Name: The unsung heroines of D-Day | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2025-06-20T17:37:58.000Z
Duration: 4 min 49 s
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29-year-old Welsh nurse, Iris Bower, was one of the first British women to arrive in Normandy.

After the D-Day landings in June 1944, she faced down hostility before she'd even reached the beaches.

We don't want any bloody women in this outfit, one of the medical orderlies told her.

But with the biggest amphibious invasion in history underway, women like Iris were vital to allied victory.

Made in partnership with the Open University.

The allied campaign to liberate Europe and defeat the Nazis has long been immortalized in Hollywood films like Saving Private Ryan.

By August 1944, over 2 million soldiers had landed in Northern France to fight the Germans.

Much less well known is the crucial role hundreds of thousands of young women from all walks of life played in this epic military mission.

Undeterred by male detractors, Iris was one of two women from the Princess Mary's Royal Air Force Nursing Service who crossed the channel five days after the invasion began.

Provisions were basic, sleeping in slit trenches, washing from a bucket, bombs exploding overhead.

The nursing sisters worked tirelessly in a temporary field hospital, where over 1,000 wounded soldiers were treated in under a week.

Broken, burnt, bullet-ridden men depended on them.

Iris recalls, their faces looking at me, because I had a tin hat on, battle dress, a pack on my back, and a big red cross on my arm, and she always wore her red lipstick.

Back in Britain, 18-year-old Ruth Bourne was fighting the same war as Iris and the men on the beaches, but from a North London outstation, part of the Bletchley Park code breaking nexus, Ruth operated the giant noisy bomb machines used to crack the German Enigma codes.

In June 1944, her workload was particularly heavy.

Thousands of women had been recruited to intercept, translate and process these encrypted enemy messages, yielding crucial intelligence for the army fighting across France.

But no one could know about their important work.

These women signed the official Secrets Act, and Ruth explains, once we were in, we couldn't leave, the stakes were high.

Other women found themselves far nearer the action, much of anti-aircraft command, which protected Britain against airborne attack.

They operated radar, height finders and predictors, cutting edge technology used to plot the course of enemy aircraft.

Although frequently exposed to enemy raids, their non-combatant status meant they could do everything but load and fire the guns.

26-year-old Ena Collymore-Woodstock was one of approximately 100 women recruited from the Caribbean to serve in the auxiliary territorial service in Britain.

Initially, she was given the role of clerk in Gilford, Surrey, but Ena had not traveled all the way from Jamaica to sit behind a desk.

No, sir, I was tested and told I could go into any unit, I selected anti-aircraft.

And became a radar operator, Gunner Girl Ena was one of thousands of ATS volunteers posted across the channel to defend newly liberated Northwest Europe.

In the months following D-Day, with the allies pushing through France and beyond, thousands more women were required on the continent as cooks, orderlies, clerks, drivers and operatives.

Many young women longed to go, although some faced strong opposition.

As Prime Minister Winston Churchill commented, Papas and mamas did not want their daughters serving in Europe, heavily outnumbered by men.

Women in the military were expected to manage sometimes overwhelming male attention and not get pregnant.

But despite the rigid gender divides and inequalities, most women relished being part of the war effort, it changed their lives and they changed the outcome of the war.

Nurse Iris Bower was awarded an MBE for her war work, late in life, she still remembered the soldiers in her care, one shouted out, Adolf, you've had it now, when he saw me.

Operation Overlord could not have been executed without the dedication and work of hundreds of thousands of brave women at home and abroad, 80 years on, their vital role in this extraordinary story is finally getting the recognition it deserves.

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