Authors: Virginia Nicholson
As Dolly worked for an officer she was collected every morning in a jeep, with a driver who would salute her as she greeted him. Delicious lunches were another benefit of the job. The typists ate with the officers; there was steak, and fruit. Dolly brought a large linen napkin from home and piled it full of oranges and pineapple slices for the children. From time to time they asked the army personnel back for tea and a game of cards; the ‘amorous ones’ were firmly discouraged and not asked again.
But later Dolly wondered whether she had missed out. Chores, children, a full-time job and a nun-like conscience about her husband Chas inhibited her from taking up the offers that came her way. One
day a food parcel arrived for one of the US sergeants; it contained a wondrous cake:
It was covered with cherries, marzipan, nuts and angelica. The sight of it was enough to take one’s breath away in those days of austerity. The Sergeant said, ‘That’s for you, Dorothy, if I can have a cup of coffee with you one day.’ ‘Indeed, you’d be very welcome any time,’ I said delightedly. I took the cake home and watched the children’s faces. The cake was as marvellous inside as it was out. I have never tasted anything like it and Marjorie said, ‘What a generous man he must be, Dolly.’
The following night she was on her way to bed when she was disturbed by a clamour at the door. The sergeant was down below, bellowing for his coffee – ‘You promised me,’ he yelled. He wouldn’t go away. Eventually she threatened him with the police, and he skulked off, muttering, ‘Bloody dames, they’re all the same, lead you on, take all you’ve got and give you nothing.’ But it wasn’t till the next day at work that Dolly finally realised that coffee wasn’t all the sergeant had had in mind. He was still furious. ‘ “When I gave you the cake … you said,
any time
it would be
your pleasure
.” So he had been deceived by my polite expression.’
Another young GI took a different approach. He took Dolly aside and told her earnestly that being separated from his wife back home was ‘affecting his health’. He had been to see the medical officer, who, he said, had advised him to form a liaison with Mrs Dolly Scannell, who for her part was separated from her husband. ‘He thought it would be a good idea, not hurting anyone, if you and I could form some sort of association, and be faithful to each other.’ Dolly sent him packing.
Her friend Maudie was more prepared to compromise. Maudie worked on an air force base and took it in turns to sleep with the pilots. She didn’t regard it as infidelity; she loved her husband, and he loved her. But she also hated loneliness, and hated an empty bed. Sharing it kept her happy and contented; she took no risks and encouraged no delusions. ‘Each resident knew that she was waiting for her husband,’ recalled Dolly Scannell. ‘What she offered them was a temporary haven and I believe she made life bearable for the pilots on their dangerous nightly missions over enemy territory.’ Many like Maudie saw no harm in alleviating
their loneliness and frustration, while comforting their American boyfriends.
Inevitably, many liaisons were also deeply romantic. The clean-cut, manly Yanks were the embodiment of Hollywood enchantment: those blurred idols that had kept British girls entranced in picture houses made flesh. In their arms one could be Veronica Lake, or Betty Grable. On summer evenings,
Margaret Tapster used to dance
to the sound of big bands with her beau, Sergeant Kurt Wagner; cheek-to-cheek, she caressed the collar of his costly, well-fitting uniform, breathed in his expensive aftershave and drank up his meaningless flattery, so voluptuous when spoken in a southern drawl: ‘You have the cutest little ears honey, like pink seashells … Your hair smells like the jasmine flowers on our back porch.’
But in reality women like Margaret attracted the GIs for reasons other than their seashell ears. Compared to American women, the passive, weary British female often seemed pleasantly unchallenging. One grateful American man published an article in which he explained that he had chosen to marry an Englishwoman because of her submissiveness and eagerness to please:
While American women
insist on a big share in the running of things, few European women want to be engineers, architects or bank presidents. They are mainly interested in the fundamental business of getting married, having children and making the best homes their means or conditions will allow. They feel they can attain their goals by being easy on the nerves of their menfolk.
So it was hardly surprising that love blossomed, many relationships fast developing into commitments. Starry-eyed eighteen- and twenty-year-old girls saw their dreams coming true. Not much older, the American soldiers, away from home on their first adventure, were looking for companionship, sex and the promise of domestic bliss which so many of these English girls seemed to offer. ‘
[Eddie] told me
he had gone back to the barracks that Saturday night and told his friends he had met the girl he was going to marry,’ remembered Hilda, who had danced with Eddie once at her local American air base in Northamptonshire. They were married within three months. Ruth Patchen was working for anti-aircraft command in London when she met her future husband, Staff Sergeant Wendell Poore, on
a bus. Wendell proposed a few months later; he couldn’t afford a ring, so he pulled a picture of a diamond out of
Life
magazine and gave it to her. Despite family opposition, they started planning their wedding; when the war was over they would live in Cut Bank, Montana. Often, long and happy marriages were the outcome.
But reality caught up with some of these GI brides.
Nineteen-year-old Mary Angove,
who had volunteered for the ATS in 1940, was based at Seaton Barracks near Plymouth in 1942 when the Americans arrived. The first she saw of them was a soldier in a tin hat who looked like a German. That night the over-excited GIs rampaged around the camp, cursing, shouting and calling names at the girls through their blackouts. In light of what happened to Mary later, it seems these soldiers may have been a bad batch:
Probably they got a good dressing-down from their colonel in the morning. Luckily they left us alone after that … But I did date one or two of them. I met Kenneth one night when I stopped at the fish and chip shop in the village on my way back to camp. It was getting late; you had to be in at 10, otherwise you’d be put on a charge. Anyway, this Yank was in front of me, and he offered to get mine. So I said, yes thanks, and he walked me back to barracks and we made a date. But I didn’t turn up.
But one morning I was off-duty, and I ran into him again. So then we went out for a while. It was on and off because we were in different places. But I ended up with marrying him … which was rather stupid of me. He was different then, obviously.
War had seemed to justify spontaneity. What place did caution have in a world where nothing could be anticipated? But by 1947 Mary had left her abusive and alcoholic husband and was back in Britain.
Heat and Sand
Nevertheless,
Barbara Cartland would be
among many who concluded that the Americans’ presence added more than it subtracted from wartime Britain:
Believe me, I know what I am talking about when I say that the American airman and soldier is in general a well-behaved, decent-living, fine-principled boy. He is not sophisticated, he is not polished, he is very often adolescent in his outlook and knowledge, but his heart is all right.
As the tone of her remarks suggests, Cartland took a patrician and parental view of the GIs, but it was a forgiving one, and above all a deeply grateful one. The American soldiers’ presence proclaimed the good faith of President Roosevelt who, together with Churchill, in February 1942, had established the Combined Chiefs of Staff to co-ordinate the Allies’ war effort, ‘and to provide for full British and American collaboration with the United Nations’. British people knew that the war could not be won without American help. And, failing an imminent Second Front in occupied Europe, that summer Roosevelt also reached agreement with the British chiefs of staff to mount Operation Torch, the landing of a combined force in French North Africa.
The backlash against Rommel was coordinated by troops on the ground in Libya, Morocco and Egypt. But from early in the war the island of Malta had been of key importance in controlling the sea route across the Mediterranean, vital to maintaining Axis supply lines. This Allied base was a thorn in the side of the German command: ‘Without Malta the Axis will end by losing control of North Africa,’ said Rommel. Throughout 1941 and the first half of 1942 the Luftwaffe bombed Malta remorselessly. Air raids were almost constant; the island was in a state of siege and in danger of starvation.
Corporal ‘Mike’ Morris’s
strong-minded and courageous approach to everything she did was never more in evidence than when she determined to go to Malta early in 1942. Mike’s value as a fluent German-speaking member of the ‘Y’ Service had been proved during the Battle of Britain, intercepting transmissions between German bombers and their bases. But when bomber activity over Britain started to slacken, she took a new posting in Egypt, monitoring aerial threats to the troops in the desert. It was here in January 1942 that she received the news – which at first she took to be an error in decoding – that she had been awarded the MBE. It was a huge boost to her confidence. In February she marched off to see Group Captain Scott-Farnie of Special Signals Intelligence and explained to him that she
had
to go to Malta. As she saw it, the monitoring staff on the island were insufficient and under-trained in dealing with the quantity of radio/telephone message traffic from the numerous German bombers
now threatening it. There were QAs at the military hospital, but there were no WAAFs working there, or any other servicewomen; indeed women were now being evacuated from Malta. Mike knew that she had better experience in this vital work than any of her male colleagues. But Scott-Farnie did not see things her way. Her sex, in his view, disqualified her. ‘I’m sorry but it is out of the question,’ he said. And nothing she could say would persuade him.
I went on arguing but it was to no avail. Finally, choking with rage and frustration, I picked up my heavy German dictionary and hurled it at him. It missed, and that only made me even more angry, so I stormed out of the office. If I did get killed, was that so serious? Was it not better that I, a single girl, died, rather than a married man perhaps with children? The all-important thing was that German R/T was being heard in Malta.
Later, however, she sought him out and apologised for her outburst. But, having thought things over, Scott-Farnie too had been looking for her. He had been to see the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Arthur Tedder, and Tedder, more enlightened, had given her his blessing to go.
Before departing, Mike went to see him. He was, she recognised, most rare and unusual for a man. ‘There was no quibbling about my being a woman. He appreciated that I could do the job and there it ended.’ But with military terseness Tedder warned her that Malta was now ‘pretty uncomfortable … I hope you realise what you’re letting yourself in for?’ Mike stressed that she felt she could help. As she left, he called after her, ‘Take your tin hat – you’ll need it.’
Mike quickly discovered that Tedder’s advice was in earnest. She arrived in Malta on 13 February in the middle of a heavy air raid; the flying-boat from Cairo was escorted by British fighters. Quickly, she settled into her work; a receiving station had been set up at Kaura Point to monitor transmissions from German bomber traffic based in Sicily to the north. Soon after her arrival she was returning to her hotel in the company of one of the airmen when they both confused a Messerschmitt 109 flying low over the sea with a British fighter in trouble. It was nearly a fatal mistake. The fighter aimed a volley of machine-gun fire at them – ‘ “Christ!” yelled the airman … “He’s a bloody Hun,” ’ as they hurled themselves flat on the ground behind a wall. It missed them, and careered on, firing over the airfield. Shaken and swearing, Mike’s escort picked himself up and asked whether she
was all right. ‘ “No, dammit, I’m not,” I replied. “I’ve wrecked my stockings, and I’ve only got one more pair with me.” ’
Despite her concern for female accessories, Mike found she was accepted as ‘a moderately decent type’ and permitted to dine in the all-male mess. This also spared her the nightly journey – dodging bombs and shrapnel and picking her way across the rubble – from her safe lodgings in a labyrinth of tunnels for her evening meal at the hotel. The island was being pulverised – ‘it was difficult to determine when one air-raid ceased and the next began’ – though one that stuck in her mind was a direct hit on a neighbouring house. Mike and her hosts heard the occupant screaming in agony as the bombers droned overhead, followed by the chillingly sustained wail of a grief-stricken woman.
The gallantry of the airmen, ground crews and gun crews on Malta was extraordinary; equalled only by Mike’s determination to use her skills to support their heroism. It was vital to glean any information possible about enemy movements. Under her guidance, Mike’s Maltese unit was working unbelievably long hours to ensure round-the-clock monitoring; she and her German-speaking eavesdroppers could warn of impending attacks, advise on targets, alert fighters when they had been spotted, listen in on weather reports, determine the strength of enemy formations and contact threatened shipping convoys.
In the short time she spent in Malta, Mike Morris demonstrated – as she had during the Battle of Britain – a cool-headedness and intellectual grasp that materially aided that stricken island. But early in March Scott-Farnie told her that he wanted her back in Cairo; Messerschmitts were attacking our North African airfields and harbours, and the 8th Army in the desert needed all the support they could get. She agreed to leave on 9 March, her twenty-fourth birthday. After a farewell party she set out for Luqa airfield, joining a group of women and children who were being evacuated to Egypt. It was midnight, ‘there was the usual raid in progress’, and Mike and the evacuees embarked on two Wellingtons. They started to taxi along the blacked-out runway; suddenly without warning a third aircraft, about to take off, hurtled into one of the Wellingtons, instantly starting an inferno. The pilot of Mike’s plane yelled at his passengers, ‘For Chrissakes, get to hell out of here. There are mines on board that kite.’