by Siân Evans
When they reached the coast of Normandy, Martha was astounded that there could be so many diverse vessels in one place. Fierce battles ensued as the Allied troops forced their way ashore to face German bombardments, and before long water ambulances were bringing wounded combatants of all nationalities out to the hospital ships moored off the coast. The medical staff were working at full stretch – the patients had to be lifted aboard, triaged, sent for surgery or treated for their wounds. Their clothes and boots had to be cut off them, most of them hadn’t eaten for two days, and they were desperate for water, food, coffee, cigarettes and pain relief. Martha spoke to many of them, in German and French, realising they were extremely young and very frightened; she carefully explained to one young German that the orderlies dare not move him as he might bleed to death. There were more wounded stranded on the beach, and Martha volunteered to go ashore as a stretcher-bearer. It was a hazardous business; her party landed at dusk and trekked up a beach over pebbles the size of melons to a Red Cross tent. Martha helped supervise the transfer of the wounded to craft that could take them to the hospital ship as soon as the tides were right. Once back on the ship, with every bunk filled with injured servicemen of many nationalities, they sailed for the English coast where the wounded were taken to hospitals on land. ‘Made it’ was the terse but heartfelt verdict of the chief medical officer.
Martha exchanged her nurse’s disguise for her own clothes, left the ship and took the first train to London. She was promptly arrested and detained but escaped during the night, making her way to the home of an RAF pilot she knew. He was flying to Italy the following day, so she hitched a ride with him to the next theatre of war.
Her account of the D-Day landings was vivid and personal. She focused on the human tales of bravery and endurance, but what is also remarkable is her own commitment to getting the story by travelling the Atlantic on a dynamite ship then stowing away on board a hospital ship. This was not the first eyewitness account of war at close quarters related by Martha Gellhorn, and it would not be her last, but it was a milestone in her remarkable sixty-year career.
Following D-Day, while the war in Europe intensified, transatlantic passenger numbers gradually increased. Even though conditions were still dangerous, there were renewed opportunities for some merchant seawomen to resume their former careers. Maida Nixson, whose accidental career as a stewardess had begun in 1937, had longed to go back to sea, and had already risked enemy torpedoes and death by drowning, escorting evacuated mothers and children around the globe to safer countries. The WRNS could only offer her domestic work in port, so Maida became an assistant nurse in a hospital. However, during the last year of the war she found a job as a stewardess again, this time dealing with war brides and their offspring.
In late June 1944 Maida set sail in a largely empty passenger ship from Liverpool to New York, to help organise the transport and resettlement of American and Canadian wives of British airmen. The pilots and ground crew had been sent to the States and Canada for training in the early years of the war, and those who had married local girls wanted to be reunited with them, now that the risk from German raiders and submarines was so diminished. As usual, the ship zigzagged across the Atlantic, so progress was slow; meanwhile radio news reports spoke of the destructive flying bomb attacks on Britain. Maida’s five fellow stewardesses on this trip included the widow of a steward who had lost his life, along with many of his shipmates, in their valiant attempts to save children trapped below decks when their vessel was torpedoed.
On arrival in New York to pick up the American brides and offspring, the crew were amazed by the contrast with the darkened and war-ravaged British ports to which they were accustomed: ‘The skyline of New York must always be considerably overwhelming, and the sight of that great serrated artificial cliffside a-dazzle with blinding radiance made an almost shocking impact on our nerves. Our eyes accustomed to darkened England refused to credit the glare, we felt inclined to call “Put out those lights!” By night, even more than by day, the city had a look of bizarre unreality.’16
On sailing day, the ship was swamped by hundreds of young women, accompanied by small, hot toddlers and crying infants. Someone thrust a large, damp baby into Maida’s arms, and disappeared into the crowd. It took Maida some time to locate the mother of this unwanted burden, and when she succeeded, she was virtually accused of kidnap.
Extra bunks had been put into the cabins, and below decks there were dormitories housing twenty-six beds at a time. Conditions were cramped and difficult – six stewardesses each had around 130 passengers to look after and there were 99 infants aboard. Most of the passengers had never travelled before and, though nervous, were uncomplaining. The ship was blacked out from dusk to dawn, and it was extremely hot, being July. Meals were eaten in relays, and all passengers had to be off decks by 10 p.m.
Some British people were aboard, having spent the war years in the States, and they were privately dubbed ‘bomb-dodgers’ by the stewards. On arrival, the women and children were handed over to the RAF. Customs officers discovered a thriving smuggling ring on board, mostly in bird seed, which sold for £1 a pound in savagely rationed Britain, and in Cuban cigars, perhaps easier to understand. A transatlantic voyage in wartime was a great chance for shipboard crew to trade in forbidden or unavailable commodities, and considerable ingenuity was exerted to hide contraband from the customs officials.
Cunard alone had transported 2.473 million people and 9 million tons of cargo during the Second World War. Winston Churchill would later bestow the greatest compliment on Cunard when he remarked that the contribution of the two Queens and Aquitania had shortened the war in Europe by at least a year. Winston Churchill had good reason to be profoundly grateful for the crews’ professionalism and dedication. In March 1946 he sailed on the Queen Elizabeth to the United States to deliver what would come to be known as his ‘Iron Curtain speech’ in Fulton, Missouri. During the course of that voyage he agreed, at Cunard’s request, to write a foreword for a projected war history of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth that Cunard planned to publish:
Built for the arts of peace and to link the Old World with the New, the ‘Queens’ challenged the fury of Hitlerism in the Battle of the Atlantic. At a speed never before realized in war, they carried over a million to defend the liberties of civilization. Often whole divisions at a time were moved by each ship. Vital decisions depended upon their ability continuously to elude the enemy, and without their aid the day of final victory must unquestionably have been postponed. To the men who contributed to the success of our operations in the years of peril, and to those who brought these two great ships into existence, the world owes a debt that it will not be easy to measure.17
The war in Europe ended with the German surrender to Allied forces, and was marked by the celebrations of VE Day, 8 May 1945. Worldwide, tens of millions were dead, and many more were homeless or displaced. Many European countries were in ruins, with devastated economies no longer in control of their industrial infrastructure. Help from America in the form of the Marshall Plan was delivered in naval and merchant vessels crossing the Atlantic.
In the months following the end of the war, the great ocean liners helped to repatriate American troops and airmen. With 15,000 General Infantrymen – GIs – aboard (including 4,000 accommodated in sleeping bags in corridors), the Queen Mary received a hero’s welcome in New York City. Newsreel footage of the ship’s arrival shows the decks teeming with cheering, waving servicemen as they pass the Statue of Liberty. The great ships brought home the prisoners of war, repatriated the dispossessed, and carried the stateless to new lives in the New World.
For seafaring women the experiences of wartime had been salutary and a test of their mettle. There were those who had worked aboard the great ships in the 1920s and 1930s, during the golden age of transatlantic travel, when the appeal of the role lay partly in its proximity to celebrity and glamour, and the opportunity to make an independent living. Many of these women, in
choosing a career afloat, had demonstrated that they were resourceful and adventurous, and they were willing to use their sea knowledge and their people skills to support the war effort in tougher times. There had been tragedies: Edith Sowerbutts wrote movingly about the sinking of the City of Benares, and she did not return to working at sea after that ship was lost. There were also instances of extreme bravery, such as Maida Nixson’s determination to escort evacuated women and children to places of safety, and Victoria Drummond’s extraordinary courage in sticking at her post to save her ship and fellow crewmates from enemy attack. Intelligence and stubbornness had also characterised many of the women who had travelled as passengers on the ships during wartime: expatriate Nancy Cunard, who took months to reach war-torn London, and Martha Gellhorn, consummate war writer, who claimed a berth on a dynamite ship to cross the Atlantic, then stowed away on a hospital ship to cover the D-Day landings.
For women of all nationalities who had survived the years of conflict, the post-war world offered new challenges and huge decisions. Many of them had met and married men from overseas, and they now faced moving from one continent to another in order to join their husbands. The merchant navy rose to the challenge by recruiting a new generation of women seafarers, primarily to help reunite far-flung families who had been sundered by war.
10
Romance, Repatriation and Recovery
Bernard and Dora Owens’s long and happy marriage started as a whirlwind wartime romance. He was an American soldier and, by September 1942, was attached to General Eisenhower’s London headquarters. Late one December night, as he hurried into a Tube station through the heavy fabric blackout curtains, he blundered into an attractive English nurse in a crisp uniform, who berated him for nearly knocking her over. Apologies followed, and he escorted her in a cab to her workplace, Mile End Hospital, more than six miles away. Dora agreed to a date, and they swiftly fell in love. Thirty-five days after their first encounter, Bernard proposed marriage, Dora said yes, and they married on 23 March 1943.
Home was a rented apartment in central London, and their son Michael was born in January 1944. Bernard served with the American Army in France and Germany, leaving his wife and son in London, and after the war was over, the family made plans to move back to America. Bernard sailed first, and Dora and two-year-old Michael followed on the USAT Saturnia, landing in New York on 27 April 1946. They moved to Fort Worth, Texas, and Bernard resumed his military career till retiring to San Antonio in 1970. They had been married for sixty-five years when Dora died in 2008, aged eighty-eight. Bernard said that he adored his ‘English nurse’, and that neither of them ever regretted their chance encounter years before.
Dora Owens was one of approximately 70,000 British-born GI brides who left their own country to join their husbands in America during the 1940s. A further 150,000 married women and their tiny children made the journey from mainland Europe. Bernard and Dora’s heady romance and swift marriage was typical of the era; before D-Day, hundreds of thousands of troops from overseas had been stationed temporarily in the British Isles while waiting for an overseas posting to the main theatres of war. Young servicemen inevitably came into contact with ‘the locals’, and proximity, curiosity and mutual attraction often led to romance. American servicemen who married foreign nationals were promised free passage back to the United States for their spouses and any children. Many British women also married other foreign nationals, such as Canadians or Australians.
As soon as hostilities ended in 1945, there was a huge incentive to reunite British and European women and their offspring with their repatriated husbands, as it reduced the number of dependent individuals in each country who were subject to stringent rationing and struggling to find accommodation in the wake of the war. However, the process was slow and there was a shortage of passenger berths for transatlantic travel. The brides themselves clamoured to rejoin their husbands, staging organised protest marches outside the US Embassy in London in October 1945, bearing placards proclaiming ‘We Want Our Husbands’ and ‘We Want Ships’.
In December 1945 the US Congress passed the War Brides’ Act, granting special status to the foreign-born wives and dependants of US servicemen. They were now exempt from the normal restrictions of the immigrant quotas, and all efforts were made to reunite the families divided by the Atlantic. Operation Diaper Run was the name given by the American War Department to the initiative, and some thirty American- and British-owned ships were hastily adapted to accommodate mothers and babies. Shipping companies contacted many of their former female seafarers, and offered them posts accompanying the mothers and babies. There was a shortage of trained female personnel, as so many had been laid off at the start of the Second World War, and they had since found jobs on land. Cunard’s interim solution was to extend the working age for stewardesses beyond sixty if they wanted to continue going to sea, and many stayed on till they were sixty-five or older, happy to fill a relatively well-paid job they found convivial.
The first shipment of brides of Operation Diaper Run boarded the SS Argentina, which left Southampton in January 1946. On board were 452 British women, their 173 children and 1 ‘war bridegroom’. On arrival in New York, a band played ‘Here Comes the Bride’ as the Argentina docked at Pier 90.
Captain Donald Sorrell, captain of the Queen Mary, recalled that his superintendent told him, ‘You’ve taken the men back, Sorrell, now see what you can do with their women.’ The Queen Mary alone transported some 22,000 women and children within seven months.1 The Queen Mary was refitted in January 1946 in Southampton, and sailed to New York on 10 February, transporting 1,700 GI brides and 650 infants to their new lives in America. The ship had been provided with extra laundries, a nursery and a bigger playroom. The area around the first-class swimming pool was altered to be used as a drying room for nappies. There were stewardesses, American Red Cross nurses, children’s nurses and welfare officers aboard. Kay Ruddock of the Red Cross was a war bride escort officer on the Queen Mary; she recalled that it was very sad watching the young women and children saying goodbye to their friends and families as they boarded the ship in Southampton, knowing they were sailing to an unknown future and might not meet again. ‘Lovesick, seasick and homesick’ was how one GI bride described her conflicting emotions and sensations.
There were all sorts of hazards facing the ship and its charges: it was winter and the North Atlantic could be very stormy, while there were still dangers from floating mines and wreckage. Inside the ship there was a severe shortage of high chairs and these had to be screwed into the deck to secure them, as the Queen Mary was notorious for pitching and rolling in rough seas. After six years of severe food rationing in mainland Britain, some women were unable to control their appetites, and over-fed their children too. One proudly boasted to the captain that her two-year-old had just consumed stewed fruit, porridge, eggs and bacon, while a young mother was on her seventeenth bar of unrationed chocolate that morning. The dire consequences of binge-eating while travelling at thirty miles an hour through heaving winter seas were both predictable and unpleasant.
One anonymous stewardess recalled multiple ‘baby run’ trips on Cunard liners. On her first voyage the passengers were mostly Scottish young women, many of whom had been courted by the American soldiers billeted at a camp near their rather quiet town in the run-up to D-Day. Each young mother was taken aboard, and settled with three others in a four-berth cabin, sleeping in bunks to which metal cribs had been attached for the infants:
Oh, they were so happy to see all the food they had, and all their bunks. There was all these babies, and they were so thrilled with all the food they had. They were terribly sick and so were the babies. When we got to New York we helped the mothers take the babies ashore and the American mothers-in-law, you see, all came down to meet them and I remember one American said, ‘what beautiful babies, we’ll have to send our American children over there to get some colour in their faces’, you know. But those girls cried when they left the s
hip, they felt they were leaving England … really leaving England for the last time.2
Before sailing, all the mothers had been briefed about what to expect in America; after all, they were travelling to a foreign country, and needed to understand the culture, the language and the customs. In June 1945 the Good Housekeeping Institute had published a pamphlet entitled ‘A War Bride’s Guide to the USA’, offering practical tips on contemporary American society, slang and popular culture. As the introduction warned: ‘You have undertaken to become an American – just as millions of other people have done before you. Getting to know your adopted country will be an exciting adventure; the future is before you.’ British-born women were advised to be pleasant but reticent at first, and to avoid trying to make jokes until they were on familiar ground.
Operation Daddy was the informal name for the Canadian initiative to reunite GI families; some 45,000 British women, accompanied by 15,000 children, were taken by ship to Halifax in Canada to join their menfolk in the late 1940s. A fair proportion were Scottish-born, a reflection of the large number of Canadian troops stationed north of the border during the war years, and it is estimated that one in thirty present-day Canadians is a direct descendant of a ‘war-bride’ family. Many of the war brides initially suffered from homesickness and culture shock on arrival in North America, and some marriages inevitably failed, though most survived.