The Girls Who Went to War: Heroism, heartache and happiness in the wartime women’s forces
she shouted, in a pitch-perfect impersonation. Her ear for music had made her an excellent mimic, and the parade ground was soon ringing with peals of laughter.
But Corporal Birchett was not amused by Jessie’s performance. ‘Private Ward!’ she shouted, her usual unflappable demeanour wavering a little. ‘Go and see the orderly sergeant at once.’
As dressings down went, Jessie’s was not exactly a harsh one. The orderly sergeant, Molly Norris, was a rather cuddly woman whose quiet, gentle demeanour had earned her the nickname ‘Aunt Molly’.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she said, doing her best to suppress a little smile as Jessie explained what she had done. ‘Well, I suppose I’ll have to put you on cookhouse duties for the rest of the morning, won’t I?’
Jessie soon found herself hunched over a large metal sink, doing the dishes for a camp of 300 people. Without any washing-up liquid this was no mean feat, but for Jessie – who had grown up as her mother’s domestic dogsbody – the punishment was pretty easy to bear. In any case, she reasoned, it was worth it just to escape the dreaded early morning PT session.
After a few weeks, Jessie learned that the men and women of 518 mixed battery were being split into four sections – A, B, C and D – which would take turns operating the guns once the unit was fully operational. She and Elsie Acres, the blonde girl who slept in the next bunk, were excited to discover they had both been put in ‘C’ Section, which meant they would be working together. Even better, the two girls had both been chosen for the height-and-range finder, the strange bulky piece of equipment they had seen outside the classroom on their first day. It was considered one of the most elite jobs on the gun-site. ‘There’ll be no smoking or drinking for you,’ one of the instructors warned them. ‘You’ll need steady hands and quick reactions.’
But before the girls got down to the serious business of equipment training, which was to take place at a practice firing camp in Weybourne in Norfolk, there was some fun to be had first. The end of the theory course was traditionally celebrated with a concert in the NAAFI, performed by the members of the new battery. Word soon got out that Jessie played the piano, and when the others heard that she could accompany any song on request, without the need for sheet music, she suddenly found herself in demand.
Some of the performers were less tuneful than others, but a girl called Lillian almost brought the whole battery to tears with a beautiful rendition of ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’. The men, meanwhile, made them all cry with laughter, dressing up in drag and singing ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major’ in screeching falsetto voices. Not to be outdone, one of the girls attempted to black up with shoe polish for her own comedy number, only to regret it later when she discovered it took seven baths to get the sticky stuff off her face.
As Jessie looked around the NAAFI that evening, full to bursting with men and women tapping their feet and singing along to the songs she was playing, her heart swelled with happiness. Growing up under her mother’s roof might not have been easy, but in the Army she had found a new family – and one where her talents were appreciated.
For the next stage of ack-ack training, Jessie and the other girls travelled to the seaside town of Sheringham, where they were billeted at the Grand Hotel. But the building conspicuously failed to live up to its name – the rooms had been stripped of all furnishings apart from beds and a small wooden chest for each girl’s belongings, and although they had access to bathrooms with beautiful marble-topped sinks, they were rationed to five inches of bath water per week. To check that no one was exceeding the quota, officers would frequently barge in on them unannounced.
The gun-site itself was a few miles away at Weybourne – it was right on the coast, so that the shells could be fired out to sea. When the girls left the hotel at six in the morning and piled sleepily into the back of an Army lorry for their first day’s practical training, it was still dark outside. They had been issued with an extra thick one-piece denim uniform to wear on the gun-site, but as the chill winter air crept in through the canvas around the lorry they were still bitterly cold.
But all thoughts of physical comfort evaporated the moment the team arrived on the gun-site. Jessie gazed at the huge guns in the glint of the breaking dawn, feeling a thrill of excitement rush through her. There were four of them, lined up majestically on a raised platform, like great cannons pointing out to sea. Behind them she could make out the height-and-range finder and the predictor – as well as a large, dome-shaped object called a kinetheodolite, which was used to record practice firings so that trainees could review how they had done.
On the order of their commanding officer, Captain Rait, the mixed group of ack-ack personnel took their stations. There were five men to each gun, six girls gathered around the predictor, and two spotters. Jessie and Elsie Acres took up their positions on the height-and-range finder, looking through a pair of eyepieces on one side of the long metal tube. Opposite them stood a young woman called Jean, who was their reader. When they signalled to her that a target was locked in, she would call out the distance displayed on a little dial in front of her.
High up in the sky, Jessie could see the target approaching – a small British plane towing a long red-and-white sleeve. Surely that can’t be too hard to hit, she thought, as she watched it glide along in a perfect straight line.
When the aircraft came within range, one of the spotters called out its bearing, and Captain Rait shouted ‘Engage!’ Jessie and Elsie rotated the height-and-range finder until they could see the plane through their little eyepieces, and began furiously adjusting their instruments until the images were perfectly lined up.
‘Read!’ Jessie shouted, as soon as she could see the plane clearly.
‘Read!’ Elsie echoed moments later.
Jean read off the height of the plane, and the predictor girls began combining it with their own data. As they studied the dials of the giant box, it rotated to follow the plane through the sky. Then one of them shouted, ‘Fuse one-eight!’
‘Set!’ called out the men, as the shells were loaded into the guns.
When all four were ready, Captain Rait bellowed, ‘Fire!’ The whole procedure had taken place in a matter of seconds.
The noise that followed the captain’s command was indescribable, louder than anything Jessie could ever have imagined. She felt the wind rush against her face, and her nostrils filled with the smell of cordite. Moments after the sound of the guns firing came a loud clanging noise as the metal shell cases fell onto the concrete.
Looking up at the sky above her, Jessie saw four puffs of black smoke were the shells had exploded. She gazed at the little plane, still dragging the red-and-white sleeve behind it. There was no sign that they had made any impact.
Through her ringing ears, Jessie could hear Captain Rait call, ‘Stand down.’ Feeling rather shaken, she followed the others into a little hut, where the kinetheodolite images were being processed.
‘Predictors – you were at fault this time,’ a stern gunnery instructor told the group, pointing out how a tiny error in one of their readings had caused the guns to miss their target. The predictor girls listened sheepishly, feeling they had let everyone down.
But as ‘C’ Section practised firing over and over again that day, each time it was someone else’s turn to be in the instructor’s bad books. By the time the sun set and Jessie and her colleagues piled onto the lorry to head back to the Grand Hotel, the girls were hoarse from shouting out their readings, and their hair stank of cordite. But after countless attempts, they still hadn’t so much as grazed the red-and-white sleeve.
Captain Rait had some reassuring words for his team, however. ‘It’s not all about scoring direct hits,’ he told them, as they trundled back to Sheringham. ‘As long as we come close enough to a Jerry plane to spook the pilot, he won’t be able to target his bombs accurately.’
Over the next few weeks, the exhausting routine on the gun-site was repeated day after day, and bit by bit Jessie and her colleagues improved – until finally, one afternoon, they managed to punch a hole right through the red-and-white sleeve. The thrill of success