The forgotten story of the Nightingales – the first British women flown into a war zone
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When given the order to “Run”, Leading Aircraftwoman (LACW) Rita Marshall did as she was told. Alongside fellow nursing orderly Lilian West, the 20-year-old darted for cover from the juddering RAF Douglas Dakota that had crash-landed on the Belgium front line.
Unarmed and banned from wearing Red Cross armbands because they had travelled on a supply plane (the Dakota was similarly bare of any humanitarian symbol because of its function), these young women knew they were targets. They laid low in a barn, hidden by a local farmer for days before another aircraft could evacuate them. “Mum joked they were more worried about the farmer than the Germans,” recalls Marshall’s daughter, Cheryl Wood, 70, from Enfield, north London. “He kept knocking.”
Yet Marshall’s typically stoic humour belied the fact that, back home in South Shields, her family had received the telegram everyone dreaded: missing in action. Indeed, she and West very nearly remained so. Thankfully, there wasn’t room for them on the first return aircraft – it was shot down over the English Channel.
What these orderlies fresh from their teens were doing in a conflict zone in the latter years of the Second World War, and without protection, is a story largely overlooked by history books. They were two of around 200 volunteers from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), rather than officer-ranked RAF nurses, who trained as orderlies for the Royal Air Force Air Ambulance Unit from March 1942.
Glamorously christened “Flying Nightingales” by the press, their role was to evacuate wounded servicemen by air. Eighty years ago this summer they became the first British servicewomen to be flown into an active war zone when they commenced their dangerous mission in the days after June 6 1944 – D-Day.
Until then, the Flying Nightingales, none of whom are believed to be living today, had only tended the wounded on domestic flights. In March 1944, women were finally approved by the Air Council for European flights, but the tsunami of Normandy casualties forced the issue.
The first three to fly to France, Corporal Lydia Alford, LACW Myra Roberts, and LACW Edna Birkbeck, climbed onboard with their “first aid panniers” on June 13 at 5am in light rain, one per Dakota. Outbound, the aircraft were packed with supplies; on their return, each woman tended up to 24 men, stretcher cases stacked along each side, the floor filled with the wounded.
More than 100,000 were evacuated by the Nightingales. The women had undertaken a six-week crash course, and it wasn’t a given they had civilian nursing experience – Marshall had worked in a children’s nursery before the war.
Before her death in 1993, Alford recalled instruction in oxygen injections, broken bones, burns and colostomies at RAF Hendon, north London; a “dinghy drill” in a swimming pool, and “several hours” flying on glider exercises. “These were pretty terrifying as they were carried out with the cargo door removed,” she admitted, her recollections collated in A Nightingale Flew: Real Stories of the WAAF Nursing Orderlies by Kara Neave, an amateur researcher and former RAF air traffic controller who is one of very few to research the Nightingales.
In the same collection, Neave recounts how Roberts remembered being kept in the dark as D-Day brewed. “We just did as we were told, but we knew something was happening,” she said. The Nightingales flew from bases at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire; Blakehill Farm, Wiltshire; and Broadwell, Oxfordshire, generally without a seat, balancing on teetering crates.
Upon landing at the battlefields they tended casualties as supplies were unloaded, then kept the men stable on the hairy return flight with little more at their disposal than morphine and “industrial-sized urns” of tea. “Flying over the Normandy coast we could see the aftermath of the D-Day landings strewn across the beaches,” said Alford of that first landing. “Abandoned landing craft; broken tanks; craters; and scattered, discarded equipment. The thing I remember chiefly was the dust, which was everywhere, coming up in great clouds. I tried to make the wounded men as comfortable as possible in that dust.”
Roberts remembered kinetic scenes – and some surprise from the troops. “We could hear the bombing, see the shelling, and sense the snipers in the trees,” she said. “We passed convoys of soldiers. When they saw us in the jeep, they yelled, ‘Blimey, women!’”
And those who flew next, on June 18, recalled hazardous journeys. Corporal Elsie Beer, who amassed nearly 400 flying hours, was in her early 90s when she recounted for Neave’s book the bombardment in the skies and shelling at the airstrip. “Our plane got hit, shrapnel shot through the Dakota’s windows,” she said.
Yet orders stated the Nightingales’ parachutes should be locked up on return flights. They must remain with the wounded, even if that meant going down with them. Two Nightingales, LACW Margaret Walsh and LACW Nora Helen Speed, were shot down airborne and never returned.
The women were committed: one Nightingale, ACW Hodgson, quipped when asked by an American radio interviewer “How would you feel about bailing out?”, “Could my patient bail out on his stretcher?” Yet many remained aggrieved by their treatment. In her mid-80s, West pointed out in a BBC interview in 2009: “We were doing the same job and taking the same risks as the men.”
“They’d sit on ammunition boxes because there wasn’t a seat for them,” says Wood. “And the air crews got a cooked breakfast – the nurses didn’t.” Her mum would have something to say about that. A larger-than-life, nurturing redhead, Wood recalls her always inviting anyone in for tea, keen to feed up friends and strangers alike.
“She was caring and would get on with anyone, that probably made her good at this job,” she reflects. Wood looks like her, but doesn’t quite have her bedside manner, she admits. “She always told me I’d make a good nurse – if I could stand the sight of blood,” she laughs.
Katie Edwards, manager of the Florence Nightingale Museum in London, which opens an exhibition, In Focus: The Flying Nightingales on Sunday May 12 to coincide with Nurses’ Day, says that women’s front-line war histories have been sidelined. “We have the heroes in the sky, on the front line: the men. These stories of women are not well known,” she says.
Neave adds that the women themselves played down their achievements and bravery. “They all gave a sense of ‘we were just doing our job’,” she says. “I don’t think they realised what a profound effect they had. Not only on their patients – I haven’t heard any man was lost under their care. But reverberating through history as trailblazers, inspiring women to come. What they did was unbelievable.
“And I have no idea how they managed on a Dakota with 24 injured men,” she adds. “I have flown in one, it’s like a washing machine. The smell in that metal tube – blood, vomit, cigarettes. They used butter on burns victims. The smell was horrendous.”
Yet the Nightingales tended not to elaborate. Descendants are left unpicking only fragments of detail, piecing together jigsaws with missing pieces, yet they did get a clear sense of lasting trauma. “My mother would start telling the stories and cry,” says Wood. “She recalled men saying: ‘Nurse, can you move my legs?’ and his legs would be gone.”
Later, she evacuated prisoners of war and tended survivors in concentration camps. There was one memory, in Bergen Belsen, she returned to, hesitating to tell her sensitive daughter the stark truth. “She told me about a pile of rags,” says Wood. “She went nearer – it was a 17-year-old boy, so skinny, the most shocking thing she had ever seen.”
The Nightingales all lived with unerasable images. In the same BBC interview in 2009, Beer, in her late 80s, remembered “one man saying he wanted a drink, but he couldn’t, because he didn’t have a mouth”. West described “men crying like babies”.
Corporal Phyllis Bull, whose tunic features in the exhibition, recounted one scene of air crash victims. Her daughter Hannah White-Overton, 63, from Wiltshire, recalls: “She said they seemed just as they’d always been, but when you lifted them from the stretchers every bone in their body was broken, they were like jelly. It stayed with her forever.”
Bull, whose closest brush with nursing before the war had been working as a cleaner in an operating theatre, volunteered for the Nightingales aged 20. She’d grown up in poverty in a Wilshire village, bright, yet forced to leave school at 15, craving adventure. The WAAF, and the Nightingales, gave it to her.
Amid the treasured photos that exist from her war days, she stands proudly in sheepskin flying boots and overalls on the side of a grassy country lane near her family home. White-Overton looks a bit like her, the same petite, rounded figure. The photo was taken by Bull’s brother, George. Nine years younger, he was in awe of her, and later joined the RAF.
Yet despite the pride she and her family felt, her work undoubtedly brought lasting sadness and fear. The role quickly became less adventure, more personal. It became very real.
Bull lost her own fiancé, Bernard, an air gunner, in an air crash. In 1985, aged 54, she wrote down her wartime recollections for the 1985 book We, Also, Were There: A Collection of Recollections of Wartime Women of Bomber Command and spoke of meeting him the night before, and the devastating irony of their farewell. “As I said goodbye he suddenly said, ‘Phyllis I don’t want to die.’ I said ‘Don’t be so silly, of course you’re not going to die’.”
As an orderly she could have attended his crash but her peers stopped her in time, warning her away.
“What happened to Bernard made it very real in a horrific way to her,” says her eldest daughter, Rosemary Smeeton, 77. “And she didn’t want that world. She was an idealist. She wanted a better world of safety and peace.”
To that end Bull remained ferociously dedicated, persisting with her work but nevertheless scared. Smeeton, who lives near Weymouth, describes the deep sense of “responsibility” she bore for the men, and how the deep chill of the Dakotas always dogged her. “She recalled how awful it was to see these wounded airmen and keep them warm. She managed to get knitted blankets to go over the top of the RAF issue so it felt a bit homely.”
The blankets were Bull’s attempt, Smeeton thinks, to make the men feel “safe”. It was a trait she saw in her mum throughout her life. After the war she became a medical secretary, but then a teacher. “She cared about people,” she says. Both daughters were inspired by her to become teachers, too. Yet Smeeton adds, tellingly: “She never flew after the war.”
As a group, the Flying Nightingales weren’t decorated for their outstanding courage. Only in 2008 did the seven remaining collect lifetime achievement awards from the then Duchess of Cornwall.
Sadly, Marshall had passed away in 2002, but she was delighted to attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace with some of the Nightingales before her death. Wood still smiles when she looks at the photograph of her and her mum standing outside the palace gates, and was moved to see how the other Nightingales flocked to Marshall that day. “‘Red’ they called her because of her hair – they said ‘Red, we’d know you anywhere!’,” she remembers. “She stood out, she brought people together.” They also said something else. “They said Mum was a heroine,” she adds, quietly.
Marshall was reunited with West that day for the first time since their barn escape. “They laughed about the farmer,” recalls Wood. Before we finish chatting, she reveals Rita was actually her mum’s middle name. Her first? It was Florence. Of course.
In Focus: The Flying Nightingales at the Florence Nightingale Museum runs from May 12 to December 2024
