|
A good bit of the screen-time in Episode 6 of "Masters of the Air" is spent with Rosie Rosenthal and his crew at a "flak house" in southern England. Like the hero in my novel "Courage to be Counted" (Jack Nielsen), Captain Rosenthal is not at all happy about being taken out of action. He too doesn't recognize how much he needs a psychological and physical respite from the horrors of war.  Stanbridge Earls, Romsey, Hampshire (1943) (photo credit: Imperial War Museum, UK) Owners of large country estates in Britain offered their properties to serve as rest-and-recuperation homes, dubbed "flak houses" by the airmen. While the estate staff (cooks, laundry, grounds maintenance) were British, Red Cross Girls were in charge of creating and running the daily recreation opportunities. The women we saw riding bicycles with a group of men as Rosie and his crew arrived at Coombe House were likely American Red Cross Girls -- at the flak houses they frequently wore civilian attire as the goal was to help the men put the war out of their mind.  The real Coombe House is located on a 50-acre estate at Shaftesbury in the Dorset countryside. It was a hotel when it was converted to USAAF Station 523 and open as a recuperation facility for USAAF officers in September 1943. In late 1945, it converted to a Catholic independent day and boarding school for girls, St. Mary's School, and operated as such until it closed due to financial difficulties in June 2020.  In his chronicle "Flak Houses Then and Now: The Story of American Rest Homes in England during WWII," Edward Hohman notes that fliers who spent time at Coombe House recall the bar was situated below the grand ballroom and that the men wrote their names and bomb group number on the walls and ceiling. Unfortunately, unlike The Eagle, a historic bar in Cambridge which still sports similar grafitti as pictured here (photo from own visit to The Eagle as part of the National WW2 Museum's "Masters of the Air" tour led by Dr. Miller), the room was redecorated at some point during its time as a girls school. Hohman also notes that Coombe House was one of the flak houses where 8th Air Force psychiatric consultants studied the results of the flak house program.
0 Comments
Episode 5 of "Masters of the Air" gives us only a quick glimpse of the Red Cross Girls serving doughnuts to the men as they head out to the flight line. So I've decided to use this space this week to expand a bit more on the history of the clubmobiles.  Clubmobile Convoy attached to General Patton's Third Army advancing into Germany in early 1945. Photo credit: Ollie Atkins for the American Red Cross (US National Archives) The GMC truck models pictured above were first introduced in North Africa and would become the primary Clubmobile used in continental Europe following the D-Day landings in summer 1944. This model was suited to rougher terrain than the Green Liner bus model used in the UK.  Red Cross Girls assigned to Clubmobile groups slated to follow the invasion forces in summer 1944 receiving training on how to extricate the Clubmobile from a mud-filled shell crater outside London. Photo credit: Margaret Zaines, Red Cross Correspondent (US National Archives) The women assigned to the Clubmobile groups that followed the invasion forces across the Channel in summer 1944 were given a driving course (and instruction in basic maintenance and repairs) around London. It was fairly typical for each 3-woman crew to designate a primary driver, but they all took the course, and as pictured here, were expected to understand how to navigate muddy roads.
I would love to include screenshots from the Masters of the Air official trailer of the snippet that included the interaction of a Red Cross Girl character with one of the bomber crewmen (but I'm afraid that is probably not a good idea from a intellectual property perspective!). My next thought was that I would share a photo of a Red Cross girl that is in the public domain that might convey the emotional import conveyed so poignantly in that trailer snippet.
But the vast majority of the public domain Red Cross Girl images were, in essence, publicity photos -- the entire point of those photos was to convey a sense of normalcy, even a note of joie de vivre, for the folks back home. Smiling Red Cross Girls and laughing soldiers, those were the images the government photographers were directed to capture.  American Red Cross Clubmobile "Phyllis" at Alconbury base of USAAF 92nd Bomb Group (1943). Credit: United States Army Air Forces, National Archives (public domain). Given the long hiatus since I blogged (or vlogged), I thought a good starting point to rejuvenate this space would be to revisit how I learned about the Red Cross Girls, who they are, and why I chose to feature them as heroines in my WW2 novels.
I have always been drawn to WWII novels, and shortly after I attended a writing conference, I decided to write a historical romance set during the WWII years. I read Emily Yellin’s excellent book Our Mother’s War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II, which describes the many roles that women played beyond the iconic defense plant work of Rosie the Riveter. I discovered that the Red Cross deployed thousands of women overseas (all over the world, not just Europe) and that the work of these women often took them closer to the front lines than even combat nurses. These women were also ahead of their time on so many levels in that they all had a college degree, some career experience, and possessed a mix of intangible attributes such as charisma, resilience, and resourcefulness. Further, the contributions of these daring and courageous women had largely been lost to history, and I knew I wanted to tell their stories. |
AuthorI'm the author of historical romances set during WWII. Archives
February 2024
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed