My favourite cousin Eric Padfield, two years older than I, had volunteered several months before the war for the Royal Air Force," Eileen Younghusband recalls. "He had always wanted to fly." Many of Eileen's male school friends had volunteered to serve with the British military services at the outbreak of war, and a rising feeling of patriotism, born out of the Blitz and the havoc, death and destruction it was wreaking, was growing throughout the country.
Before long Eric was fully trained and commissioned as a pilot officer with the RAF. When he was killed in August 1940, Eileen, along with the rest of her family, was devastated. "I was deeply affected by his death," she remembers. "It made me realise that helping in a YMCA canteen and working in a comparatively safe and comfortable office was not enough. I had to do more for my country." Eileen was 19 years old when she applied to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), and she was delighted to receive a summons to the Air Ministry in London for an interview.
Adolf Hitler's rise to power and the looming threat of another world war in the second half of the 1930s had forced the British military services to consider potential manpower issues. The British Army, the Royal Navy and the RAF had looked to Britain's female population during the First World War to fill roles at home in Britain that would release men for service on the front lines. All three had demobilised their female personnel at the end of that conflict, and no peacetime women's military services existed.
Denne historien er fra Issue 118-utgaven av History of War.
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Denne historien er fra Issue 118-utgaven av History of War.
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NAUMACHIA TRUTH BEHIND ROME'S GLADIATOR SEA BATTLES
In their quest for evermore novel and bloody entertainment, the Romans staged enormous naval fights on artificial lakes
OPERATION MANNA
In late April 1945, millions of Dutch civilians were starving as Nazi retribution for the failed Operation Market Garden cut off supplies. eet as In response, Allied bombers launched a risky mission to air-drop food
GASSING HITLER
Just a month before the end of WWI, the future Fuhrer was blinded by a British shell and invalided away from the frontline. Over a century later, has the artillery brigade that launched the fateful attack finally been identified?
SALAMANCA
After years of largely defensive campaigning, Lieutenant General Arthur Wellesley went on the offensive against a French invasion of Andalusia
HUMBERT 'ROCKY'VERSACE
Early in the Vietnam War, a dedicated US Special Forces officer defied his merciless Viet Cong captors and inspired his fellow POWs to survive
LEYTE 1944 SINKING THE RISING SUN
One of the more difficult island campaigns in WWII's Pacific Theatre saw a brutal months-long fight that exhausted Japan’s military strength
MAD DAWN
How technology transformed strategic thinking and military doctrine from the Cold War to the current day
BRUSHES WITH ARMAGEDDON
Humanity came close to self-annihilation with the Cuban Missile Crisis, Broken Arrows’ and other nuclear near misses
THE DEADLY RACE
How the road to peace led to an arms contest between the USA and USSR, with prototypes, proliferation and the world’s biggest bomb
THE MANHATTAN PROJECT
Einstein, Oppenheimer and the race to beat Hitler to the bomb. How a science project in the desert helped win a war
