

  During both World Wars women made their way to the front line as nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers and cooks. Nursing and caring for the wounded to some extent falls into an area of work traditionally seen as female-appropriate but the work of pioneer Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War legitimized the idea that women could work near the front line. For the public, particularly during the First World War, wartime nurses were often seen as angelic beings, mopping fevered brows but as always the reality of wartime nursing was not that simple: women, many of them from sheltered privileged homes, came face to face with horrendous wounds and appalling conditions, working with scarce resources, often under fire, in makeshift field hospitals, not far from the front line. The rules of war stated that women were not supposed to nurse on the battlefield but in practice many did, including the daring Elsie Knocker and Marie Chisholm who set up a first-aid post at Pervyse, Belgium, right on the front line, gaining the British Military Medal for rescuing a British pilot from no-man’s land. Women such as the Scotswoman Dr Elsie Inglis, whose offer of help was turned down by the British War Office – they told her to ‘go home and sit still’ – funded her own hospitals in Fran
ce, Romania and Serbia during the First World War. And twenty years later, thousands of women continued the tradition working as nurses and doctors in Britain and in war zones abroad, where they worked in makeshift field hospitals as near to the front line as possible, often under heavy bombardment.

  One uniformed unit that became very well known during the First World War was the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY). First formed in 1907, and consisting largely of highly privileged and rather dashing women, the FANYs (as they became known) drove ambulances in France and Britain, and became renowned for their daring exploits. Later, in the Second World War, they were a recruiting source for British intelligence and special operations.

  Spying and intelligence

  Wars are not only fought in the open, they are also fought in secret as governments and armed forces attempt to find out what their enemy is planning. Espionage and intelligence gathering are an integral part of all wars but not visible to the general public. By and large this has often been seen as ‘men’s work’ but women too have played a major role. During both World Wars women were highly visible in food queues struggling to maintain their families and homes, as volunteer or civil defence workers, in wartime factories and as members of the auxiliary armed forces. But one of the rolls which were taken on by women during wartime was far less visible and less well known – that of intelligence gathering and espionage.

  ‘In times of war and peace governments will always seek other countries’ information to give them an advantage in international situations.’