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This story was submitted to the People’s War site by Dorothy MacKenzie for Three Counties Action on behalf of Victoria Little and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

I volunteered for the WAAF and was taken in during 1941. The first two weeks were at preliminary training camp and I had to be interviewed before a board. I was appointed ‘Clerk Special Duties’ which I thought sounded interesting.

I was posted to the RAF station at Church Fenton in the Vale of York. It was a Fighter Command Aerodrome, which had Mosquito night fighters and Spitfire day fighters.

The Mosquito was one of the best planes in the War. It was a multipurpose plane, famous for path finding. It pinpointed the area for the bombers.

I worked in the Operations Room (Ops Room). We were known as ‘Plotters’. Our job was to plot all the aircraft that were in our sector. If they were enemy planes they had a plaque that was black lettering on a yellow background; the minute that these came up, things started to move.

We were given scrambling orders from Group Headquarters who told us what to get airborne. After that it was our own Controllers who dealt with the ‘emergency’ situation. Radar was fairly new but we had forward stations and through radar we got the positions of the aircraft. The information could then be passed to the pilots who searched for the enemy aircraft. We were given figures through earphones to pinpoint the marker to plot the course of the aircraft.

We were in ‘watches’, in operation 24 hours a day/seven days a week. The hours were long and there were three sets of people over the 24 hours. Shifts were - on at midday till 5pm, then back on at midnight till 8am, then 5pm till midnight, then 8am till midday, then we had 24 hours off. It was tiring. Per watch there were about 20 people - generally not all in the room at the same time as some of us took a rest. However, if we were busy we were all in the room.

In addition to the plotters, the Army was in the Ops Room because of the searchlights and the Observer Corps was there for visual spotting.

Group Headquarters informed the Ops Room to tell aircraft on standby to scramble. As soon as the planes were airborne, the Controller took charge of what was happening in the sky and which compass points to go on to intercept. As this was going on we were still getting the bearings for the plotting. Once the pilots visually sighted the enemy, they were on their own. The pilots would ‘come back’ to the Controller to say either if they had hit the enemy plane or lost sight of it. The Deputy Controller would talk directly to the pilots on the RT, obeying the Controller’s instructions.

Life in the WAAF

I quite enjoyed the time - overall much more exciting than life at home. There were some ‘awful’ things such as winter in Yorkshire and living in Nissen huts. We had to go across the grounds in the snow for a bath. The food was awful and we were hungry half of the time. We had one week’s leave every three months. However, there was lots of fun such as going in groups to the village pub and to dances. I was in the WAAF until late autumn of 1945.

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