Abstract
On its back cover, The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing claims to offer ‘a unique perspective on D-Day and its aftermath through the personal testimonies of the Wrens who worked for Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay during Operation Overlord. Like many such claims, this is somewhat overblown, but the book is nonetheless interesting and at times illuminating, although perhaps not in the manner stated above.
The book is divided into three large sections. The first one deals with the period before, during and immediately after D-Day, the second, the period when the Wrens moved across to France with the rest of Ramsay's staff, and the last – perhaps the most interesting – covers the occupation of Germany. It should be made clear from the outset that this book is not a history of D-Day, or indeed of the Wrens of D-Day. The book is predominantly made up of the fully transcribed letters of the author's mother, Joan Halverson Smith. Gaps in her narrative, mostly in the early sections, are filled by another 11 women whose interviews are held in public collections or whose experiences were subsequently published. The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing is primarily a personal narrative of one Wren's experience and is essentially a memorial to Joan Smith's service. The title is drawn from a quotation attributed to Churchill and refers to the fact that the huge numbers of Wrens who played a vital role in the planning and delivery of Operation Overlord kept the secret safe and managed to avoid ‘gossiping’ about it, an arguably rather gendered perspective but probably typical of the time. What this means in the context of this book is that although Joan's letters are well written and incredibly detailed, we learn almost nothing about D-Day from them, as she was rightly determined not to ‘sing’, and was in any case subject to censorship. What we do learn about the operation comes from the other source material and the author's contextual notes and is rarely particularly illuminating for readers with any kind of background in the broader history, although this may not be the case for newcomers to the subject.
However, what The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing does provide, exceptionally well, is a quite remarkable written portrait of an intelligent, vivacious young woman, for whom the war provided an opportunity not only to ‘do her bit’, but also to experience a wider world which would simply not have been open to her in the normal run of things. As the author rightly points out, one of the challenges with archival collections of letters is that often we only have one side of the dialogue, and this is the case with Joan. Nevertheless, through her determination to reply line by line to the information provided in the letters she received, we learn a great deal about the trials and tribulations of her wider family and her relationship with them. Of them all, we perhaps learn the most about Joan's apparently somewhat insecure, controlling and passive-aggressive mother Grace, whose discomfort about her daughter's military service overseas is abundantly clear, even though the reader does not see a single word she wrote.
Sometimes there is too much detail. The book contains every surviving letter that Joan wrote, and she sometimes wrote several times a week, to multiple family members, so it would perhaps have benefitted from a little more ruthless editing. There is considerable duplication of narrative, and it is of questionable interest to see a reproduction of a postcard and a transcript of the note on the back simply apologising for being too busy to write. That said, the reproductions of Joan's private photographs and documents are of interest, and truly help to bring her story to life.
The last section of the book, following the end of the war, is perhaps the most illuminating, not least for the interesting insights into changing attitudes to Germans, as familiarity slowly brought about compassion and understanding, and the way in which the Wrens were seamlessly transitioned from carrying out vital and highly sensitive war work to the gendered norms of 1940s British society. Dances, once a welcome relief from stress and anxiety, become an exhausting and unwelcome trial, with the Wrens bussed around from camp to camp under orders (literally) to provide dance partners for lonely male service personnel. Gradually, with demobilisation underway and the service shrinking, we learn how the women's roles reverted back to men, with Wrens relegated to their traditional place as typists and administrators. Joan at one point had to type up a naval officer's personal memoir; although she received payment and clearly quite enjoyed the work, it is equally clear from her writing that this was not a matter in which she had any choice. Even the least enlightened reader should have moments of genuine outrage at the squandering of the enormous potential inherent in this group of capable, dedicated young women, in an effort to put the genie back in the bottle and restore the social norms of 1939.
Given this pressure, there is a miserable inevitably about the book's ending. Joan left the service, moved to the Isle of Wight to help run the family hotel, and eventually married her wartime sweetheart – a relationship on which the letters shed little light, but which seems at times to have been less than ideal and certainly involved at least one breakup. A close wartime friendship with a charming Royal Marine named Ken, also attached to Ramsay's staff, tantalisingly appears to have been rather more appealing. ‘The marriage’, concludes the author, ‘represented the foreclosure of the diverse possibilities of experience that the war had presented, and its quality of continual coming-into-being’ (496).
It would be decades before the naval service, along with other skilled professions, re-learned the lessons of 1939–45, and began once more to recognise the utter ludicrousness of ignoring the potential of one half of the population simply to allow the other half to retain privileges they had enjoyed for centuries.