BRITAIN'S W.A.A.F.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 178, 30 July 1942, Page 3

BRITAIN'S W.A.A.F.

SOLID ACHIEVEMENT SPECIALIST AIRWOMEN (By A Special Correspondent) LONDON. A year ago the story of Britain's W.A.A.F.—Women's Auxiliary Air Force—seemed to be a sequence of heroic incidents. There was Dorothy Pearson dragging a young pilot from his blazing machine and flinging herself between him and the explosions that followed when the flames reached his bomb load; there was Joan Mortimer calmly emerging from the destruction of the station armoury to start pegging out the sites where unexploded bombs lay buried on the airfield; there was Flight-Sergeant Gartfield lying with a broken back laughing and joking with the girls who were trapped with her in a trench. W.A.A.F.'s were decorated by the King for gallantry and their names appeared on the list of those who had lost their lives on active service.

The W.A.A.F. to-day have got just as good a story. It is a story of expansion and solid achievement. In the two years and a half of the war the W.A.A.F. has grown to more than the size of the whole R.A.F. at Munich time, and by the end of last year it had become the largest women's service in the world. This astounding expansion has been achieved entirely by voluntary enlistment; conscription has had no place in it. For security reasons the exact number of the W\A.A.F. is a secret, but months ago it was admitted to exceed 100,000. The expansion of the women's air service is more than a question of numbers. The R.A.F. is largely a service of specialists, and so are the, airwomen. To a much greater degree than any other of the women's services airwomen are actually substituting for men and releasing more squadrons to take the air.

In the early days there were only five "trades" open to the W.A.A.F.— they could be just cooks, clerks, orderlies, storekeepers or drivers. Now they have opened 54 "trades" to themselves, including such vital jobs as radio location, bomb plotting, balloon operation, meteorology, intelligence reporting, fabric working, parachute packing, photographic interpretation, coding and cyphering, instrument repairing, flight mechanics, armament inspection.

The W.A.A.F. have just won their latest victory! W.A.A.F. flight mechanics in charge of the repair and overhaul of planes are to be allowed to go on test flights to prove they have done a good job. The experiment of training women for work on engines and bodies was started only recently, but it has E roved so successful that it is to e continued on a much bigger scale.

During the first fortnight of her training each W.A.A.F. gets some lectures on the psychology of clothes, but this encouragement is really not needed. W.A.A.F.'s clean their buttons diligently, press their shirts regularly, grumble if their skirts are issued too long. Deliberately, so that the close connection between the W.A.A.F. and the R.A.F. might be emphasised, the badges of rank and the colour and style of the uniform in the two services are identical.—Auckland Star and N.A.N.A.