Drawn by the opportunity of independence and adventure, more than half a million young British women answered the call to arms during the Second World War, leaving behind sheltered home lives for the rigours of the armed forces. 

To mark the 70th anniversary of VE Day, two Hampshire women have have told the Daily Echo their remarkable stories of how their lives were changed forever  by the outbreak of war.

Daily Echo:

One was Jessie Denby, who is pictured above.

The 93-year-old says: "We worked with the men, marched with the men and ate with the men, but despite what the tabloids claimed, we didn’t sleep with the men.

 “I mean where would we anyway? There were so many of us in the barracks.”

Jessie was just 17 when the war broke out in 1939.

Two years later, and by then engaged to a soldier she had met whilst working in a greasy spoon, Jessie was determined to do something to help the war effort.

Daily Echo:

She joined the women’s branch of the army – the Auxiliary Territorial Service, or ATS, and became one of the first women to be posted to an anti aircraft (ack-ack) battery, where she worked on a height and range finder.

Daily Echo:

She was sent to gun sites all over Britain and put her life at risk night after night in intense bombing raids whilst protecting cities, such as Hull.

“Hull was the worst bombed city I ever saw in Britain,” says Jessie.

“I was on Humberside for about a year and the raids seemed to go on and on and every time I went back there after I had been on leave, there seemed to be less and less of the city.

“There must be hundreds of shells lying at the bottom of the river Humber.”

To avoid giving the Germans the opportunity to gloat at the devastation their bombings were causing, the newspapers never mentioned Hull, instead they made vague references to raids on a north east coastal town.

Jessie received a letter from her fiancé, Jim, in which he told her that he would be shipping out soon, but didn’t know where.

He asked whether they could get married before his posting, so the wedding was arranged and the newlyweds spent a week together in Leeds before returning to their individual barracks.

When Jim’s embarkation leave came through a few days later, the couple once again spent time together before Jim was deployed. Jessie was 21 years old and had been married for just three weeks when Jim was killed in action.

She would later find out that his convoy was attacked in Tunisia. “Jim was killed on April 25, Easter Sunday, 1943.

"I often think what would have been if he had made it back, but I never regret it. Marrying Jim was one of the best decisions I ever made,” said Jessie, now widowed, but who went on to marry twice more and have a son, Neil.

The time passed and in the winter of 1944, Jessie was posted to Belgium, where she threw herself into her work.

She and the ackack girls lived in horrific conditions, sleeping in an old German barracks and contending with freezing temperatures and dysentery while defending Antwerp from V1 rocket attacks.

“Belgium was very grim,” she explains. “There was no water, no electricity and no gas.

"It was winter and you needed Wellington boots just to get out of the truck when we arrived as it was so muddy, but within a few days the cold hit and the mud was replaced by frost and snow.

"It really was bitterly cold. “In the beginning there was no water so we got some out of a well and all caught dysentery.

"We had to melt snow to be able to wash with, both our bodies and our clothes.”

During their spare time in Belgium, many of the ack-ack girls volunteered at the local hospital, which was full of people coming out of Fort Breendonk – a Nazi prison camp.

“Most of the nurses in the hospital were nuns,” says Jessie. “And the prisoners were like skeletons, starved and almost worked to death.

"It was horrendous to see. I used to spend most of my time there washing up as I would not have been much use on the wards.”

The war ended while Jessie was in Belgium and she celebrated VE Day at a crazy party with Belgian friends who were over the moon that the conflict was over, having suffered under the German occupation earlier in the war.

“There was a lot of fun at that time as the war was over and we were all waiting to be demobbed,” says Jessie, a keen member of her local British Legion.

“We held a concert one day and I found a long dress which I wore with my army boots and passion killer khaki pants underneath.

"I did a little dance and at the end threw my dress up so that everyone could see the passion killers.

"We had such fun,” she smiles before breaking into a rendition of a few piano tunes in her Chandler’s Ford home recalling her passion for music and dance.

Following VE Day, Jessie was sent to a supply depot in Hamburg where she witnessed the desperate poverty of the German population and the destruction caused by the allied bombing.

“The base in Hamburg was in a wooded area so the British had missed it whilst bombing.

"It had flushing toilets, electricity and running water and that felt like a hotel after what we had endured in Belgium, but the people there were desperate and it wasn’t safe. We had to travel everywhere in groups, it was so hostile.”

Jessie returned to Britain in a journey that took more than 48 hours because of the disruption and destruction of the railway infrastructure.

She was demobbed in 1946 after spending five years serving with the ATS. “I loved my time with the ATS.

"I made some great friends and I felt like I really made a difference.

“If I could go back and do it all again – I would!”

Daily Echo:

Margery Harley, who is pictured above, grew up in a small village near Portsmouth. She was the youngest of three daughters and a shy, timid girl – no-one could believe it when she joined the WAAF, or Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. 

But Margery was prompted to do so when she heard conscription was coming in for women and was horrified to see one of her friends, who was sent to a munitions factory, suffer from TNT poisoning.

She decided it would be better to join the forces than to suffer the same fate.

“I was 21 when I joined up in 1941,” explains the 95-year-old. “It is often made out that women who joined the armed services were looking for romance. But I wasn’t looking for romance.

“I joined because I knew I would be called up and I really didn’t want to go into a factory. I was scared of the machines you see.”

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On the first night in barracks all the girls were crying from homesickness and Margery wondered what on earth she had let herself in for.

After the tough basic training she was sent to Wales to train as an accountant and after she was posted to a barrage balloon command centre in Titchfield.

“I was terribly disappointed to be sent to Titchfield, it was in the middle of nowhere and I had to hitchhike to get there.

"We were going there to replace the men, which they didn’t like the thought of at first, but they soon realised we could do the job.”

Margery spent three years at Titchfield working in equipment accounts in the army stores. Her confidence grew and she was promoted to corporal. 

When the chance came up to serve abroad, she took it without knowing where she was headed.

“When they asked for volunteers to go overseas, I was the first in the queue,” says Margery, a grandmother-of-five who lives in Alresford. “I thought everyone would want to go, but they didn’t.

“Those that did were put on a train with the blinds down and told not to attract attention to ourselves.

"We went to Scotland where we boarded a ship called the Capetown Castle. It was beautiful. There were tablecloths and cutlery and flowers on the tables.

“We were in port for a few days before we realised that the boat had started moving.

!Everything was shrouded in secrecy and we never saw land again until we arrived at Port Said in Egypt.

“I never realised Egypt was a country, I thought it just existed in the Bible!”

Margery was first posted in Kasfareet, an air force base out in the desert where they stayed in huts made of stone, before being moved to Turah, where they lived under canvas and worked in the caves. 

“I’d never liked camping, but at least from there you could get to Cairo,” she says.

“So I got to climb the pyramids and see the Sphinx. It was very hot, but there always seemed to be a breeze, so you didn’t feel too bad.

Daily Echo:

“I wanted to see the pyramids by moonlight, but when I got there one night, there was a bus load of soldiers and they got out and played football, and there were stalls there with egg and chips.

"I just thought to myself this isn’t right – you don’t play football by the pyramids.

“One day we put on a PT sports display in the desert, way out from camp. It was supposed to be a display, but there was nobody there but us.

“Being in Egypt was exhausting though, we used to dance all night and work all day.”

Margery had to work on VE Day, but the following day she hitched into Cairo, where the local people refused to let her pay for her food, instead saying it was free from the people of Egypt as thanks. 

“Before you went home they used to send you on an Educational Vocational Training course in Palestine,” explains Margery, who is now chairwoman of the WAAF Association.

“To learn to do all the things that we had missed out on during the war, like using a washing machine, covering chairs and all sorts of household things.

“My sister was a nurse stationed in Palestine at the time, so I was desperate to go on the course so that I could go and see her.

"It was so nice when I finally could. I spent three weeks in Palestine and the most wonderful thing was walking through the orange groves, they were so beautiful.”

"But with the war over, bit by bit the life she had enjoyed disappeared as people were sent home to be demobbed and when Margery finally got her turn in 1946, she struggled to adjust to civvy life, until she joined her local RAF association, where she made new friends who she felt understood her and met her late husband, Alistair.

“I was very lonely when I came out of service. But I learnt so much when I was there, I went anywhere that I was asked to go and I had an |amazing time.”

Jessie and Margery’s stories are featured in The Girls Who Went to War by Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi, published May 7, for more details please visit: www.girlsatwar.com.