I was Barbara Brown when I joined the WAAF [Women's Auxiliary Air Force] on April 22, 1940 and was posted to a Fighter Station in Lincolnshire as a plotter in the Ops. Room. That summer I was sent up to Air Ministry for the Officer Selection Board and passed, but as Intelligence was the only job I was interested in and it was closed to women at that time, I had to wait until January '43 before it was opened again to WAAF. 17 of us passed OCTU at Bowness-on-Windemere and from there we went to Highgate for a 2 week course, causing great consternation, as there had never been so many new WAAF Intelligence Officers, all at the same time, before. While at Highgate we were told that big-wigs from Air Ministry and the War Office were coming to interview all of us to choose 6 people for a special hush-hush job they could tell us nothing about. Being absolutely honest, I was surprised to be one of those chosen, and as luck would have it, was the only one of the six who made it "beyond the pale" into Bletchley Park.
Hut 3, German Section, Luftwaffe und Wehrmacht, in the brick building with the red-dust making central corridor, was where I started life at B/P [Bletchley Park]. We were a group of younger Section Officers under the supervision of a higher-ranking, older and gracious lady, Gwen, and we worked 8 hour shifts, 4 people at a time, each at a corner desk. Our office was in the first wing to the left, first door on the right, and on the door was a large sign, "TOP SECRET -- KEEP OUT." Messages came through a small hatch in the wall, which we decoded from numbers into English. Time was of the essence, and as soon as a message was decoded, it was put into a wire basket attached to a pole just inside the door, the button above it was whisked away – where and to whom we never knew and, of course, did not ask. At that time, I knew nothing of Ultra or Enigma, and to this day, I don't know exactly what we were doing or why we were doing it.
ACW (Air Craft Woman) Barbara Brown circa 1940 |
Some time after I arrived, an Army Captain came in from the field (we were told) and was put in a position over Gwen, who was no longer in charge of us. In the late autumn of '43, I came back to midnight duty after a seven day leave, and the relieving shift found such an air of excitement in the room. We learned that Gwen and Suzanne (a short, thickset Welsh girl with shiny, black, wavy hair) were on the Queen Mary and were sailing THAT NIGHT with Churchill, who was off to meet with Roosevelt in Washington and then go to the Chateau Frontenac in Montreal to meet with the Canadian Prime Minister. Our euphoria lasted all night, thinking of Gwen and Suzanne on the Queen Mary and praying for everyone's safety. My happy bubble was abruptly burst in the morning when the Capt. came in when the others had gone and said, "I want you to know, Barbara, that you should have been on the Queen Mary with Suzanne because you and she are our best operators, but the powers-that-be had slapped Gwen in the face once when I was put in charge over her, and they didn't want to do it again, so they decided she would go instead." Until that moment I had had no idea I was one of their best operators, and the shock of the news that I should have gone with Churchill on that history-making journey was devastating. Unable to share my hurt with anyone, I went back to my billet and cried myself to sleep, wishing he had never told me. I had been happy until then. When Gwen and Suzanne returned some two weeks later, it was bitter-sweet to me to hear their wonderful experiences.
When the European War was over in May '45, we were all declared redundant, and a week or so later, Flt. Lt. Brin Newton-John (father of Olivia) was assigned to bid us all a personal farewell. I had taken part in the clever revues B/P had put on at the end of '43 and '44 and had sung with him. He told me I had been recommended for promotion; however, I never heard any more about it and remained a S/O for the rest of my service. Instead of leaving B/P and going on to pastures new a Major of the Japanese Section requested that I join his staff, and I went to the brick building with the long, black, shiny un-dusty central corridor known as the Burma Road. Sad to say, I did not shine too brilliantly there, and I was glad when the Pacific War came to an end. There is a good memory I have of those few months, though. One evening the Major invited me to dinner at Ciros in London, and the news went around the room that Eisenhower was expected. When he arrived with his entourage, everyone stood up and applauded him to his table, and we were treated to his delightful grin. A pleasant memory indeed.
With the war over, I finally left B/P and stooged around at various jobs. Air Ministry called and asked if I would like to go to Brussels or Paris. Having "done" Paris at the end of my school days, staying at l'Ecole des Invalides near Napoleon's beautiful tomb, I opted for Brussels, and I flew to Belgium in October '45 to work at the H.Q. of B.R.A.R.E.R.A. – Bureau de Reserche de l'Aide Rendue aux Evades Allies – IS9. It was in the ex-Gestapo H.Q. on the lovely Avenue Louise where we worked to try to repay, in some small measure, the surivors of the Underground. There I met my New Yorker husband-to-be, who was with the American contingent doing similar work. I decided we would be married in Brussels among our colleagues because after my house was blitzed, my parents had finally been able to settle down in Worcestershire where I knew nobody and which was not really my home. Being married on foreign soil turned out to be a complicated business for both of us. Actually, marriage had not been in my plans at all because in June '43, just after going to B/P, I had received a "Dear Joan" letter from my fiance in Egypt after a four year separation, and I had decided to stay permanently in the WAAF. Fate decreed otherwise, though, and after returning to England at the end of May '46 to be demobilized, I left for America, arriving in New York on August 8, 1946 on a Bride ship, no less, that being the only transport available at the time; otherwise I would have had to wait 18 months to 2 years for a commercial plane or ship passage. Thereby hangs another tale – in fact, I have many tales to tell, having been blessed with an excellent memory.
My story starts way back in 1940 when Britain stood alone against the might of the German war-machine. When war was declared on Sunday, September 3, 1939, we expected to be blown to bits and London razed to the ground in the first 24 hours. Who knew then that it takes much, much longer than that? Instead of the expected blitz, we went through six months or more of the "Phony War," when Hitler was busy mopping up the Continent, leaving us more or less alone. My fiance was already a pilot in the RAF (Royal Air Force), having joined in January 1939 on a short term commission: six years active service and four years in the reserve. Unfortunately for me, after 3 months initial training in England, he was posted to no. 4 Flying Training School, which was in Egypt, and on April 15, 1939, I waved goodbye until his ship disappeared over the horizon. With the Phony War still in progress, I went to Air Ministry one day in March 1940 to see if I could do something to help, with the result that I found myself on a parade ground for two weeks training to become a WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force), and on April 22nd was posted to a Fighter Station in Lincolnshire as a plotter in the Operations Room. I discovered I could plot easier upside down than the right way up and was stationed on the Coast position at the top of the huge sector table map where aircraft were plotted for the controller to see. My new friend Kitch, (Joan, a tall, slim, pretty blue-eyed blonde), was on the North Sea position to my left, with the rest of the watch on other positions around the table. At first we patrolled right across from the Wash to the Merseyside, from the east coast to the west, but when a new station was built in the west, our responsibility was halved.
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"A" Watch sent on a recruiting drive to the nearby ports of Grimsby and Cleethorpes |
There were several watches working around the clock, 3 days of duty, then a 24 hour stand-off. We were A Watch, known as the Brainy Watch, and we went on Church Parade sporadically, only when Sunday coincided with our stand-off. Our I.D. tags were octagonal, made of a reddish brown indestructible composition material, and stamped "C of E" (Church of England), "RC" (Roman Catholic), or "OD" (Other Denominations -- Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists all lumped together under a common Protestant stamp).
My first leave of four days came in August, and I joined my parents on a visit to my sister, Eva, her husband Jim, and Martin their baby boy, in their new home in Aylesbury, a lovely market town, the county seat of Buckinghamshire, north-west of London. At that time, Britain was on Double Summer Time, and the evenings were light until 10 or 11 p.m. That was to save electricity, delaying blackout time until it became necessary to turn on the lights. On the second evening there, my mother came down from upstairs saying she had been looking out of the landing window, watching a big black thing floating through the air on something white. No sooner had she finished speaking when there was a terrific CRUMP sound, and the ground shook – then the sirens went off! Jim and my father went into action immediately, bringing down two mattresses from the bedrooms, putting a large one under the dining table pushed up against the inner wall of the dining room, for my parents and me, and a twin one under the stairs for him and Eva and the baby. (The individual shrapnel-proof shelters later issued to home owners were not available then). Under the table, my father, mother and I took deep breaths and prayed for the safety of the house and the people in it. There were no more crumps, but for hours we lay there listening to the wretched, uneven engine-beat of the German bombers passing overhead and later coming back, going south. At one point, I suddenly discovered my knees were shaking uncontrollably and then realised it was also happening to my mother, sandwiched in between me and my father. She must have felt me shaking at the time, and suddenly, we were both giggling helplessly. Nerves, of course. Finally the planes stopped coming, and the All-clear sounded. We all had some hot cocoa, said a thankful prayer, and tried to sleep in our clothes in the same places for what was left of the night. The next morning we found that the big black thing Mother had seen floating in the air had been a land mine coming down on a parachute. The beastly thing had landed on the pretty Village Green and duckpond, around which was a semi-circle of centuries old little brick almshouses where old folks lived. Many houses had disappeared and their occupants killed; the rest were in a shambles and the people hurt, and the pond with its famous white ducks was completely gone. No one knew why the Germans had dropped the land mine there. Aylesbury had no factories and was considered a safe area. Just a whim of the bombardier or a mistake? Nobody ever knew, but we discovered this was the beginning of the blitz.
My parents went back to our house in a town in Middlesex county, just outside the last postal district of West London, Jim returned to his job as an RAF instructor (he was RAF retired in a screened job at that time), and I went back to my station. More and more raids were reported, especially on RAF Fighter Stations along the south coast and inland. We had several bombings, but it was always by a single plane. Then the Ops Room was moved off the station to the emergency Ops Room underground in the woods several miles away. We WAAF were also moved to a lovely, large stone house, Scawby Grange, near the village of Scawby, and went to our work by RAF bus through the woods. We realised our war had finally begun – later known as the Battle of Britain – and the pilots of Fighter Command were fighting for our very existence. They were the 'Few' to whom Churchill, in his inimitable way bequeathed this epithet, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few."
In our underground Ops Room when surrounding cities were being blitzed, our table map would be covered in raid blocks of planes coming from all directions, and often we ran out of raid blocks – there were so many planes. It was a hectic, stressful time, and after hours of plotting, we would be relieved for 10 minutes or so, and when we went up outside for some fresh air, the night sky further away would be red from the glow of burning fires in the city being blitzed, with bright flare-ups as the bombs exploded. A sight indelibly imprinted on the mind – it was a time of much anguished praying.
Sunday, September 15th was my 23rd birthday, and I well remember it. Two waves of German bombers attacked that day, and every available pilot and plane were sent to the south coast from all over Britain. They no longer flew in squadrons, and they formed "sweeps" of many planes to individually "Tally-Ho" on any of the hundreds of enemy planes in the sky. It was not until after the war that we knew this was the day we had shot down more enemy planes than at any other time during the battle for the skies, and it is now known as the "Battle of Britain Day." That was when Hitler stepped in and took over from Goering, altering the Luftwaffe's air tactics and stopping the bombing of the airfields – thus literally saving the British Isles. (Our backs were against the wall had he but known it). He turned his attention to night bombing of the cities, to the cost of so many civilian lives, but Fighter Command was able to recoup and rebuild and continue the fight. God works in mysterious ways.
In October 1940, my station received the news that our house had been blitzed, and I was given seven days compassionate leave to go to my parents. Thank the good Lord, my father had grown weary of going to their garden shelter when the sirens went off every evening for two months, and a week before the bomb fell, my parents had gone to visit my mother's cousins in Shropshire, a beautiful county bordering on Wales. On my way to visit them in Bedlam (yes! Bedlam – a contraction of Bethlehem), I stopped off to see our house. It turned out to be what was left of our house. It had been a two story pale cream stucco house on a maroon brick base, with brick trim and maroon and cream paintwork. All that was left were the frames of the front bay windows on their brick base, with little fragments of curtains fluttering in the breeze from the sliding rollers at the top of the frames. On the left was the large maroon drain-pipe, still standing upright, all alone, attached to a little piece of brick at the botoom. Formerly, it had led from the gutters under the eaves to guide the rain into a little drain. That was all there was to see. The shelter had disappeared because the bomb fell close to it. Had my parents been there, they would have been blown to pieces, as it was only shrapnel proof, not bomb proof. Also disappeared was my absolutely gorgeous young chestnut tree, grown from a chestnut I brought home from the Boise de Boulogne when I was at l'Ecole des Invalides a few years before. Altogether, it was a horrible sight, just skeleton frames and a huge gaping hole where the garden had been. Again, no one knew why the bomb had been dropped, as there were no military targets in the area, just homes. Another random bombing.
