British Women in World War 2

From a guide for US troops stationed in Britain in World War 2:

'A British woman officer or non-commissioned officer can and often does give orders to a man private. The men obey smartly and know it is no shame. For British women have proven themselves in this war. They have stuck to their posts near burning ammunition dumps, delivered messages afoot after their motorcycles have been blasted from under them. They have pulled aviators from burning planes. They have died at the gun posts and as they fell another girl has stepped directly into the position and “carried on.” There is not a single record in this war of any British woman in uniformed service quitting her post or failing in her duty under fire.

Now you understand why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. They have won the right to the utmost respect.'

Ack Ack Girls

'Ack Ack Girls' were members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) that helped operate Anti-Aircraft Guns in the defense of Britain from German bombing raids during World War 2. 

From 1941 onward all unmarried British women aged 20 to 30 were required to join one of the Auxiliary services, which included the ATS. One of the most dangerous and exciting ATS roles was to be selected for 'Ack Ack' duty, manning the Anti-Aircraft guns known for their distinctive ack-ack sound as they fired. The idea to use women in gun crews was first proposed by British engineer Caroline Haslett and was eagerly approved by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Churchill's own daughter, Mary Soames, was one of the first Ack Ack volunteers and served at a gun site in London's Hyde Park.

As a royal proclamation forbade women from operating deadly weapons, Ack Ack Girls worked as part of mixed-gender squads where men would load and fire the weapons with the women's support. The three main roles of the women were Spotters who used binoculars to find enemy planes, Range-Finding teams who calculated the distance a gun shell would have to travel to hit the target, and Predictor teams who worked out the length of the fuse necessary to make sure the shell exploded at the right height.

Women were subject to the same intensive training as men and  had to undergo rigorous testing in terms of fitness, hearing, eyesight and nerves in order to be accepted. This was essential for enduring the hard conditions at the gun emplacements and to keep on task while bombs fell all around them. When the Germans deployed V1 flying bombs against Britain, 369 Ack Ack Girls were killed in just 3 months. Their sacrifice and dedication proved invaluable to the war effort, as well as providing a boost to civilian morale, the sound of the Ack Ack guns becoming a well-recognised symbol of British resistance.

Read a personal account of Ack Ack Girl, Vee Robinson, here.

Hannah Snell

Hannah Snell (1723-1792) was a famous British soldier in the 18th century.

Born in Worcester in England, Snell is said to have had a fascination with soldiers even as a child. When she was a young woman she moved to London and in 1744 married a man named James Summs. The couple had a daughter, but the child died only one year old and Summs disappeared. Hearing a rumour that Summs had been pressed into military service, Snell borrowed the clothes of her brother-in-law, James Gray, and assumed his identity to join the British army and locate Summs. 

Although she later discovered that Summs had been convicted and executed for murder, this did not prevent Snell from pursuing an adventurous military career disguised as James Gray. According to her own account she became a soldier in the 6th Regiment of Foot, where she was stationed in Carlisle during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland. During this time she was trained in military drill and the use of firearms. However after she prevented a sergeant from raping a local girl she was sentenced to 600 lashes of the whip for 'neglect of duty'. As she endured the first 500 lashes without making a sound her commanding officer ordered that she be spared the final 100 lashes.

Snell left the regiment after this and instead decided to travel to Portsmouth where she joined the British Royal Marines and set sail to India on the Swallow. In 1748 Snell fought in the naval Battle of Pondicherry where the British attempted to capture a French colony. She reportedly killed several Frenchmen before being wounded herself. She is also known to have fought in a battle at Devicotta and was wounded a total of 12 times during her naval service, including suffering a musket shot to the groin. She operated on herself to remove the musket ball so that she wouldn't be identified as a woman by the ship's surgeon.

In 1750 Snell returned to Britain and decided to finally reveal her true identity to the other members of her unit. With the encouragement of her shipmates she petitioned the head of the British army, the Duke of Cumberland, to grant her a military pension. Remarkably, the pension was granted and she was honourably discharged from the army. Snell's exploits became popular gossip around London and she eventually sold her story to a London publisher under the title 'The Female Soldier'.

Snell retired to Wapping where she opened a pub named 'The Female Warrior'. She lived for another 40 years, married twice more and raised 2 sons. In her old age Snell began to suffer from dementia and in 1791 she was admitted to the Bedlam asylum where she died 6 months later.

Bracha Fuld

Bracha Fuld (1926-1946) was a Jewish resistance fighter who helped refugees enter Palestine in the wake of the Second World War. 

As a teenager, Fuld escaped Germany to move to Palestine in 1939, where she lived with her mother. She was an energetic student at Balfour High School, where she took part in sports, hiking and dancing. Originally named Barbara, she changed her name to Bracha.

In the period after World War 2, the British wanted to prevent the many thousands of Holocaust survivors from migrating to Palestine, leading to Jewish revolt and widespread resistance. Fuld joined the Palmach resistance movement in 1944 and was stationed in Kibbutz Kiryat Anavim, near Jerusalem. During this time she met her boyfriend, Gideon Peli, although he was later imprisoned by the British.

Fuld was trained to be a section commander and took charge of a number of female soldiers in Palmach’s E company. It is known she fought in a raid on the German colony of Sarona in Tel Aviv. Some stories also suggest she worked as a spy seducing a British officer, but this is unsubstantiated.

On the 27th March 1946, Fuld was part of a squad charged with protecting a road that Jewish immigrants would use once they had arrived on the refugee ship Wingate. Fuld’s squad was not informed that the ship had been diverted and were taken off-guard when they encountered a British tank unit. She was severely wounded in the ensuing firefight and died in hospital shortly afterward. She was 19 years old.

Both a ship for transporting illegal immigrants and a street in Tel Aviv were later named after Fuld in her honour.

Yaa Asantewa

Yaa Asantewa was the Queen Mother of Ejisu in the Ashanti Empire during the late 18th and early 19th century, as well as leader of the Ashanti rebellion against the British Empire.

Born in 1840, Yaa Asantewa played a supporting role in the royal family of Ashanti Empire (located in modern-day Ghana) as ‘Queen Mother’.  Following the exile of her grandson King Prempeh I by the British in 1896, Yaa Asantewa inherited leadership of the empire as regent in his stead.

In 1900, the British governor-general of the Gold Coast, Frederick Hodgson, met with local leaders at Kumasi. He demanded that the Golden Stool, the divine throne and symbol of the Ashanti nation, be turned over to him as a recognition of British power. While some of the leaders considered this, Yaa Asantewa, as Guardian of the Golden Stool, reprimanded them, saying:

“If you the men of Ashanti will not go forward, then we will. We the women will. I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men. We will fight till the last of us falls in the battlefields.”

Yaa Asantewa then assembled an army of 5000 volunteers to resist the British forces, inflicting heavy losses upon them and forcing them to retreat to the fortified British offices at Kumasi. With the offices defended by machine guns and 500 Nigerian Hausas, Yaa Asantewa’s forces chose to instead lay siege to the British, cutting telegraph wires and blocking supply routes. Two days before the British would have been forced to surrender, a relief column sent by Hodgson broke the siege and forced the Ashanti to retreat.

Despite having been able to harass the British forces from several well-defended forts, the Ashanti Empire was eventually defeated and absorbed into the British Empire in 1902. As rulers before her had been, Yaa Asantewaa was exiled to the Seychelles, where she remained until her death in the early 1920s. In 1924   Prempeh I was finally allowed to return to Ashanti, bringing Yaa Asantewa’s remains with him to receive a royal burial on her native soil.

Phoebe Hessel

Phoebe Hessel was a British soldier and local legend who lived in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Raised in Stepney, London, Hessel fell in love with a soldier named Samuel Golding when she was 15 years old and disguised herself as a man so that she could join the army to accompany him. She became a member of the 5th Regiment of Foot with Golding and served in the West Indies and Gibraltar. The two remained together in the British army for 17 years.

In 1745 she fought against the French in the Battle of Fontenoy where she received a bayonet wound to the arm. Eventually she revealed herself as a woman, although accounts vary as to whether this occurred when she was stripped to be whipped as a punishment, or if she did so voluntarily in order to stay with Golding when he was wounded. She was not disciplined for her deception and was paid the same amount as any soldier leaving the army.

She and Golding remained married for twenty years in Plymouth until his death, after which she remarried and moved to Brighton, where she became a well-known local figure and traveling saleswoman. She died in 1821 at the impressive age of 108. In her native Stepney both Hessel Street and Amazon Street are named after her, the latter due to her nickname as the ‘Stepney Amazon’.

Christian ‘Kit’ Cavanagh

Christian ‘Kit’ Cavanagh was an Irishwoman who fought in the British army as a dragoon during the 17th and early 18th centuries.

Born in 1667 in Dublin, 'Kit’ was a wild teenager who eventually settled down to run a pub with her husband Richard Welsh. When Welsh disappeared in 1691, Cavanagh received a letter indicating he had, possibly not by choice, ended up in the British Army and been sent to Holland. Unwilling to lose her husband she left her children with her mother, disguised herself as a man and joined the British Army on a mission to find him.

As an infantryman she fought at the Battle of Landen, where she was wounded and captured by the French. She was eventually returned to the British, but was discharged from the army for killing a sergeant in a duel over a woman. She immediately re-enlisted and joined the Royal Scots Greys Dragoons, with whom she served until the end of the Nine Years’ War. During this time she grew to enjoy the life of a soldier, with a penchant for the looting that followed battle. 

Cavanagh re-enlisted with the Scots Greys when the War of the Spanish Succession began in 1701. She was shot in the thigh during the Battle of Schellenberg, but refused to be sidelined and fought in the Battle of Blenheim a month later. After this battle she was assigned to guard French prisoners, where after 13 years of searching she found her husband. Unfortunately when she found Richard he was courting a Dutch woman. Having rebuked him fiercely she left and returned to her life with the Scots Greys.

Cavanagh’s identity as a man had never been challenged, despite being known as the 'Pretty Dragoon’. However when her skull was fractured at the Battle of Ramillies the surgeon treating her discovered she was a woman. She was discharged but carried on with the army as a sutleress, and some accounts claim she continued to fight on the front lines.

On return to Britain Cavanagh was presented to Queen Anne, who granted her a bounty of £50 and a pension for her services. Following her death in 1739 she was buried with full military honours. 

Æthelflæd

Æthelflæd was an Anglo-Saxon queen and warrior in 9th and 10th century England, who fought to protect her land from Viking invasion.

The eldest child of King Alfred of Wessex (better known as Alfred the Great), Æthelflæd was raised in a time when the kingdoms of England were being conquered by Danish Vikings to create the new territory of the Danelaw. As a teenager she was married to Æthelred, lord of the neighbouring kingdom of Mercia, to form an alliance against the Vikings. On the way to her wedding she personally fought off a Viking attack, which may have been sent to assassinate her and prevent the marriage.

The alliance proved effective in bullying the Vikings into making a temporary peace, and the couple took advantage by building a series of forts to help defend their lands. When in 902 Æthelred began to suffer a wasting illness, Æthelflæd became the ruler of Mercia in all but name.

As ‘Lady of the Mercians’ she undertook a military and political campaign to reclaim what had been lost to the Danelaw. In 905 she led her forces in repelling a Viking attack on the port of Chester, and in 907 she took an army deep into Danish East Anglia to retrieve the bones of a Christian saint.

In 917 she again went to war, not just against Vikings at Derby, but also against Welsh kings who had been opening their borders to Viking forces. This was more of a tactical than bloodthirsty move, leading to alliances with some Welsh rulers. A cunning politician, she also cultivated ties with the king of Alba (Scotland) and even with disaffected Viking lords.

She died in 918, just days before the Vikings at York surrendered to her and accepted her as their overlord. Her life’s work led to a combined kingdom of Mercia and Wessex that lay the foundation for a united nation of England.

The Rani of Jhansi Regiment

The Rani of Jhansi Regiment was the Women’s Regiment of the Indian National Army (INA) during the Second World War. It was named after Lakshmi Bai, Rani of Jhansi, a revolutionary heroine.

The regiment was formed in 1942, along with other Indian nationalist forces aiming to overthrow the British Raj in colonial India, with assistance from Imperial Japan. Most of the 1500 women were not from India at all, but teenage volunteers of Indian descent from rubber plantations in Malaya.

The regiment was raised in Singapore and were organised into officers or sepoys (privates) based on their education. It was led by Captain Lakshmi Sahgal, who was upper-class and highly educated. The cadets were trained in the use of rifles, hand grenades and bayonet charges. Some received additional training in field medicine and jungle warfare in preparation for operations in Burma. 

In 1944 the Rani were deployed in Burma alongside other INA forces and the Japanese army. 100 Rani troops are are noted as forming a vanguard unit as part of the ongoing Battle of Imphal, while other Rani gave support to the Nursing Corps there.

By March 1945 the INA had failed at Imphal and were forced into a disastrous retreat. The Rani suffered losses from Allied air attacks during the retreat and were disbanded not long after. While Lakshmi Sahgal went on to become the Minister of Women’s Affairs in the Azad Hind government, the fate of most members of the Rani of Jhansi regiment is unknown.

WAAF Intelligence Officer

“A WAAF intelligence officer debriefs a bomber crew following an operation.”

Source: Imperial War Museum

Margaret Corbin

Margaret Corbin was a woman who fought in the American Revolutionary War during which she manned a cannon with her husband, John.

Margaret and John were married in 1772 and three years later when the war began John enlisted in the First Company of Pennsylvania Artillery. Margaret chose to accompany John and assisted him in his work as a matross, loading and firing cannons.

On November 16, 1776 the pair fought in the defense of Fort Washington, where 600 American soldiers fought 4000 Hessian troops in the service of the British. During an assault by the Hessians, John was killed and Margaret took his place operating the cannon. She continued to fire the cannon repeatedly until her arm, chest, and jaw were hit by enemy fire.

Following the battle Margaret was left disabled from her injuries, however in 1779 she became the first woman to receive a military pension from Congress. She was enrolled in the Corps of Invalids and became part of the garrison at West Point, New York. Discharged in 1783, she lived in Westchester County, New York, until her death in 1800 aged 48.

[Read more about Margaret Corbin]