The Wrens of World War II

The Wrens of World War II PDF Author: Peter Hore
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 192248864X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
The World War II codebreaking station at Bletchley is well known and its activities documented in detail. Its decryption capabilities were vital to the war effort, significantly aiding Allied victory. But where did the messages being deciphered come from in the first place? This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y service, a secret even more closely guarded than Bletchley Park. The Y service was the code for the chain of wireless intercept stations around Britain and all over the world. Hundreds of wireless operators, many of them who were civilians, listened to German, Italian and Japanese radio networks and meticulously logged everything they heard. Some messages were then used tactically but most were sent on to Station X – Bletchley Park – where they were deciphered, translated and consolidated to build a comprehensive overview of the enemy’s movements and intentions. Peter Hore delves into the fascinating history of the Y service, with particular reference to the girls of the Women’s Royal Naval Service: Wrens who escaped from Singapore to Colombo as the war raged, only to be torpedoed in the Atlantic on their way back to Britain; the woman who had a devastatingly true premonition that disaster would strike on her way to Gibraltar; the Australian who went from being captain of the English Women’s Cricket team to a WWII Wren to the head of Abbotleigh girls school in Sydney; how the Y service helped to hunt the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic, and how it helped to torpedo a Japanese cruiser in the Indian Ocean. Together, these incredible stories build a picture of World War II as it has never been viewed before.

The Wrens of World War II

The Wrens of World War II PDF Author: Peter Hore
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 192248864X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Get Book

Book Description
The World War II codebreaking station at Bletchley is well known and its activities documented in detail. Its decryption capabilities were vital to the war effort, significantly aiding Allied victory. But where did the messages being deciphered come from in the first place? This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y service, a secret even more closely guarded than Bletchley Park. The Y service was the code for the chain of wireless intercept stations around Britain and all over the world. Hundreds of wireless operators, many of them who were civilians, listened to German, Italian and Japanese radio networks and meticulously logged everything they heard. Some messages were then used tactically but most were sent on to Station X – Bletchley Park – where they were deciphered, translated and consolidated to build a comprehensive overview of the enemy’s movements and intentions. Peter Hore delves into the fascinating history of the Y service, with particular reference to the girls of the Women’s Royal Naval Service: Wrens who escaped from Singapore to Colombo as the war raged, only to be torpedoed in the Atlantic on their way back to Britain; the woman who had a devastatingly true premonition that disaster would strike on her way to Gibraltar; the Australian who went from being captain of the English Women’s Cricket team to a WWII Wren to the head of Abbotleigh girls school in Sydney; how the Y service helped to hunt the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic, and how it helped to torpedo a Japanese cruiser in the Indian Ocean. Together, these incredible stories build a picture of World War II as it has never been viewed before.

Wren's War

Wren's War PDF Author: Sherwood Smith
Publisher: Puffin
ISBN: 9780142401620
Category : Fantasy fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
When wicked King Andreus declares war on the royal families of Meldrith, Wren and her friends, Princess Teressa, Prince Connor, and chief magic maker Tyron, determine to defeat him.

A Game of Birds and Wolves

A Game of Birds and Wolves PDF Author: Simon Parkin
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316492086
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
As heard on the New Yorker Radio Hour: The triumphant and "engaging history" (The New Yorker) of the young women who devised a winning strategy that defeated Nazi U-boats and delivered a decisive victory in the Battle of the Atlantic. By 1941, Winston Churchill had come to believe that the outcome of World War II rested on the battle for the Atlantic. A grand strategy game was devised by Captain Gilbert Roberts and a group of ten Wrens (members of the Women's Royal Naval Service) assigned to his team in an attempt to reveal the tactics behind the vicious success of the German U-boats. Played on a linoleum floor divided into painted squares, it required model ships to be moved across a make-believe ocean in a manner reminiscent of the childhood game, Battleship. Through play, the designers developed "Operation Raspberry," a counter-maneuver that helped turn the tide of World War II. Combining vibrant novelistic storytelling with extensive research, interviews, and previously unpublished accounts, Simon Parkin describes for the first time the role that women played in developing the Allied strategy that, in the words of one admiral, "contributed in no small measure to the final defeat of Germany." Rich with unforgettable cinematic detail and larger-than-life characters, A Game of Birds and Wolves is a heart-wrenching tale of ingenuity, dedication, perseverance, and love, bringing to life the imagination and sacrifice required to defeat the Nazis at sea.

Love and War in the WRNS

Love and War in the WRNS PDF Author: Vicky Unwin
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0750964677
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Book Description
Sheila Mills’s story is a unique perspective of the Second World War. She is a clever, middle-class Norfolk girl with a yen for adventure and joins the WRNS in 1940 to escape the shackles of secretarial work in London, her unhappy childhood and her social-climbing mother. From a first posting in Scotland in 1940, she progresses through the ranks, first to Egypt and later to a vanquished Germany. Extraordinary and fascinating encounters and personalities are seen through the eyes of a young Wren officer: Admiral Ramsay, the Invasion of Sicily and Operation Mincemeat that triggered it, The Flap, the sinking of the Medway, the surrender of the Italian fleet and the Belsen Trials. These observations are peppered with humorous insights into the humdrum preoccupations of a typical Wren – boys, appearance and having fun, while worrying about home and family. This treasure trove of hundreds of letters, along with scrapbooks and memorabilia, some of which are reproduced here, was discovered in bin liners shortly after Sheila died. Her daughter, Vicky, has pieced together a fascinating and unusual record of the Second World War from a woman’s perspective.

Women at Work in World Wars I and II

Women at Work in World Wars I and II PDF Author: Paul Chrystal
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1399071297
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book is about women in World Wars I & II - women working in factories and on farms, or toiling perilously in field stations just behind the front lines, in inhospitable hospitals and convalescent homes. It is, therefore, about the prodigious contribution women made to the war efforts from 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, standing in for the men who had left their places of work for the various theatres of war from Greece and Italy to Belgium, from Mesopotamia to France. Their tasks were many and various: keeping the troops supplied with shells, bullets and explosives, keeping the nation from starving to death, keeping hundreds of thousands of wounded troops alive so that they might fight another day. The book is, in short, the uplifting but sometimes tragic story of the many women who stepped up to work in the factories, hospitals, field stations, in transport and in civil defense, on the farms and shipyards, or signed up to the various military and civil services during the two world wars of the 20th century, ‘wars to end all wars…’. The book is different because it deals with women’s labour in both world wars and in all occupations, it covers the discrimination and prejudice they faced from men at every level, military and civilian, even when they had demonstrated beyond doubt that they were quick learners, industrious and proficient, and usually as good as any man. The book raises the embarrassing question why it has it taken so long for the prodigious contribution women made in both wars to be recognized, and why some women workers still remain air brushed from our military history after more than a century. As it turned out, little was beyond their capabilities and it is reasonable to suppose that without their huge efforts and accomplishments both wars might have turned out very differently for us.

The WRNS in Wartime

The WRNS in Wartime PDF Author: Hannah Roberts
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786733250
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
The Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) was created in 1917, re-formed in 1938 and maintained after 1945. This book determines for the first time the reasons for the expansion and contraction of the service and the impact key individuals had on it and in turn the influence it had on its members. Hannah Roberts offers new insights into a previously little studied British military institution, which celebrates its centenary in 2017. She shows how political and military decision-making within the fluctuating national security situation, coupled with a growing cultural acceptability of women taking on military roles, allowed for the growth of the service in World War II into realms never expected of women. Although it shared a similar pattern in its formation to the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and had a similar ethos to its Air Force counterpart, the WAAF, the WRNS took on a wider-ranging role in the war, in part due to the latitude afforded to the service because of its uniquely independent origins. From 1941 onward the WRNS spread internationally and subverted the combat taboo by adopting semi-combatant roles. Using twenty-one new oral histories and a multitude of archived personal documents, this book demonstrates the pivotal importance of the Women's Royal Naval Service in both the world wars.

Veterans of the First World War

Veterans of the First World War PDF Author: David Swift
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429614942
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This volume synthesises the latest scholarship on First World War veterans in post-war Britain and Ireland, investigating the topic through its political, social and cultural dynamics. It examines the post-war experiences of those men and women who served and illuminates the nature of the post-war society for which service had been given. Complicating the homogenising tendency in existing scholarship it offers comparison of the experiences of veterans in different regions of Britain, including perspectives drawn from Ireland. Further nuance is offered by the assessment of the experiences of ex-servicewomen alongside those of ex-servicemen, such focus deeping understanding into the gendered specificities of post-war veteran activities and experiences. Moreover, case studies of specific cohorts of veterans are offered, including focus on disabled veterans and ex-prisoners of war. In these regards the collection offers vital updates to existing scholarship while bringing important new departures and challenges to the current interpretive frameworks of veteran experiences in post-war Britain and Ireland.

The WRNS

The WRNS PDF Author: Marjorie H. Fletcher
Publisher: B. T. Batsford Limited
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
Compiled by an ex-director, this is a history of the Women's Royal Naval Service. Using both unpublished archival material and the personal experiences of Wrens, it charts the history of the Wrens during various periods of their existence, which include World War I and II, the post-war period to 1949, and the present day.

British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960

British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960 PDF Author: Sue Kennedy
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1789627621
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This volume contributes to the vibrant, ongoing recuperative work on women’s writing by shedding new light on a group of authors commonly dismissed as middlebrow in their concerns and conservative in their styles and politics. The neologism ‘interfeminism’ – coined to partner Kristin Bluemel’s ‘intermodernism’ – locates this group chronologically and ideologically between two ‘waves’ of feminism, whilst also forging connections between the political and cultural monoliths that have traditionally overshadowed them. Drawing attention to the strengths of this ‘out-of-category’ writing in its own right, this volume also highlights how intersecting discourses of gender, class and society in the interwar and postwar periods pave the way for the bold reassessments of female subjectivity that characterise second and third wave feminism. The essays showcase the stylistic, cultural and political vitality of a substantial group of women authors of fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry and journalism including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Nancy Mitford, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, Kamala Markandaya, Susan Ertz, Marghanita Laski, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Pargeter, Eileen Bigland, Nancy Spain, Vera Laughton Matthews, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns, Shelagh Delaney, Stevie Smith and Penelope Mortimer. Additional exploration of the popular magazines Woman’s Weekly and Good Housekeeping and new material from the Vera Brittain archive add an innovative dimension to original readings of the literature of a transformative period of British social and cultural history. List of contributors: Natasha Periyan, Eleanor Reed, Maroula Joannou , Lola Serraf, Sue Kennedy, Ana Ashraf, Chris Hopkins, Gill Plain, Lucy Hall, Katherine Cooper, Nick Turner, Maria Elena Capitani, James Underwood, and Jane Thomas.

Bletchley Park's Secret Source

Bletchley Park's Secret Source PDF Author: Peter Hore
Publisher: Greenhill Books
ISBN: 1784385824
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
A captivating history of the highly secret group of women who helped win the Second World War. The World War II codebreaking station at Bletchley is well known and its activities documented in detail. Its decryption capabilities were vital to the war effort, significantly aiding Allied victory. But where did the messages being deciphered come from in the first place? This is the extraordinary untold story of the Y-Service, a secret even more closely guarded than Bletchley Park. The Y-Service was the code for the chain of wireless intercept stations around Britain and all over the world. Hundreds of wireless operators, many of them who were civilians, listened to German, Italian and Japanese radio networks and meticulously logged everything they heard. Some messages were then used tactically but most were sent on to Station X—Bletchley Park—where they were deciphered, translated and consolidated to build a comprehensive overview of the enemy’s movements and intentions. Peter Hore delves into the fascinating history of the Y-service, with particular reference to the girls of the Women’s Royal Naval Service: Wrens who escaped from Singapore to Colombo as the war raged, only to be torpedoed in the Atlantic on their way back to Britain; the woman who had a devastatingly true premonition that disaster would strike on her way to Gibraltar; the Australian who went from being captain of the English Women’s Cricket team to a WWII Wren to the head of Abbotleigh girls school in Sydney; how the Y-service helped to hunt the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic, and how it helped to torpedo a Japanese cruiser in the Indian Ocean. Together, these incredible stories build a picture of World War II as it has never been viewed before. “We get to see how the work of individual Wrens helped in such operations as the interception and sinking of the Bismarck, the Slapton Sands disaster, several naval battles (Channel Dash, Matapan, etc.), the ongoing small warship clashes in coastal waters, convoy defense, and more. A good read for anyone interested in the naval side of the war in Europe or in the role of women in military service.” —The NYMAS Review “Will reward a patient reader with a remarkably intimate view into the lives and times of these hidden heroes.” —Naval Historical Foundation