Women Warriors: Faye Schulman, Jewish Partisan and Photographer

I haven't done one of these for a while, but I came across the story of this fascinating woman recently.
Faye Lazabnik was born in 1919, and when the Germans arrived at the village where she lived in the Lenin ghetto in Poland in 1942, all of her family were killed, along with most of the rest of the inhabitants. She was spared because of her photographic skills - the Germans wanted her to develop their photos of the massacre. She had helped her brother Moishe with his photographic business before the War.
She managed to escape during a partisan raid, and joined the Molotava Brigade, a group of mainly Soviet Red Army escaped prisoners of war. She had some knowledge of medicine because another brother had been a doctor, and she served the group as a nurse for two years, along with a vet who was their doctor.
She managed to retrieve her photographic equipment during a raid on Lenin, and documented the partisan group with her photographs. She wanted to show that the Jews had not gone passively to their deaths, but had fought back.

Here she is with some of the Russian partisans - the picture has been colourised.

After the War, she married Morris Schulman, another partisan, and they emigrated to Canada in 1948, where she still lives in Toronto. She wrote a book about her experiences called A Partisan's Memoir: Woman of the Holocaust.

Dambusters Tea

I occasionally treat myself to tea from the wonderful tea shop in Lincoln, Imperial Teas on Steep Hill. This time they had a new blend dedicated to the Dambusters 617 Squadron; Lincolnshire has strong links to the bomber squadrons of the Second World War, and especially Lancaster Bombers. It sounded interesting, so I sent off for it, and I've just opened the packet to put the tea in my tea caddy.
On the back of the packet, the blurb says that the tea is a blend of a strong, smooth Assam, and a "very special tea that adds a touch of honey, sweet tobacco and malt to the flavour. It also has an intriguing appearance."

They can say that again! It's got bouncing bombs in it! Made of tea!

I'm looking forward to my first cup of it.

Pimpernel Smith

I happened to catch the second half of a new dramatization of The Scarlet Pimpernel on Radio 4 over Christmas.
It was a bit odd, to be honest. Marguerite and Chauvelin had Northern accents - I suppose to indicate that they were lower class French people - and Sir Percy sounded more French than either of them! But it did remind me of the original film Pimpernel, Leslie Howard, and his 1941 anti-Nazi propaganda film Pimpernel Smith, which I remembered with some fondness.
So I sent off for a DVD.
There is, of course, a scene of horrendous sexism at the beginning of the film, where Professor Smith insults the women archaeology students so that they leave the lecture hall, so that he can offer a trip to Germany for a summer dig only to the young men. This is a cover for the activities of the mysterious man who has been spiriting intellectuals out of Germany from under the noses of the Gestapo - the year is 1939. The mysterious man is, obviously, Professor Smith, who is not the typical absentminded professor of archaeology that he appears.
The film was obviously made on a very tight budget, but they disguise it well, especially in the scene at the party in the British Embassy in Berlin, with the wide, sweeping staircase.
In the original Scarlet Pimpernel story, Chauvelin is trying to discover the identity of the Pimpernel at a ball, and is blackmailing Marguerite to help him because her brother is imprisoned in France. In this case, it is General von Graum who is trying to discover the identity of the mysterious rescuer of intellectuals, with the help of Ludmilla, the daughter of a Polish newspaper editor who he has imprisoned.
She makes a very bad secret agent, though the young American archaeology student (I assume he was there to encourage the United States to join the war on the Allied side) pretty much gives the whole game away when he talks to her. Von Graum manipulates her quite easily, but he can't just arrest an Englishman - he has to have the proof that he's helping Germans to escape.
There's a fair bit of comedy as the Nazis try to work out what the tune is that the mysterious rescuer whistles, and a running joke about the identity of Shakespeare, as well as von Graum trying to get to grips with English humour: "'T'was brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe' - is that funny?" he demands.
Meanwhile, there's a romantic sub-plot as Professor Smith changes from a man besotted with the statue of Aphrodite he discovered twenty years before, who says that he deplores the presence of women students at the university, into someone who has romantic feelings for Ludmilla, who he goes back to rescue when the rest of the party crosses the frontier.
As in the original story, the Scarlet Pimpernel and Chauvelin talk at the end of the story, with Chauvelin anticipating the Pimpernel's death by firing squad very shortly, so Professor Smith and von Graum come face to face at a railway station on the frontier, where Professor Smith gives a fine speech opposing Nazism, before escaping with the words: "I'll be back.... We'll all be back."
Those speeches opposing Nazism are still relevant today - sadly.

So, though it's an old and somewhat creaky film, I think it's still worth rewatching.
And without Pimpernel Smith, there might not have been an Indiana Jones....

Women Warriors - WAVES, American women during the Second World War

By the end of the Second World War, around 84,000 women had been accepted into the WAVES programme of the US Navy - standing for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. Around 8,000 women served as officers. Many served in secretarial and clerical positions, but there were also aviation mechanics, photographers, control tower operators and intelligence personnel. In 1944, African American women were also accepted into the programme.
Originally, it was thought that women would only join up for the duration of the war, but in 1948, the Womens' Armed Service Integration Act was passed, allowing women to serve alongside men as permanent members of the armed forces in the US.

Women Warriors - Minnie Spotted Wolf

Minnie Spotted Wolf was a member of the Blackfoot tribe, and she joined the Marine Corps Women's Reserve in 1943 - she was the first Native American woman to do so. She grew up working on her father's ranch, including breaking horses, so she was used to hard outdoor work.
During the Second World War, she worked as a driver for visiting officers in Hawaii and California, and operating heavy machinery.
Her story was even featured in a comic book of the time - "Calling All Girls".
After the war, she trained as a teacher, and she married and had four children.
She died in 1988, at the age of 65.

Women Warriors - Molly Rose, ATA Pilot

My Young Man shared an obituary from the Telegraph with me - of Molly Rose, who has just died aged 95.
She joined the ATA during the Second World War. Women were not allowed to be fighter pilots, but they were needed to deliver planes to airfields as part of the Air Transport Auxiliary. For much of her service - she joined up in 1942 - she was based at Hamble near Southampton, in an all-female unit.
She delivered 273 Spitfires to airfields, and many other types of aircraft including Wellington bombers, Beaufighters and Mosquitos. Later in the War she flew Tempests and Typhoons, which were higher powered Spitfire variants. Sometimes the ATA pilots flew four different types of aircraft in a single day. They flew without radio, and often to airfields which were camouflaged and difficult to find. In all, she flew 486 aircraft of 38 different types - and after the War, she never flew again. She spent the rest of her working life as a magistrate.
She married Bernard Rose, who was a Captain in the 4th City of London Yeomanry during the War, in 1939. After the War he became a Lecturer in Music at Queen's College Oxford. They had three sons. They met while she was an apprentice engineer in the family business - her father was David Marshall of Marshall Aviation in Cambridge - and she learned to fly on a Tiger Moth belonging to her brother, gaining her flying licence at the age of 17.

RAF Hero, Mohinder Singh Pujji

I was reading the excellent blog Spitalfields Life, in which the Gentle Author had a day out in Gravesend - where he found this statue (picture taken from Wikipedia):

Mohinder Singh Pujji was a commercial pilot before the Second World War, and one of the first pilots to volunteer with the Royal Indian Air Force to come to Britain. He flew Hurricanes just after the Battle of Britain, and later flew in the Middle East. He was awarded the DFC during his service in Burma for flying reconnaissance missions over Japanese territory, often in monsoon conditions, to bring back information about Japanese troop movements.
After the war, and a bout of TB that ended his military career, he worked at the Safdarjung Aerodrome in Delhi, and after his retirement he moved to Britain, finally living in Gravesend. In 2000, he was made an honorary Freeman of the Borough of Newham.

In 2005 he protested the use of the image of a Spitfire by the BNP in their leaflets, saying:
"The BNP are wrong to use the Spitfire as representative of their party. They forget people from different backgrounds helped in the Second World War. I am proof of this - I was flying a Spitfire. I also met Winston Churchill. Even in those days, there were ethnic minorities fighting for the British."

Partly because of his comments, the Royal Air Force Museum at Cosford mounted a permanent exhibition in 2009 called Diversity in the Royal Air Force - Mohinder Singh Pujji was guest of honour at the opening.
He died of a stroke in 2010, aged 92.
The statue was erected in 2014.

Women Warriors - Lyudmila Pavlichenko

Otherwise known as Lady Death, Lyudmila was a Ukranian Soviet sniper during the Second World War.

She was creditted with 309 kills, making her the most successful female sniper in history, and one of the top military snipers of all time.
Her hobby before the Second World War was shooting, and in 1941 she volunteered for the infantry, being assigned to the 25th Rifle Division, where she became one of 2,000 female snipers in the Red Army - only about 500 of whom survived the war.
In 1942, she was wounded by mortar fire, and taken out of combat. Instead she was sent on a publicity tour of the USA, meeting President Roosevelt (the first Soviet citizen to be recieved by a US President). Woodie Guthrie wrote a song about her.
She also toured Canada, where she was presented with a Winchester rifle which is now on display in the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow.
In the UK, she visited the cathedral ruins at Coventry, and several factories in Coventry and Birmingham, and collected over £4,000 from Coventry workers to pay for three X-ray units for the Red Army.
Back in the Soviet Union, she became an instructor, and trained snipers until the end of the war.
In 2015, a film of her life was made, called Battle for Sevastopol ("Unbreakable" in Ukranian), and her portrait has also been used on Russian postage stamps.
She died in 1974 after a career as a historian.

Women Warriors - Hanna Reitsch, Luftwaffe test pilot

She was always proud of supporting the Third Reich, and was close to Hitler - she was at the Bunker during the last days of the war, when she accompanied Generaloberst von Greim as he accepted the command of the Luftwaffe after the dismissal of Goering for what Hitler considered to be an act of treason.

But her flying career was remarkable.
She started off in gliders in the 1930s and broke several records for altitude and endurance. She became a stunt pilot in powered aircraft in 1934 for the Ufa film company, and also travelled to South America with an expedition to study thermal conditions. She became a test pilot in 1935.
In 1937 she was posted to the Luftwaffe training centre at Rechlin-Larz airfield, and tested the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and Dornier Do 17 barrage balloon fender projects, for which she recieved the Iron Cross Second Class in 1941.
She was the first female helicopter pilot, too.
In 1942 she test piloted the Messerschmidt Me 163 Komet, which was rocket propelled, making her the first woman to pilot a jet aircraft - and crashed on her fifth flight, spending five months in hospital. For this, she recieved the Iron Cross First Class.
In 1943, she spent several weeks touring the Luftwaffe units of the Eastern Front.
She also test piloted a manned version of the V1 rocket, and trained instructors.
After the war, she spent 18 months being held by the Americans, and after that settled in Frankfurt. As soon as she was able, she started flying gliders again. In 1952, she won a bronze medal in the World Gliding Championships in Spain, the first woman to compete.
She was invited to India by Nehru to set up a gliding school there, and was also welcomed to the White House by President Kennedy. In 1962, she went to Ghana to set up the first black African national gliding school, where she became a friend of Kwame Nkrumah, the president.
She wrote several books about her life, including Ich flog in Afrika fur Nkrumah's Ghana and Fliegen, Mein Leben.
She died back in Frankfurt in 1979 and there were rumours that she had saved the cyanide pill she had been given by Hitler at the Bunker in 1945 for all that time until she, too, was ready to commit suicide.

Women Warriors - Nancy Wake, the White Mouse

Here's Nancy Wake, one of the most decorated service women of the Second World War - and one who had a five million franc price on her head at one point!
She was born in New Zealand, and grew up in Australia, and in 1937 she married a Frenchman, so at the outbreak of war she was living in Marseilles. She became a courier for the Resistance, and it was the Gestapo who nicknamed her White Mouse.
When she reached England in 1943, after escaping France over the Pyrenees, she joined the SOE, who parachuted her back into France in 1944. Once there, she co-ordinated groups of maquis - over 7,000 of them - and led raids herself. Once she killed a German sentry with a judo chop to the throat so that he wouldn't raise the alarm.
I saw a film about her a few years ago, (this would have been the 1987 film called Nancy Wake) in which she rode a bicycle for something like 300 miles, through several German checkpoints, to another group of resistance fighters, to use their radio, and then had to carry the answer back to her own group.
It was only when the war had ended that she learned that her husband had been tortured to death by the Gestapo for refusing to tell them where she was.

After the war, she was awarded the George Cross, the American Medal of Freedom, and the French Medal of Resistance and Croix de Guerre, among other honours.

She returned to Australia, where she married again, and she lived to be 98 years old, dying in 2011.

The Roof at Manchester Victoria Railway Station

I heard the other day that Manchester Victoria had been having a massive face-lift - after it had been voted Britain's worst railway station in 2009. Apparently they have taken off the old glass roof and replaced it with something more fitting for the 21st century as part of the upgrade. "Well," said the chap who told me, "it always used to leak anyway."

But I was thinking of a story my gran used to tell.

During the Second World War, my gran was travelling into Manchester Victoria from Bury (I think) with my mum, then a small baby, in a pram. Prams in those days were enormous, unwieldy beasts, and she could only travel in the guard's van. Which is why she was forgotten when the train was cleared of passengers at Victoria.
So she comes struggling off the guard's van and starts wheeling the pram down the platform - and comes face to face with a Luftwaffe officer! He was in handcuffs between two guards, presumably being taken to a prisoner of war camp. Outside the station, there was a crowd shouting at him through the locked railings - this was after Manchester had taken quite a bit of bomb damage, after all, and they wouldn't have been kindly disposed towards him if they'd got their hands on him.
Nana remembered him ignoring the crowd, and looking up at the roof of the station, with the glass shattered by bomb blasts, and she said he looked very satisfied, and pleased with what the German bombers had accomplished. Then she was hustled away and let out of a side door.
So I always used to look up at that old roof when I went through there, and think of my gran meeting the Luftwaffe officer.

Women Warriors - Hazel Ying Lee

She started off as an elevator operator in a department store in Portland, Oregon, until she discovered flying, saving all the money she could to take flying lessons.
In 1932, she became one of the first Chinese-American women to gain a pilot's license.
When China and Japan went to war against each other, she travelled to China to volunteer for the Chinese Air Force. Because she was female, she was given a desk job, and only managed to fly occasionally, for a commercial company working out of Nanjing.
She spent nearly a year as a refugee in Hong Kong, but returned to the United States in 1938.
In 1943 she joined the Women's Airforce Service Pilots as their first Chinese-American pilot. The women pilots ferried planes from the factories to airfields across North America. On one occasion she had to make a forced landing in a farmer's field, and was chased with a pitchfork as he mistook her for an invading Japanese pilot!
She trained to fly all the US Air Force single engine planes, and it was while landing a P-63 that she crashed, as two planes tried to land on the same runway at the same time. She got the radio message to pull up and try again, the other pilot didn't due to a faulty radio, and they collided in mid-air. Hazel Lee died of her injuries a few days later. She was 33.
Despite flying for the military, the women of WASP were classed as civilians, and were not allowed military funerals.

Women Warriors - the Woman who bought her own Tank

One of my friends has a great interest in tanks, and obscure corners of military history, so when he mentioned "the woman who bought her own tank" I had to investigate further.

This is another Soviet story (like the Night Witches I've blogged about previously).
Mariya Vasilyevna Oktyabrskaya was the wife of a Soviet army officer. Her husband was killed in 1941 - some accounts say her sons were also killed - and she donated her entire savings to the Red Army on the condition that they used the money to buy a tank, and that she would be allowed to drive the tank.
Seeing the good propaganda potential, the Red Army agreed, and Mariya qualified as a tank driver and mechanic. Her tank was a T-34, which she named "Fighting Girlfriend" and she took part in tank battles around Smolensk in 1943, where she was promoted to Sergeant.

In January 1944, she was involved in a tank battle in which her tank was hit by enemy fire. She jumped out of the tank to repair it, and was hit by shrapnel - she spent two months in a coma in a military hospital before dying of her wounds. She was made a Hero of the Soviet Union posthumously.

Women Warriors - The Naga Queen

Or Ursula Graham Bower, as she was more properly known.
After reading about the Night Witches, I came across another fascinating story from the Second World War, and really, I can't do any better than to direct anyone who's interested to the Daily Mail article (and that's a sentence I never thought I'd type!) They did a feature in Femail on 23rd April 2010, which is excellent.
Ursula Graham Bower was a debutante who went out to Burma before the Second World War and fell in love with Nagaland. She did anthropological work with the tribespeople there. She even made some short films which are now in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
At the beginning of the Second World War, she was asked to organise "her" tribesmen into a scouting force to warn the British of the expected Japanese advance. The British army expected to quickly replace her with a male officer, but it never happened, and in the end they were sending men to her for jungle warfare training. She was made an MBE for her wartime work.
The British called her the Naga Queen, and that's the name of the book about her exploits written by Vicky Thomas. The Americans called her the Jungle Queen, and there was a comic strip of that name about her. She also wrote her own book, published in 1950, called The Naga Path. Fergal Keane, the BBC correspondent, has also written a book about the campaign in the Naga hills, centring on the siege of Kohima, but mentioning Ursula Graham Bower and her scouts. It's called Road of Bones.

Women Warriors - Night Witches

The Germans called them the Nachthexen, but in Russia they were known as Stalin's Falcons, the all female Soviet Russian night bomber squadron of the Second World War. There was also a fighter squadron and a dive bomber squadron. British and American women were allowed to fly in order to deliver new planes to airfields, and other behind the lines flying, but these women went into action.
The night bombers were flying old and obsolete biplanes, the Polikarpov Po-2, which were so slow their top speed was below the stalling speed of Messerschmitt 109s, but they were also very maneuverable, so they were very difficult to shoot down. A favoured tactic was to idle the engine when they got close to their target and coast in silently to drop their payload of two bombs each. They didn't carry radios, and navigated to their targets using an ordinary map and a stop watch. Oh, and because of the low altitude flying and the weight of the bombs, they didn't carry parachutes.
Ground defences were far more dangerous to them than enemy fighters. Being so slow, it was immensely dangerous to be caught in a searchlight beam. So they flew in teams of three; two planes would catch the attention of the ground defences while the third dropped her bombs, and then they would change places until they had all dropped their bombs.
At their largest size, the night bomber squadron had 40 two-person crews, and all the ground support staff were women as well. In the winter of 1942, there are stories of the ground crews having to lie on the wings of the planes to stop them from blowing away in gales - they were only made of wood and canvas.
The pilots flew 24,000 sorties in all, from 1942 to 1945. The number is so high because they flew multiple missions in a night. By the end of the war, the surviving pilots had all flown over 1,000 missions each, and 23 of them were awarded Hero of the Soviet Union medals (as comparison, Leonard Cheshire was awarded a VC for sustained courage over more than 100 missions in a Lancaster bomber).

Kindertransport and Kosher Food in Blackpool

I was reading Bookwitch's blog today (www.bookwitch.wordpress.com, on 22nd November), in which she attended a performance of a play about the Kindertransport on the concourse of Manchester Piccadilly railway station. This happened in 1938, when hundreds of Jewish children were sent out of Nazi Germany by their families to safety in England - many never saw their families again. Suitcase is being performed at ten stations around the country to mark the 75th anniversary of the Kindertransports.

It reminded me of one of my gran's stories.
She was evacuated from Manchester at the beginning of the Second World War because she was pregnant, and sent to Blackpool (the coach they were in went round and round the streets about three times before they were found somewhere to stay). She ended up in a group taken in by Mrs Colenso, who ran a boarding house - which began a friendship between them that lasted over fifty years.
Also in the group of pregnant women was an Orthodox Jewish woman - and she had a problem. None of the food Mrs Colenso was cooking was kosher. The woman was eating slices of bread and butter, but not much more than that - and one of the other women was quite deliberately eating the bread and butter first, because she didn't like Jews.
My gran was the sort of woman who couldn't stand by and do nothing - so she went to Mrs Colenso and explained the problem.
"But, I don't know how to cook Jewish food!" Mrs Colenso said. "What can we do?"
My gran suggested that they find a Jewish family in Blackpool that the woman could have her meals with, and somehow they found a couple who were willing to feed her. It all had to be done on the quiet, because Mrs Colenso was in charge of all the ration cards for her guests, and for this to work, she had to hand over the Jewish woman's ration cards to the couple who were buying the food. No-one in authority ever found out, and the Jewish woman was able to have her baby in Blackpool, safely out of range of the German bombers.