THE CLASS OF ’43
Women who broke so much more than mere glass ceilings.
WOMEN FERRY PILOTS
Women ferry pilots flew more than nine million miles in 72 different aircraft for the Ferrying Division, US Air Transport Command during WWII. Unorthodox women who billiantly helped sustain the vital flow of military aircraft around the country at the height of WWII.
VIOLETTE SZABO, SOE
The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was the brainchild of Winston Churchill to take the fight behind enemy lines in WWII. Violette Szabo was one such SOE agent. She was captured and executed in the infamous Ravensbruck women’s prison on 5 Feb. 1945. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre. Fittingly, her statue stands alongside Lambeth Palace in central London.
The inevitable rivalry and conflict between the SOE and MI6 is brilliantly depicted in one of my favourite television series, Foyle’s War.
ONE DORSET SQUARE, LONDON
SOE safe house where many agents spent their last night in London prior to being dropped into France via parachute or Lysander aircraft. To those in the know, the SOE was to become known as the “Baker Street Irregulars” since the agency occupied several pieces of real estate in the nearby Baker Street area. The large exhibition halls of the Natural History Museum were used for their basic parachute training.
I spent the first few months of a diplomatic posting living just a half block away in Dorset House and became quite familiar with the area.
MEMORIAL PLAQUE, ONE DORSET SQUARE
Today, One Dorset Square is suitably the home of the Alliance Francaise in London.
In what is possibly a hat tip to the role played by Queen Elizabeth in WWII, the inestimable British actress, Honeysuckle Weeks, plays the uniformed driver/mechanic for detective Foyle in the eponymous TV series.
As the song says, “Bless ’em all, the long, the short and the tall”
What we do without them??