WOMEN BEHIND 'THE FEW' WAAF

The Women's Auxiliary Air Force and British Air Intelligence during the Second World War

- DR SARAH-LOUISE MILLER

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.