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It's late on the 11th of June 1944, D-Day plus five. We're at the harbour in Gosport on the south coast of England. Less than a week after the Allied invasion of Normandy, men and materiel are still being loaded onto boats to make the hundred mile voids across the channel. His Majesty's ship LST 180, a so-called landing ship tank, is loading up for the voyage. But as well as tanks, the hulking vessel will be carrying personnel. Two hundred men,
And two women. Iris Ogilvie and Molly Giles are RAF nurses. They've volunteered to set up a field hospital in Normandy. It's a dangerous job. But Iris, known to her friends as Fluff, has nothing to lose. Since her RAF husband Donald was killed flying over Holland, she's adopted a fatalistic attitude. I don't care what happens to me, is how she puts it. Iris just wants to do something meaningful with however much time she has left.
The two women spend the voyage in the captain's private cabin. Out on deck, they would likely attract stares, perhaps wolf whistles too. Not that these girls would struggle to cope with a bit of male attention. They're used to it, and they don't mind being noticed. In their royal blue battle dress, complete with red cross armbands, they cut quite a figure. As the LST makes its way across the channel, Iris squints at her reflection in a little mirror, carefully applying her Elizabeth Arden lipstick.
When she and Molly go ashore, she intends to look her best. Just before dawn, the ship docks at Juno Beach. Almost a week on from D-Day, the scene there is still one of carnage. The fighting has moved inland, but there's no doubt this is a war zone. The sand pockmarked with craters, torn metal, and worse. The two young women scramble to shore near the town of Corse Saulte-sur-Mer. When the beach master catches sight of them, he can't quite believe his eyes.
"Watch out Adolf, you've had it now," quips one of the British soldiers. Before long, Iris and Molly are dealing with casualties at a medical camp a few miles inland. Over the next few days, they treat over a thousand Allied soldiers, tending to their injuries, offering solace and hope. Then they escort them to the nearby RAF landing strips, where a fleet of Dakotas stand by, ready to fly them back to England. To the men on the front lines, these glamorous young women are nothing short of miraculous.
They called them the Angels of Mercy. Iris and Molly might be the first women to cross the channel as part of Operation Overlord, but from its very inception D-Day has required not just manpower, but woman power too. This unprecedented military endeavour, moving a vast army of fighting men across to France, has relied on a second, less obvious army as well. The half a million women in uniform, who made D-Day possible. From the Noiser Network.
This is D-Day. By June 1944, hundreds of thousands of British women are involved in war work of some kind, many of them in the official women's services. There's the Auxiliary Territorial Service, or ATS, the women's branch of the army. This includes AA Command, the anti-aircraft division tasked with shooting down enemy bombers. The RENS is the equivalent force attached to the Navy. And for the Royal Air Force, there's the WAF.
Dr Tessa Dunlop, author of Army Girls. Proportionally, we mobilised more women than any other belligerent in World War II. By the end of the war, the ATS is the biggest service. 300,000 recruits have passed through as members. The WAF is about 180,000. And the Wrens, that more elite service, or at least they considered themselves as such, were about 70,000 strong.
Women have been conscripted into war work since December 1941, when Parliament passed the National Service Act. Back then it only applied to unmarried women between 20 and 30. But by 1944, conscription of women has been extended to include those aged from 19 to 43. Whatever their age, forcing women to serve is controversial.
The War Office very reluctantly, in late 1941, agreed to conscription. They sort of had sweat coming off their bald heads. It was a massive Churchill U-turn that none of his biographers ever write about. And it's him that sells to Parliament the idea of conscripting women. Author Claire Mollie.
If you look at Hansard, you can see some quite colourful discussions about whether women should be doing this. And you get men and women on both sides of that argument, actually, which is quite interesting. So you get a lot of men saying, well, the reason we're going to war is to protect you girls. And you get a lot of women saying the war is going to be over much faster if we corral our entire nation's national resources to the war effort. But you also get women going, no way, thank you, we're ladies. So you get the whole gamut of it.
Even under conscription, there are strict limits on what women are allowed to do. The range of jobs on offer grows during the course of the war, from the more typically female support roles – cooks, orderlies, secretaries – to male jobs, such as mechanics and engineers. But there's one line that can never be crossed.
In Britain, our women were strictly non-combatants. And that meant that while you have a legal standing by 1941, while you can serve in an operational site like a gun site, you cannot pull the trigger off one of those giant anti-aircraft guns. You're not even allowed to load it. And this is dancing on semantics because women died on those gun sites.
women are conscripted, but they're not expected to serve in the front line. Of course, women do serve in the front line, even those ones that aren't considered to. So we have women who are manning searchlights or doing the calibrations of the anti-aircraft guns. And they are in the front line because if you're an enemy bomber flying in and you can see the searchlight or you can see where the anti-aircraft gun is firing from because you can see the bullets, you're obviously going to fire at them. So they were in the front line of fire, but it's never really recognized in that way.
the women who are killed as a direct result of their service work is higher than we imagine. Throughout the war, around 2,000 women serving in the ATS, WAF and RENS will lose their lives. The ban on them using deadly force may seem crazy to us now, but at the time it's considered essential to placate those who feel the fairer sex have no place in the forces in the first place. Because politically this is a hot topic.
And not just in Parliament. When the Daily Mail runs a poll asking its readers what they hate most about the war, women in uniform comes out on top. Britain always had a fear of putting women in uniform. There's an idea that it is Bolshevik to put a woman in uniform, that by taking away their individuality, you are in some ways stripping them of an essence of femininity, of a sense of themselves, and thus it may lead to that dreaded word promiscuity.
It was particularly the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, that was singled out and it was dubbed the Auxiliary TARP Service. Such is the moral panic that a special commission is convened to look into rumours of promiscuity in the women's forces. The Markham Committee was established to sort of placate the panic in the public and political discourse.
They actually count the number of illegitimate pregnancies in the services versus the number of illegitimate pregnancies, and that's the term used in civilian life. And they are relieved to announce that there is more lax morals among the civvies than among those girls in uniform. By 1944, most Brits have got used to the sight of a woman in uniform, whatever their personal opinions on the matter. And when it comes to D-Day, women have a key role to play.
I think it's really important that we remember that D-Day was a largely male business, but not a wholly male business. Of course, all the service personnel to reach the beaches in Normandy were men. But many of the vital functions that made D-Day happen couldn't have operated without women.
Because if you have up to two million men based in Britain training all over the country, who's feeding them? Who's packing their kit bags? Who's sewing their kit bags? Who's typing up the troop orders and the marches? Who's logistically shunting them from one end of the country to the other end of the country? Women. Some women find themselves closely involved with the preparations for Operation Overlord.
Wren Fanny Gore Brown is 19 years old when she is assigned to work as a plotter at Dover Castle. She's already abandoned her plans to study at Oxford in favour of military service. High on the cliffs overlooking the English Channel, Dover Castle is an imposing stone fortress. Built shortly after another cross-channel invasion, the Norman Conquest of 1066, the plotting room is deep underground. To get there, Fanny must traverse several long tunnels
lit by dingy lamps and smelling of mould. "The tunnels had a very, very peculiar smell. Really extraordinary. Dank, uncomfortable places with a very early form of strip lighting which was horrible actually. I had terrible headaches." When she arrives for her shift, Fanny puts on a headset and picks up a long stick. This she will use to push counters across a large table, like a croupier in a casino.
Only instead of moving chips across a roulette table, she's moving vehicles across a map. It was very demanding work. We actually marked on charts on the wall everything that moved in the channel in every direction. And the plot itself was absolutely sacred. When the plot was being updated, nobody moved close to it at all.
The Wren plotters, they worked eight hour watches in Dover Castle. They're drawing up plots based on the information that's received and the map shows where the convoys are going up and down the channel. And all this activity is in the build up to D-Days and soon plotting officers are in complete charge of the plotting room. It's their base. It's their domain, their kingdom. Nautical knowledge that previously was a male domain becomes one that's also a female domain.
You start with four plotters in the Wrens in 1940 and by the end of the war there's plotters in all operation rooms across the UK.
And actually quite a lot of girls really rather liked plotting because it involved not just a level of cognizance, but also of teamwork, which was revolutionary in so many young girls' lives that they did something previously deemed to be a man's job and they were proved more than capable, of course they were, of doing those jobs.
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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Hi, listeners. Did you know that the team behind this show has other podcasts too? Discover them all at Noisa.com, home of the Noisa Network. You'll find hundreds of immersive true stories. There's a world of podcasts waiting for you. Take your pick. Listen at Noisa.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
In the plotting rooms, huge wall maps are mounted on solid wooden boards. By the end of a shift, the Wrens' fingers are bleeding from pushing in drawing pins. But worse is when they have to pull them out. That means a ship has sunk. At Dover, Fanny is working directly for Admiral Ramsay, the man in charge of Operation Neptune, the naval component of Overlord. "Oh, he's wonderful. We all would have died for him. He was incredible. Absolutely incredible."
Not a man to go and have a drink in the bar or anything like that, but absolutely super to work for. Real, real leader. And Ramsey isn't the only well-known figure to grace the Ops Room. The Prime Minister is also a frequent visitor.
Churchill came to Dover really quite often and, of course, always came to the Ops Room. The two memories I have of him, one was when he brought General Smuts along and they came into the Ops Room and Churchill, with a stubby finger, pointed from Dover to Cap Green A and said to Smuts, very close...
And the other memory of him is that I came out of the Alps from the long corridor, so you could see, looking straight back, straight back to where the terrace was built into the cliff face, and he was standing on the terrace in his boiler suit, quite alone, looking out to France. I shall never forget that.
In the run-up to D-Day, many servicewomen are reassigned. Fanny Gore-Brown is sent to London to take up a new position as PA to Admiral Tennant. I found I was expected, God help me, to be his personal assistant. I walked from Sloane Square to Norfolk House and to my astonishment, American Marines
wearing white gloves were guarding their door. And of course they turned out for me and saluted me, so that was exciting. I was expected and I went upstairs to meet Admiral Tennant.
Mulberry and Pluto
are two top secret innovations that are critical to the D-Day invasion plan. One of the reasons the Germans are convinced the invasion will take place in the Pas de Calais is that the Normandy beaches provide no harbours, and everyone knows that harbours will be needed for the flood of reinforcements that will arrive in the weeks following the invasion. The Mulberries offer an ingenious alternative. Author and historian Giles Milton
The Allies had their secret master plan, which was to tow harbours across the Channel, the famous Mulberry Harbours, which were then to be installed at Arromanches, which was to allow the delivery of vast numbers of tanks and general military hardware onto the shores of France. Pluto, meanwhile, stands for pipeline under the ocean, and it does pretty much what it says on the tin.
The other thing that the Allies needed, and they needed in vast quantities, was oil, petrol and, you know, fuel. 148,000 vehicles are thirsty. And so the Allies dreamed up this thing called Pluto, which was an underwater pipeline, which pumped fuel across from England to Normandy. And this proved a lifeline to all of those armoured divisions that had come ashore. Mulberry and Pluto are central to the logistics of Overlord.
And it's critical that the Germans don't find out about them beforehand. After all, as the propaganda posters put it, loose lips sink ships. Fanny worries she might let slip crucial information to the wrong people. And of course, tremendous anxiety that one would be hit over the head in an hour and end up in hospital and start blabbing. Happily, it didn't happen.
In fact, the closest Fanny comes to blabbing is to her own mother. One day Mrs. Gore-Brown makes an offhand remark about the harbours in the Pas de Calais and how important they'll be to the coming invasion. Fanny is about to correct her, but then holds her tongue. All over Britain, women are keeping secrets that could jeopardise the entire war if they got out, including on the specifics of D-Day.
Penny Bailey, who was a typist, a clerk in the army, knew where her boyfriend was going to be before he did because she was typing up the troop commands. And when she told me, age 99, she was still whispering it because it was top secret.
It must have weighed incredibly heavily upon them. And there must at times have been conflicts of interest where they desperately wanted to tell people, don't go, but couldn't do so. But all the people that I know of the interviews I've read and the few that I've done, I mean, they have this even sense now of reluctance to talk about it because they took their signing of the Official Secrets Act so very seriously.
I was talking to two women recently, one, Betty Webb from Bletchley Park, and Patricia Outram, who's a Wren. And they both said that when they were asked to sign the Official Secrets Act, the officer asking them put a gun on the table in front of them. And I mean, there was no indication he was going to use it. It was just like adding weight to the conversation in a silent way. And that was noted. The women who work at Bletchley Park, the code-breaking centre based in a country house 50 miles outside London,
are charged with keeping one of the most important secrets of the war. The German Enigma codes have been compromised, meaning the Allies can decrypt enemy communications. After the war, the Prime Minister will single them out for praise. Winston Churchill says that these women were the geese that laid the golden egg and never cackled because they never spoke about it. Intense security around it. Throughout the war, around seven and a half thousand women work at Bletchley Park.
The majority are Wrens. Middle-class women have been freed to gain degrees in mathematics, physics, or engineering. Because with so many men away fighting, universities have spare places. It's these women who help construct the early computers that break the top-secret Enigma codes. Others work as translators, analysts, admin staff, motorcycle dispatch riders. Most of them keep quiet about their work at Bletchley long after the war is over.
Such is the culture of secrecy. And in the run-up to D-Day, the work done there is vital. 75% of the people working at Bletchley are women. And most of them are just in junior roles. And they don't have the military overview. They don't have the strategic picture. But without their work, we wouldn't have been able to do this.
We're going to see this flurry of Enigma activity. We need to be able to confirm that the Germans have swallowed Operation Fortitude hook, line and sinker. That is convincing the Germans that the D-Day landings are in fact going to arrive in Pas de Calais, not in Normandy where they do arrive. And we can confirm that because we are able to intercept and to process and to decrypt all the enemy communications.
Over 2,000 more female recruits are drawn into the park and the code breaking nexus in that year. We also need to know exactly where the enemy are located in Normandy to know what our boys are going to be up against.
By the time we get to early June, Bletchley Park has got this incredibly detailed picture. They knew how many tanks and how many troops were stationed where, and they knew where those forces were headed. And this probably was one of the decisive factors in the success of Normandy. By the time D-Day comes around, Fanny Gore-Brown is ordered to relocate again, when her boss, Admiral Tennant, is sent to Southwark House near Portsmouth. By now, she's privy to even more top-secret information.
I'd known where, of course, when I was at Norfolk House. I knew where I did it. Obviously, the date, I didn't know. I certainly knew the date by when I got to Southwark.
We knew all about the scale because of the endless typing and the endless checking. People used to walk round and round the room checking typescripts because I can't remember how long Overlord is but it's a very long operations order in tremendous detail.
One of Fanny's colleagues in the Wrens, a young woman called Christian Lam, is charged with drawing up visual aids for the men going ashore on D-Day. Her little office beneath a stairwell in Whitehall is plastered with maps of the French coastline. Christian's job is to draw whatever landmarks – churches, castles, railway stations, and more – will be visible from each landing position. A bit like the panoramic engravings at the top of the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building.
telling you what you can see below. Although in this case, Christian has to base her work not on direct observation, but on careful calculations about angles of sight. Total accuracy is essential if the men in the landing craft are to understand what's in front of them when they reach Normandy. Eighty years later, Christian's contributions to the success of D-Day will see her receive France's highest honor, the Croix de Guerre.
"You were not there in person," French President Emmanuel Macron will tell her, "but you guided each step they took." But even those not involved in the invasion itself can draw their own conclusions about what's going on. Among them is Joy Lofthouse, a pilot with the Air Transport Auxiliary, or ATA, known unofficially as an "Atter Girl." Joy's job is to deliver aircraft to where they're needed, and it gives her an unusual vantage point.
She can see with her own eyes what's hidden from those on the ground. She was told she had to be really quiet about what she was seeing because most people didn't have her perspective. As she is flying over the country lanes towards the south coast, she sees the mass build-up of military vehicles. She sees the fleets of boats and barges lining up in the Solent already. And then she flew back again a few days later and it was all gone.
When Joy got her wings in the ATA, she joined the ranks of 168 female pilots, working alongside more than a thousand male ones. Most of them are too old for frontline service. A year earlier, the ATA became one of the world's first equal opportunities employers, awarding the same pay to women as they give to men.
They certainly face a lot of prejudice. I know that there were pilots who delivered aircraft and got out of the plane and people would ask them where the pilot is. You know, that happens more than once. So there is a lot of that prejudice going on. But I think they built up their respect. I mean, they started the war, they were flying in a skirt on a third of the salary of the men and they end up flying in trousers on the same salary. For many Atta girls, the opportunity to fly Spitfires and Hurricanes is pretty much a dream job.
And like the nurses who go ashore in Normandy, they're quite happy to combine bravery with a touch of glamour. Mary Ellis was one of the more legendary ATA pilots, known to her friends as Spitfire Mary.
She told me that she was delivering an aircraft and she said she never wore her pilot's cap because she had lovely blonde curly hair and she didn't want to ruin her hair for the dances that night. And she thinks it saved her life because one day a returning bomber, a German bomber, came the other way and obviously thought, well, that's a bit of easy prey, I'll take that down on my way. But as he came close, he saw her blonde hair and he actually saluted her and flew on. If a German pilot had engaged her, Mary would have been unable to fight back because even if her Spitfire was loaded with ammunition,
women are forbidden from firing deadly weapons. On D-Day, the Attergirls are strictly ferry pilots, working on the home front. None of them are sent across the Channel to Normandy. But the movements of both planes and ships making that fateful journey are being carefully plotted by young women all over the country, and the stakes have never been higher.
Whether it's an aircraft or a seaborne vessel, it's a moving target. So you've got to keep plotting. It's in real time. This is happening in real time. The size of the D-Day operations means it's hugely logistically challenging. If you drop the ball, if you misread a command, if you plot inaccurately, then that could cost lives. At Southwark, Fanny Gore-Brown is back in her old job.
having begged Admiral Ramsay for an effective demotion, so she can join her fellow plotters in the ops room. She doesn't want to miss out on the most significant naval operation of the war. Fanny is on duty the night of the 5th of June, as the vast Allied armada begins its journey across the Channel.
My shift was 11 o'clock at night till 8 o'clock the following morning, 5th, 6th of June. The Armada was slowly, slowly, slowly sailing across the Channel. Ramsey went to bed with instructions to be called at five if things were going badly and at six if things were going according to plan.
And I went to watch at 8 o'clock into breakfast and the radio, while it was on in the mess, announcing that the invasion had started. That morning, people up and down Britain, in and out of uniform, are waiting with bated breath for news from Normandy. Among them tens of thousands of young women who've fallen in love with American servicemen. Nuala Calvi, author of G.I. Brides.
A lot of British girls, obviously, they would have only encountered Americans on the silver screen. So I think a lot of GIs had this kind of aura of Hollywood glamour almost about them. They were comparatively rich. A GI earned five times as much as a private in the British Army. So they could really afford to treat women on dates. They had things like deodorant and aftershave. So they smelled wonderful. They smoked exotic cigarette brands such as Camel and Lucky Strike.
And a lot of women found the GIs more attentive than British men. They would shower them with compliments, they would pull out chairs from them and so on. One of the GI brides I interviewed called Sylvia told me it was the first time a man had ever bought her flowers when she went out with a GI. Sylvia told me that she felt a lot of the Americans were keen to get a British girlfriend before going overseas so that if they were killed there'd be someone left behind to mourn them. On the 6th of June, many of these handsome GI boyfriends suddenly vanish.
A generation of young women find themselves ghosted, some more literally than others. Everyone knew D-Day was coming, you know, they knew why the Americans were there, but they'd been there for a long time and so it was still a real shock, I think, when the Americans suddenly left. And for some, it happened so quickly there, they didn't get a chance to even say goodbye. Some make a last-ditch attempt at contact before they depart. One of the most poignant images of D-Day is an abandoned tent.
Hastily scrawled on with white paint. Sorry, Jean. Had to go. Johnny. As far as I know, no one's ever tracked down who Jean and Johnny were, but they were obviously important enough to each other that he wanted to leave her a note, and that was the best he could do. And whether they survived D-Day or not, a lot of American men never returned to Britain after D-Day. In the weeks after D-Day, British service women begin being sent across the Channel, always a relatively safe distance behind the frontline troops.
The ATS send mixed-sex AKAK teams to shoot down Hitler's new V-weapons, pilotless flying bombs released in retribution for the invasion.
Within a week of the D-Day landings, Hitler and the German high command unleash their V1 and V2 rockets. But by the autumn of 1944, 80% of those rockets are being felled by AA command before they hit their target, and AA command is operated by more women than men. Fanny Gore-Brown crosses the channel with her boss, Admiral Tennant.
landing on one of the Mulberry Harbours they worked on in secret. When we arrived at Aramush in the morning, it was very exciting to land on the Mulberry. That was really exciting. And we were met by lorries with loose seats in the back. And we drove through Normandy to Granville on the Sherbrooke Peninsula. Devastation, absolute devastation, appalling devastation.
Appalling. Villages absolutely destroyed. Dreadful. But the worst sights by far are those witnessed by the British nurses. As early as noon on D-Day, the first casualties start arriving at hospitals on the south coast of England, especially in Portsmouth and Southampton.
Part of the planning was to clear the hospitals on the south coast cities. Everything was, you know, scrubbed. Everything was stockpiled, ready to take the casualties. And the casualties came really fast. I think, you know, barely within hours of the invasion being launched, we had casualties. They'd be brought up from the dockside in lorries. There's appalling injuries there that had perhaps received some emergency treatment on the hospital ships, bringing them back.
One of the nurses, a Red Cross nurse called Mary Verrier said, "Some of the time all we could do was give them tender loving care and a kiss and a hug." And that's just not once it was relentless. They treat machine gun wounds, burns and lacerations from barbed wire. Some 800 walking wounded arrive on the first day. Within less than a week, nurses like Iris Ogilvie and Molly Giles are travelling in the opposite direction.
The American nurses arrive in Normandy first, as early as D-Day plus one. But the beaches are too congested for them to unload, and their medical equipment is scattered by the chaos of the landings. Instead, they do what they can for the injured on their hospital ships. Within a few days, American, British and Commonwealth nurses have begun to establish hospitals on French soil.
They were serving in field hospitals near the front and in evacuation hospitals further back. They were on hospital trains, they were on hospital ships. You get some flight nurses on medical transport aircraft. So you have them in all of the theatres of the war, really, in various different ways. And it's not just official nurses who are risking their lives to help the D-Day casualties.
French women who lived in Normandy made great efforts under considerable risk to themselves to nurse men who landed on D-Day itself. There were accounts of women going onto the beaches while they were still under fire and helping men who were desperately wounded. Women who had rather been airbrushed from history and no one knows about the extraordinary dangers they faced to help try and rescue some of those men coming ashore. Even weeks after D-Day, there's no shortage of danger for those tending the wounded.
Two British Army nurses, Dorothy Fields and Molly Evershed, are among the tens of thousands of service personnel remembered on the British Normandy Memorial, which commemorates those killed on D-Day, and in the months of fighting that followed.
Dorothy was 27, Molly was 32, and they were on a hospital ship that struck a mine just off Juno Beach. And there was a report that their ship was almost cut in half and was listing badly, and it was clearly going to go down. Now, both these women were very strong swimmers, and of course, they could have leapt off, they could have tried to swim to safety, but both of them refused to leave their posts.
And they repeatedly returned below decks because there were a number of stretcher cases already below decks. And between them, they carried out 75 stretcher cases. They had to lift these stretcher cases over the rail on the side of the ship and get them out into lifeboats. And the last sighting of Molly was her struggling to escape from the hatch as the ship went down. And very sadly, she didn't make it. Estimates of the total number of nurses killed in action vary.
The US Army reports 201 killed during the war, the British Army twice that number. Clearly, the number of female casualties is dwarfed by the male ones. But men and women alike serve in various positions throughout the war, some more dangerous than others.
It takes time to reassess and place the female narrative alongside the male one in World War II. We always refer to these male heroes and flower the youth mowing down, and I totally get that. But the vast majority of men who serve aren't on the front line. They're also in logistical positions, office boys, doing jobs that don't actually directly imperil their lives. And that women are doing those jobs doesn't mean it's of less value. It means it's different. And sometimes it's less dangerous.
But being in the most dangerous position doesn't mean you're necessarily in the most valuable position. And everyone plays their role. And I think words like vital, important are the appropriate words to term the role of women. I think it's understandable for a whole bunch of societal reasons why it's taken 50 years.
years or so to get this narrative of women's rolling war fully up and running and recognised. I think it's also important not to distort it. They didn't do always the same role as men, invariably they didn't, but they were an absolutely integral part of the war machine. I have ever since been so thankful for the experience. I think it made one feel you can do things if you want to.
It's up to you. Get on and do it. This is the first time that hundreds of thousands of women are experiencing a paid sense of purpose, a part of being a patriotic project.
an idea of an independent self who is working alongside men, who is in many respects equal to men, although not paid as well as men and not doing always the exact same jobs as men. And it will prove, not immediately, but it will prove revolutionary. I don't think it's a coincidence that those women give birth to the generation that is going to push for women's lib, that is going to be called the bra burners, second wave feminists.
Now, where do they get those ideas from? What comes along with a different idea of what it means to be a woman? And it comes from those women who experienced something different in the war. They had their moment. And I think going forward, they see a new landscape for their children. There is no war to free their girls. So what are they going to offer the future generation of young women? In the next episode, we conclude our D-Day story with a look at what happened after the 6th of June. Three months of bitter fighting across Normandy
Hundreds of thousands of casualties. And, as Operation Overlord draws to a close, the fate of Paris hangs in the balance. That's next time.
