Imagine standing at an anti-aircraft battery while German aircraft approached overhead. You were trusted to locate them, calculate where they would be seconds later, help aim the enormous guns and pass the information needed to bring them down.
But when the moment came to actually fire the weapon, regulations said that final act had to be carried out by a man.
Today I want to discover more about the thousands of women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service who became part of Britain’s anti-aircraft defences during the Second World War. Their work was highly technical, enormously important and often carried out while enemy aircraft were somewhere above them. Yet official regulations still drew one very firm line: women were not permitted to actually fire the guns.
When the war began in 1939, the roles available to women in the ATS were initially much more limited. Women worked as cooks, clerks, orderlies, storekeepers and drivers, but as Britain’s need for manpower increased, that began to change.
Anti-Aircraft Command needed enormous numbers of people.
Protecting Britain’s cities, ports, factories and military installations required far more than simply positioning a gun and waiting for an aircraft to appear. Hitting a fast-moving aircraft thousands of feet above the ground was an extraordinarily complicated task. Its height, direction and speed all had to be established, while other factors could also affect where the shells needed to be sent.
Increasingly, women were trained to do this work.
ATS women became range-finders, radar operators, telephonists, plotters and predictor operators. Others worked with sound-detection equipment or operated searchlights that swept across the night sky looking for enemy aircraft.
The predictor was particularly important. Information about an aircraft’s position and movement could be fed into the equipment, which calculated where the gun should aim. Range-finders, meanwhile, helped establish the position and distance of the target.
In other words, the women surrounding an anti-aircraft gun were not simply assistants standing safely in the background.
They could be helping decide exactly where that gun was going to fire.
From the summer of 1941, women increasingly served alongside Royal Artillery men in what became known as mixed anti-aircraft batteries. They trained for the work, learned aircraft recognition and became familiar with complicated pieces of equipment that had to be operated accurately and quickly.
There was little room for error when an aircraft was moving rapidly across the sky.
By 1943, around 56,000 ATS women were serving with mixed anti-aircraft batteries.
But there was an extraordinary contradiction.
Women could track the aircraft. They could operate the equipment that calculated the firing solution. They could work alongside the guns during an attack and even help aim them.
But they were still officially considered non-combatants and were prohibited from actually firing the weapons.
The distinction must have seemed rather strange to the women themselves.
Being forbidden to pull the trigger did not mean they were protected from the dangers surrounding the gun site. Anti-aircraft batteries could themselves become targets during raids. The women experienced the thunderous noise of the guns, the smell of cordite, darkness, bad weather and the knowledge that enemy aircraft might be approaching the very area they were defending.
Some later found themselves helping Britain respond not only to German bombers but also to the V-1 flying bombs that began reaching Britain in 1944.
And still, technically, they were not combatants.
I think this is one of those wartime stories that shows how quickly old assumptions could begin to look rather ridiculous. Britain desperately needed these women. They were trained to perform complicated military work, trusted with equipment upon which the accuracy of the guns depended and placed directly inside an active air-defence system.
But regulations still insisted that firing the gun itself was a step too far.
The women of Britain’s anti-aircraft batteries may not officially have been allowed to pull the trigger, but without the information they produced, many of those guns could not have done their job.
Had you heard about the ATS women who helped aim Britain’s anti-aircraft guns, or did you assume the gun crews were entirely male?
Auxiliary Territorial Service women at a 3.7-inch anti-aircraft gun site, Wormwood Scrubs, London, 1941. War Office official photograph / Imperial War Museums. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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