We discussed this a few years ago, and this American was surprised to learn that Her Royal Highness actually did real work for the real army in its real war effort; it wasn’t just a publicity stunt.
I have some more questions, five years later.
Did she endure having to stand at attention, be yelled at by a drill instructor, and all of the other things British Army recruits go through?
Did she stay in the barracks with other women?
If the answer to both of those things is No, was her service basically the domain of upper-class women who wanted to “do their bit,” and it was sort of British Army Lite?
I don’t think that any of the women who fixed engines went though being yelled at by drill instructors because they weren’t really combat recruits. They just took classes on how to repair trucks. So, she went through the same training and did all of the same work but did sleep at home.
Actually, most of the civilians doing jobs like that, or shipyard, factory work and the like lived at home, hell, there were pilots that lived at home if they got stationed near home. They certainly billeted pilots in private houses near bases - it was a decent source of income for the civilians.
There’s a bit describing how she scared the crap out of the Saudi prince years ago by driving extremely fast with him in some rocky Scottish backroads on her estate. She did drive Jeeps Land Rovers and trucks, and apparently was quite capable on country roads.
"As instructed, the crown prince climbed into the front seat of the front Land Rover, with his interpreter in the seat behind. To his surprise, the Queen climbed into the driving seat, turned the ignition and drove off. Women are not — yet — allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia and Abdullah was not used to being driven by a woman, let alone a queen.
His nervousness only increased as the Queen, an army driver in wartime, accelerated the Land Rover along the narrow Scottish estate roads, talking all the time. Through his interpreter, the crown prince implored the Queen to slow down and concentrate on the road ahead."
Too much shouldn’t be read into her service. She spent the last few weeks of the war taking (and passing quite well) introductory courses for the ATS, but it was presumably never intended she should go on to regular service, even if the war hadn’t ended. Not quite a mere media stunt, but not exactly the full experience either.
I did see on TV someone explaining that when the King and Queen came to visit the course, and she had to find and diagnose a fault, she was a bit flummoxed, not realising at first that her father had also disconnected some other vital part.
You can get some idea of what regular service might have been like from the wartime movie The Gentle Sex - one of those slightly propagandistic movies where a disparate bunch of different types are called up (in this case women in the ATS) and learn a lot about themselves and each other as they train, adjust to the demands of the job and go into service. There’s a long sequence where they have to drive through the night to make sure the vital supplies get to the port (but she didn’t get to that stage):
She turned 18 in April 1944. She was basically the last cohort age wise who could have been called up for wartime.
I wonder how many British males born in April 1926 saw much more than a few weeks (or months if sent to the Far East) of combat.
Depends if they were sent to other hotspots of local conflict (e.g., Greece, Palestine, maybe - not sure of the details here - Indochina and Malaya). More generally, de-mobilisation was a carefully drawn-out process.
