Women Wartime Spies

Active or Passive?

Ann Kramer

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781844683826
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: History

"A thrilling, challenging and educational book... examines the roles of spies such a Edith Cavell, Mata Hari, Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan" ( Pennant Magazine ). Women spies have rarely received the recognition they deserve. They have often been trivialized and, in cinema and popular fiction, stereotyped as vamps or dupes. The reality is very different. As spies, women have played a critical role during wartime, receiving and passing on vital information, frequently at considerable risk. Often able to blend into their background more easily than their male counterparts, women have worked as couriers, transmitters, and with resistance fighters, their achievements often unknown. Many have died. Ann Kramer describes the role of women spies during wartime, with particular reference to the two world wars. She looks at why some women chose to become spies, their motives, and backgrounds. She looks at the experience of women spies during wartime, what training they received, and what skills they needed. She examines the reality of life for a woman spy, operating behind enemy lines, and explores and explodes the myths about women spies that continue until the present day. The focus is mainly on Britain but also takes an international view as appropriate. "Tells the often surprising stories of some of the women who chose to become spies and to serve their country... An excellent work." — The Great War Magazine

Chapter 1

Women and War

‘Upon women the burden and horrors of war are heaviest.’

MARGARET SANGER

War impacts profoundly on women’s lives, whether on the home front, in occupied territories, or on the battlefield. With the advent of total war and the mass mobilization of civilian populations during the twentieth century, women’s formal involvement in war increased enormously. The two World Wars had an impact on women’s lives that was far greater than in previous wars, not least because aerial bombardment, invading armies and the enlistment of whole populations brought war directly into the home, affecting civilians on the home front – a term that was coined during the First World War – just as much as soldiers on the frontline. During both World Wars women were involved in myriad roles: maintaining homes and families, doing war work, in caring roles as nurses and doctors, working within the armed forces – and as information gatherers, spies and resistance fighters. Many, although not all, were roles previously only held by men, or believed to be suitable only for men.

Opening the Doll’s House: women’s war work

Writing in 1917 about women’s involvement in the war, American journalist and feminist Mabel Potter Daggett declared: ‘I think we may write it down in history that on 4 August 1914, the door of the Doll’s House opened… For the shot that was fired in Serbia summoned men to their most ancient occupation – and women to every other’. To some extent she was correct; between 1914-1918 and even more so between 1939-1945, the demands of war meant that women were pulled out of their more traditional roles as homemakers and carers and plunged into activities previously dominated by men.

In Britain, when the First World War broke out, large numbers of women, including several who had spent the pre-war years fighting the British government for the right to vote, now demanded the right to be involved in the war effort. Leading suffragist, Millicent Fawcett writing in The Common Cause urged: ‘Women your country needs you… let us show ourselves worthy of citizenship whether our claim to it be recognized or not.’ Emmeline Pankhurst too, charismatic leader of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), called an end to suffragette activities and threw her influence behind the British government, actively helping to recruit men – she and her supporters were reputedly involved with the appalling white feather movement – and urging the government to use women in the war effort. These calls on women to back the government split the women’s movement but even so as increasing numbers of men were left to die in the trenches, an estimated two million women entered the labour force, working for the first time as bus and tram drivers, painters and decorators, postal workers, bank clerks, butchers and munition workers producing thousands of shells while their faces and hair turned yellow from the DDT. Women worked as chimney sweeps, delivered milk, toiled on the land in the newly-formed Women’s Land Army and were employed as communication workers and police. By the end of the First World War, women in Britain and some of the other warring countries were doing just about every job imaginable to help the war effort – and this at a time when, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, women did not have the vote, nor did many people believe they should have. Their involvement in war work did not necessarily open the doll’s house but despite considerable male prejudice it challenged the conventional view that a woman’s place was only in the home, so much so that in January 1919 The Times featured an article about a forthcoming exhibition on women’s wartime work to be held at the Imperial War Museum, which would inform the public of the ‘extraordinary range and variety’ of the work that women had done on the home front and in military hospitals.

The guns of the First World War fell silent on 11 November 1918 and as surviving soldiers returned from fighting, women were encouraged to give up the waged work they had done during the war, and return to their domestic roles. Most did so, some with relief, but nothing was ever quite the same again. During the inter-war years women in Britain, the United States and various other countries finally gained the vote. More women enrolled in universities and an increasing number of occupations began to open up for women. The First World War had also left a specific legacy: many women had lost husbands and fiancés, leaving a considerable number of single women, many of whom forged independent lives. From the mid-1930s however worldwide economic depression, coupled with the rise of Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany were ominous signs, and as the decade wore on it appeared that a second major conflict was emerging. In Britain, from 1938, the government began to make plans to put the country onto a war footing.

To some extent women’s involvement in war work during the First World War was voluntary, fed by a wave of patriotism and government propaganda as well as by the need for women to replace the men who had gone to fight. During the Second World War Britain organized for ‘total war’ and government recruitment drives for women workers were even more intense, with propaganda and radio broadcasts urging women to come into the factories and ‘do their bit’. From spring 1941 every woman in Britain aged between 18-60 had to register with employment exchanges and those who were suitable had to choose from a range of possible wartime occupations. So urgent was the need for women to be involved in the war effort that in December 1941, under the National Services Act (2), the British government took the unprecedented step of introducing conscription for single women aged 20-30, although it was emphasized that women would not be required to bear arms. By the end of the war the total number of British women in war work was around 7,750,000, two million more than in 1939. Once again, women did every job imaginable, working on the railways, in shipyards, in transport and factories. Some 80,000 women also worked on the land in the Women’s Land Army and Women’s Timber Corps, helping to bring in 70 per cent of the nation’s food by June 1943. Women worked as engineers, welders, carpenters and electricians; they built roads and barrage balloons; drove tractors and farmed the land; and helped to produce millions of tons of armaments but, despite doing the same work as their male counterparts, women consistently received less pay.

Women’s entry into male-defined areas of work, whether agriculture or industry, did not go without comment and during both wars women workers faced considerable opposition and discrimination not least from male trade unions, who feared that the employment of women would jeopardize male status and wages. During the First World War women workers were frequently lampooned in magazines such as Punch and there were considerable fears that involvement in work considered to be more suitable for men would harm a woman’s frail femininity at best, and undermine her morals at worst. There were considerable debates within the press and parliament about women’s work, particularly the use of married women; during the Second World War for instance, wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill expressed his concern that women’s involvement in factory production would seriously damage family life. Even so, by 1943 in Britain, nine out of ten single women and eight out of ten married women were officially involved in the war effort, whether on the land, in war industries or in the armed forces.

Forces women

From 1917 British and American women were also enlisted into the armed forces to free up more men for combat. In Britain the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) and the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) were set up in 1917; one year later the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) was also formed. Women wore uniform and learned to drill and take orders but then, as now, were not allowed to fight. Instead they provided a host of support duties, such as clerical and catering work. They worked as telephone operators and also worked in signals intelligence, listening into and passing on messages, some of them intercepted from enemy sources.

When war broke out again in 1939, women in Britain flocked to join the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), the women’s section of the army, the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), or the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). There was also the Women’s Transport Service (WTS). By 1943 more than 500,000 women were serving in the ATS, WRNS and WAAF combined. In the United States women served in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) and were sent to all theatres of war. Once again, women in the auxiliary services were not allowed to engage in combat but they worked as drivers, cooks and clerks, freeing men to go and fight. As war progressed, however, forces women worked in command centres and operation rooms as telephone operators or using radar and radio to plot ships and planes. There might have been a veto on women picking up arms but women worked alongside men on the anti-aircraft guns; they may not have been allowed to fire the guns but this was a moot point, they certainly pinpointed the targets.

Women on the front line

It is often assumed that women do not engage in combat and certainly in Britain and the United States, to this day, women in the armed forces are forbidden to pick up arms. However, the reality for many women during times of war has been quite different. Throughout history there have been warrior queens, such as Boudicca, while individual women have also defied convention to fight alongside men on the front line. One notable example during the First World War was Englishwoman Flora Sandes, who fought with the Serbian Army and eventually gained the rank of captain. During the First World War Russian women fought on the frontline in the so-called Battalion of Death; led by Maria Botchkareva a battalion of some 300 Russian women fought at the front side by side with men; they suffered heavy casualties. During the Second World War Soviet women pilots, known as the ‘Night Witches’, carried out more than 23,000 night bombing raids over German territory, targeting railways, ammunition dumps and artillery positions. In occupied territories too, where women are particularly vulnerable to deprivation and abuse, women have picked up arms to defend themselves and their families and have joined resistance movements, harrying and killing the enemy. The view of women as non-combatants therefore is not strictly accurate.

During both World Wars women made their way to the front line as nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers and cooks. Nursing and caring for the wounded to some extent falls into an area of work traditionally seen as female-appropriate but the work of pioneer Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War legitimized the idea that women could work near the front line. For the public, particularly during the First World War, wartime nurses were often seen as angelic beings, mopping fevered brows but as always the reality of wartime nursing was not that simple: women, many of them from sheltered privileged homes, came face to face with horrendous wounds and appalling conditions, working with scarce resources, often under fire, in makeshift field hospitals, not far from the front line. The rules of war stated that women were not supposed to nurse on the battlefield but in practice many did, including the daring Elsie Knocker and Marie Chisholm who set up a first-aid post at Pervyse, Belgium, right on the front line, gaining the British Military Medal for rescuing a British pilot from no-man’s land. Women such as the Scotswoman Dr Elsie Inglis, whose offer of help was turned down by the British War Office – they told her to ‘go home and sit still’ – funded her own hospitals in France, Romania and Serbia during the First World War. And twenty years later, thousands of women continued the tradition working as nurses and doctors in Britain and in war zones abroad, where they worked in makeshift field hospitals as near to the front line as possible, often under heavy bombardment.

One uniformed unit that became very well known during the First World War was the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY). First formed in 1907, and consisting largely of highly privileged and rather dashing women, the FANYs (as they became known) drove ambulances in France and Britain, and became renowned for their daring exploits. Later, in the Second World War, they were a recruiting source for British intelligence and special operations.

Spying and intelligence

Wars are not only fought in the open, they are also fought in secret as governments and armed forces attempt to find out what their enemy is planning. Espionage and intelligence gathering are an integral part of all wars but not visible to the general public. By and large this has often been seen as ‘men’s work’ but women too have played a major role. During both World Wars women were highly visible in food queues struggling to maintain their families and homes, as volunteer or civil defence workers, in wartime factories and as members of the auxiliary armed forces. But one of the rolls which were taken on by women during wartime was far less visible and less well known – that of intelligence gathering and espionage.

‘In times of war and peace governments will always seek other countries’ information to give them an advantage in international situations.’

(Stella Rimington)

During the First World War a large number of courageous women, whose names are virtually unknown today, worked as spies for British intelligence in enemy-occupied territories obtaining and passing back valuable information that was then used to plan combat strategies. Women in Britain also worked in the newly formed British Secret Service, listening into enemy signals, helping to code and decode messages, and keeping details on suspected enemy spies and espionage activity in Britain. As Tammy Proctor has described in her excellent book Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War, it is only very recently that their contribution has begun to be recognized. Twenty years later even more women worked in British intelligence, while others were specially trained and equipped to spy and work with resistance movements behind enemy lines, adopting false identities and risking death. While some of the women who spied during the Second World War have become fairly well known, those who worked in intelligence and espionage during the First World War are almost entirely unknown, with some notable exceptions. Obviously by its very nature espionage is a secretive profession and many women did not talk about their work once war was over. However, their invisibility may also indicate that women spies and intelligence workers, particularly during the First World War, have been overlooked or even trivialized because until recently their efforts and contribution have not been taken as seriously as those of men. It might also suggest that the use of women in these covert areas has also been regarded as somehow inappropriate.

There is nothing new about women working as spies, although the historical examples that are given, particularly by male writers, do tend to stress women’s sexuality as being the prime requisite for the task. Since Biblical times women have worked as spies – Delilah being considered by many historians to have been the earliest recorded example. More recently during the American Civil War, for instance, a number of women such as Belle Boyd and Harriet Tubman worked as spies. Belle Boyd spied for the Confederate side, operating from her father’s house and passing on information to Confederate generals. She was eventually betrayed and arrested. Harriet Tubman, the black American abolitionist who ran the so-called Underground Railroad, worked for the Union side, scouting in enemy territory and bringing back important military intelligence. Also during the seventeenth century, the writer Aphra Behn worked as a spy for the British government, although the information she obtained was disregarded.

Over the following two centuries, a number of other significant women, including Gertrude Bell, were engaged in gathering sensitive information for Britain. Gertrude Bell was in fact the first woman formally employed by British intelligence as a political officer. Born in 1868, she studied history at Oxford University and gained first-class honours, although that university did not actually award degrees to women until 1920. She went on to become one of the great Victorian women travellers, spending a great deal of time in the Middle East. She provided maps and other information to British intelligence about the Middle East and, given the political tensions of the time, her information was gratefully received. In 1916 she was formally employed by the Arab Bureau.

‘Being a spy in wartime means real hard, risky work. One is engaged in the “Secret Service”, one is always working in the dark, and one is liable at any moment to be trapped – to meet death secretly and mysteriously, or to face a firing-squad.’

(Marthe Richer)

Spying is a risky business: whether male or female, someone who adopts a false identity to obtain information from within an enemy’s territory is usually risking death, something that Marthe Richer, a First World War spy, made a point of emphasizing in her book I Spied for France. It is often said that women make very good spies, particularly during wartime because they can pass unnoticed where a man, whether in uniform or not, is more likely to arouse suspicion. Also women have neighbourhood networks, which provide useful channels for passing information, sometimes denigrated as ‘gossip’ but they still remain just as vulnerable as men. In Britain, the use of women for intelligence gathering work was fairly random until the twentieth century, operating informally and within environments such as diplomatic circles. This changed in the early part of the twentieth century with the establishment of Britain’s first Secret Service in 1909 and the coming of the First World War meant the need to obtain good intelligence was crucial and the process was put onto a far more organized and professional footing.

Aphra Behn 1640-16...