GUELPH, Ont. When Leah Batty met her future husband in England during the Second World War, he was none too pleased she was working in what was considered a male role as a wireless and radio mechanic.
“He absolutely hated me (for it),” she said of the late Donald Batty. “He thought I was a woman doing his job.”
Like it or not, he couldn’t argue that she didn’t measure up: Batty rose to the rank of corporal (earning a modest five shillings a day) in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) at a time when few women achieved that rank.
Now 87, the Guelph resident looks back fondly at those years for demonstrating women could play a great supporting role in the military. In fact, she noted 181,000 air women, including officers, serving in the Royal Air Force in 1943, a swelling of the ranks as the Allies assembled to break into fortress Europe on D-Day and defeat the Nazis.
“They were preparing to invade in 1944,” she noted.
Batty was one of 1.5 million people who immigrated to Canada in the postwar era to elude tough economic times in the Old World.
Batty grew up in Manchester, where she worked in the city hall treasury department before being called up at age 20.
“I actually wanted to go in the navy because I liked the uniform.”
Instead, she was sent to the air force and, because of her education and intelligence, became a wireless and radar mechanic, learning the trade at a technical college in London in a course condensed to one year from three.
“To us, it was very difficult,” she recalled. She spent the last six months at an RAF radio school.
“The night we were to take the last exam, we were bombed out,” Batty said. “The bathroom door flew off.”
Nine young women were killed on the floor above her. She suffered a concussion and partial hearing loss for a short while.
Grabbing what she could, she donned a bomber jacket over pyjamas and made her way back home to recover.
“Nobody stopped me,” she said, recalling the unconventional dress.
She subsequently make her way to RAF Cranwell, an air crew and officer training facility, to attend radio school, then was posted to a coastal command station at Plymouth. She serviced and tested ground transmitters and radios on visiting aircraft for U-boat hunters.
After that, she worked closer to home on flying training equipment until early 1947, ultimately leaving the service with the rank of corporal.
“Not many women were made NCOs (non-commissioned officers) because it was thoroughly a man’s world,” Batty said.
Despite the hardship, deprivation and danger, Batty fondly remembers those years working alongside other women in blue.
“It was the camaraderie. We were all in it together.” Most of those comrades have since died. “I only have one friend left (from those years).” She continues to correspond with her.
Barbara Havard, 91, also a Guelph resident, was an occupational therapist for the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps shipped out to Berkshire, England, in 1943.
“We went over with six hospitals on the same ship, in order to be in England before D-Day. They anticipated a great number of casualties,” Havard said, adding her 800-passenger craft sailed with 10,000 people aboard.
“My most vivid memory ... was D-Day. The sky was full of planes,” Havard said. “It was tremendously exciting to be there and see that.”
Today, Batty’s heart goes out to Canadians in uniform fighting with NATO forces in Afghanistan trying to rout irregular guerrilla forces. Fighting Nazis was more clear-cut, she says.
“We knew who the enemy was,” Batty said. She and Don were married in 1947 and immigrated to Canada in 1952, eventually raising four children. Don worked as a civil engineer while she went to college and became a supply teacher.