Women in Wartime

Parachute packers — who prepared those complicated contraptions of silk and leather  —meant the difference between life and death for a man plunging from the sky.

Georgina Harvey’s RCAF photo album reveals a fascinating slice of life in the wartime air force, compiled by a young woman from a well-known family in Kelowna, British Columbia who joined up in 1943 and trained as a photographer. Georgina Harvey was born in Kelowna to the distinguished Harvey family, still a well-known name in that community. […]

Back then they were called V-weapons, but today we call them cruise missiles. In the German language, the V stood for Revenge. Hitler promised that his revenge weapons would punish the Allies for their bombing of German cities. These jet-propelled missiles almost won the war. Even before the war, the Nazis realized that the land, […]

Danesfield House is now a luxury hotel, but during the war it was requisitioned by the Royal Air Force, renamed RAF Medmenham, and served as the headquarters for aerial photographic interpretation. It has personal meaning for me, too. I visited this lovely place in 2022, when I was invited to be the guest speaker at a […]

My mother-in-law Gerda Drews was a teenager living in Berlin during World War Two. She witnessed the ferocious battle of Berlin, and her family’s tragic experiences after her city fell to the Soviet Army.

Russian women, often known as Night Witches, were the only females in the world engaged in aerial combat during World War Two. These daring young women, some of them just teenagers, flew lightweight aircraft that dodged and darted and dropped bombs on the enemy under cover of darkness. So feared were they that the Germans […]

A career in photography was the goal of Lou Marr, who called herself “the original turnip who fell off the back of the truck” when she joined the Royal Canadian Air Force Women’s Division.

Bomb girls in Canada were represented by Ronnie, the Bren Gun Girl. She was just one of one million Canadian women who worked in factories during the Second World War. Bomb Girls Around the World When World War Two began, British women trooped into factories in full force. They were desperately needed there, as Britain […]

Wartime knitting was more than a hobby – it was an act of patriotism. Literally millions of women, children and even men in Allied countries used their knitting needles as weapons of war. If you weren’t a knitter, you might as well have been a Nazi! Countless knitted items were created and sent to the […]

Rationing was a fact of life in the Second World War. For five long years people ate less meat, sugar and other products. But there were few complaints. Not only were we feeding the desperate British population, we were shipping enormous quantities of food to our own armed forces, and our prisoners of war. Why […]