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By Root 1183 0

Air Vice-Marshal Edward Addison, commanding the RAF’s electronic counter-measures group, received a protest visit from a WAAF, daughter of a pre-war bank manager in Hamburg, who recoiled from the demands of eavesdropping on Luftwaffe night-fighter conversation. She said she was embarrassed by the obscenities, common to aircrew of all nationalities, that echoed across the airwaves. Most women were more robust. Working alongside combat personnel, or in the various branches of civil defence, they adapted to both the disciplines and the horrors. RAF pilot Ken Owen dismissed sentimental stereotypes about the relationship between crews and female ground staff at bomber stations: ‘It’s bloody rubbish all that stuff about the WAAFs waving us off and so on. They became as callous and phlegmatic as we were.’

For some girls, war proved as much of an adventure as it was for eager young male warriors: daily life acquired an exciting urgency. German aristocrat Eleonore von Joest said, ‘I was young, I found it really interesting. I thought, “All this is life.”’ After von Joest, then aged nineteen, took part in the horrific 1945 mass exodus from East Prussia, her mother declared sardonically, ‘My daughter even managed to have fun on the trek.’ The barriers of sexual licence were dramatically extended. Many women of all nationalities felt a sentimentality, even a duty, towards fighting men on the brink of the grave. British land girl Muriel Green wrote one day in 1941 about her newly discovered passion for a French Canadian soldier: ‘I am … almost in love! Or is it in love with love? What it is to be young and foolish! It certainly is good for morale in wartime to be made love to! … He is lonely and so am I. We are both away from home and friends … I am not quite sure whether I promised to go back to Canada with him or not! I will be his friend anyway! I blame the war for this.’ A few weeks later she described how she unwillingly allowed a Scottish soldier embarking for overseas to kiss her on their last date: ‘I did not want to really … but they were going away … and I may be the last girl he will kiss before he goes, maybe the last girl he will ever kiss. Bless him. He is too nice to be killed.’

Green, who was twenty-two, expressed deep unhappiness early in the war, as quoted above, but exulted in pleasures she later discovered, romance notable among them. She looked back on 1944 as ‘one of the happiest [years] of my life. I have had good health, good friends, good working conditions with money to spend (if there had been anything to buy) and a jolly time. The war has progressed and left many scars. I am one of the lucky devils who have no scars … Hostel life has changed nearly all the girls here to wife-pinchers … Eligible bachelors are so short … We all blame the war and go on enjoying life as it comes which in this place is life with other women’s husbands.’

The reverse of the coin, of course, was that men serving overseas were troubled by fears about the fidelity of their loved ones at home. S/Sgt Harold Fennema wrote from Europe to his wife in Wisconsin, ‘Honey, it’s pitiful the number of times you hear fellows say that their last letter mentioned someone back home who is having a baby, and her husband has been overseas for a year or more. Unfaithfulness is probably the soldier’s biggest cause for worry.’ Captain Pavel Kovalenko of the Red Army wrote in similar vein in July 1943: ‘The war has shaken all family values. Everything has gone to the dogs. Everyone lives for today. One needs a lot of strength and endurance to resist human temptations, to remain unstained. I have to resist, the honour of one’s marriage is sacred.’

Few husbands were as strong-minded as Kovalenko, amid the sexual opportunities of war, and the strains of long absences from home. As for wives and daughters, those in occupied countries who succumbed sexually to their invaders, whether voluntarily or under duress, almost invariably experienced social ostracism in their communities if they survived until the liberation. If some women enjoyed new freedoms, responsibilities