Combatants or Non-Combatants? Women in Mixed Anti-Aircraft Batteries during the Second World War

The Second World War meant women adopting traditionally male roles previously considered unsuitable for them. In this article Dr De Groot details one such example—women's experiences on gun batteries—and examines the dichotomy exposed between women's perceived roles in society, and those they were forced to adopt by the weight of circumstance. This contradiction is neatly’ exposed by Dr De Groot in the many illustrations , he provides of individual experiences, particularly the fact that women were allowed to do all the work on the batteries except actually loading and firing the guns. This allowed society to believe that gender roles were being mantained by this supposedly non‐combatant compromise. This is an interesting and ‘timely’ account of what one woman called the forgotten army of the Second World War.