Flights of Fancy and Recollection

Just finished "Bluebirds" by Margeret Mayhew. Great book about the British Women's Auxiliary Airforce during World War 2. Couldn't put it down!

I picked it up by chance (?) from a discount table at the local newsagents.

It tells the story of an odd assortment of women of different ages and personalities from all walks and stations of life thrown together in the dark days of the Battle of Britain. Looked down upon by a misogynistic, male-dominated military, given scant equipment and poor conditions and pay and relegated to the most menial tasks, they nevertheless rose to the challenge and proved themselves a vital and indispensible part of the British war effort.

The book is a very readable and enjoyable weaving together of personal drama, romance, action and historical detail. I loved it!

The book had a special appeal for me. Quite apart from the fact that I also have done some military service and could personally relate to a number of aspects of military life related in the book, my maternal grandmother served in the Volounteer Observer Air Corps, a part-time civilian auxilliary force assigned to support the air defence of Australia. Many members of this force "manned" observation posts around the country to report on friendly and enemy air movements and their information was fed into the various air commands coordinating the defence. Others, however, served in the Fighter Sector Headquarters themslves, alongside regular RAAF and WAAAF personnel.

Grandma was one of these and worked as a plotter in Number 1 FSHQ at Bankstown. This was set up initially in a cinema but then moved to an underground bunker (see below). Grandma's job was to plot the positions of aircraft on a large plotting table in response to commands from the controllers who were receiving information from observers and radar stations.

My grandmother would get up early in the morning to see her two sons off to school and my grandfather off to De Havillands Aircraft factory (also at Bankstown) where he was engaged in making the Mosquito fighter bomber, which amazingly was built largely of plywood. Then she would go off to the bunker. That night she would be home cooking and serving dinner. Yep! Our fighting women, as always, served on two fronts!

I can still remember sitting with her at her sunny kitchen bench having a cup of tea and her showing me her service brooch (nope! no uniforms for these heroines! just an insignia to pin to her jacket), her certificate of service and her khaki log book in which she proudly showed where she'd plotted the arrival of The Duke of Gloucester and Bob Hope! She pointed out the various aircraft types, Kittyhawks and Mitchells, and could still recite the Radio alphabet albeit the old World War 2 version: "Able, Baker, Charlie..."

Three high points for her were the night she had to come home and sit down to tea with her family and not say a word about the shelling of Sydney by a Japanese submarine because she and the other staff had been sworn to secrecy; the visit of the Duke of Gloucester to her bunker where he shook her hand and spoke with her briefly and the time when one of the fighter pilots lifted her up to sit in the cockpit of his Spitfire.

Sadly, I did not write all this down at the time and do not have her service memorabilia. I do hope that they are not lost and are safely in the keeping of my uncle or one of my cousins. I now have only these few scraps of memories.

By a coincidence, although my mother dearly wished to serve in the Navy during World War 2 (but succumbed to her father's strong opposition) she also served briefly as a volounteer air spotter, searching the skies for Japanese aircraft over Braidwood (!) from the Church of England tower. Today one is tempted to snort, "As if...!" but in those dark, desperate days it must have seemed very real.

Although I served in the army as a male; women's military service always held a special, if secret, significance for me. I can still vividly remember, as a child, listening avidly to my mother's and grandmother's stories.

I had the priviledge of serving in a unit which had a relatively high proportion of female soldiers. For all that I threw my heart and soul into my own duties I would often look wistfully at them, squadron clerking, radio-operating, truck driving, acting as enemy patrols and think, "There but for the unfortunate grace of God go I".

But one soldiers on, doesn't one? And...often, by that very same grace of God, wins through!

My own military service gave me the strength and sense of self to undertake, finally, the difficult path to transition.

How hard it is to tell life's crosses from life's gifts? Each seems to have the extraordinary tendency to become the other.

As the Buddhists say, "The three poisons become the three seeds of virtue."!

I found this extraordinarily comprehensive website about Australia during World War 2 including information about and pictures of 1 FSHQ's bunker:
Peter Dunn's Australia@war (home page)

Australia@war - RAAF (1 FSHQ & the bunker)

I also found this account by a woman who served in the WAAAF in Fighter command HQ:
Australians at War