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Title	INTERVIEW WITH MISS PATRICIA DANIELS
Description	I wanted to go into the WAAF as a wireless operator but wasn’t able to finish the course as my ears could not cope with it. It wasn’t so much the noise as the pressure and the constant buzz. They had a very sensible rule in the air force that if you failed or didn’t complete a course you had to go off and do “dogsbody” work for 6 months or so. I was a scholarship girl and as clever as the men but the opportunities for women were not there. At one stage I didn’t feel that I was doing very much. I was a messenger boy, really, running round delivering forms etc.  This was just filling in time between proper jobs. In fact, Mr Screeton (the Head of Hemel Hempstead Grammar School) was appalled and I think wrote a letter saying I should be used more usefully. Whether that hastened my going off on training, I don’t know. Life as a Radar Operator    Then I got retrained as a radar operator and that was much better. I was stationed first on the Suffolk border attached to Fighter Command monitoring planes coming in. We could tell whether they were ours or not because they were equipped with FFI – Friend or Foe Indication. There was equipment in the aircraft that gave a pulse at intervals and we could see that on a screen. The people doing the plotting needed to know that so they could tell when the fighters were getting near to the stream of incoming aircraft. Our Nissan huts were literally in the middle of a field and the station was about a mile down the road. There were probably about 7 people and the mechanics on watch at any one time. We were looking at a screen like a TV screen with a zig zag line and from that you could tell where the aircraft were, how far away they were and you could get their direction and also their height. So, someone was sitting looking at that, someone else was relaying the information through to Fighter Command, someone else was logging it in a book. We had a map on a table; perspex with a light shining through it and this was really very trying on the eyes especially in the middle of the night when you had been on duty for several hours. Someone tracked the aircraft on the map with a china graph pencil. You could see what was happening and give them a picture. Then that information was sent through to Command Headquarters they put it on a map. We couldn’t tell if someone had been shot down. When we were tracking them there was a mass (of aircraft). Working With Bomber Command   Then I went off on another training course and was in the south east between Deal and Dover with Bomber Command. We were controlling the planes. I was working on “oboe,” in fact. A little bit of mathematics. The intersection of two arcs give a pin point and that’s where you tell them to drop their bombs or their markers. There were two stations, ours and one on the Norfolk coast and we worked in partnership. One tracked the pilot and sent out beams when he got near the target and tracked him onto it. If he deviated from the track he got dots on one side and dashes on the other.  A steady note meant keep going on this course. Meanwhile the other controlled the navigator and did the same thing. As soon as he got the signal he pressed the button (and released the bombs). We’d worked it all out with paper and pencil and slide rules beforehand.    A lot of other radar went on that I wasn’t actually involved in. They had “G” where several transmitting stations sent out different time pulses and the navigator in the aircraft could read them. The other one was H2S which was actually carried in the aircraft. It put pulses down to the ground and the navigator could then see a map of where he was.   There were two sorts of radar masts. The tall ones were for high flying aircraft but near the coast they had smaller ones for low flying aircraft and shipping. I don’t know much about the night fighters. There were two crew and the navigator had a screen and he must have had a mobile radar set so he would send pulses out and “see” where the aircraft was and guide the pilot and that’s how they shot someone down. But this was a secret because you were not supposed to know that. “Cats Eye” Cunningham, who I think was one of the pilots would show you round the aircraft and people would say, “Ah yes, he’s got very good night vision.” It was said you must eat carrots. If you eat carrots you can see in the dark.  But of course it had nothing to do with carrots! When I went on the course for controlling the aircraft we had an introductory talk. We were told that the accuracy with which operations were carried out was such that we need have no fears about civilian casualties because that is not what we are aiming at. It was factories, goods’ yards etc. “But if any of you are worried – if you have fathers, brothers, husbands in prisoner of war camps, sometimes operations are fairly close.  The accuracy is such that there should be no problem at all but if any of you are concerned you can say no now and can go off back to your unit or another unit and nothing more will be said.” One girl did go because her father was in a POW camp in northern Germany. Any one of us could have said, “No, I won’t do it. It is against my principles.” There would have been no blame.    I felt no particular guilt about what I was doing. It had to be done to win the war and it concentrated the attack on one particular spot. It was not a personal thing. Although we did meet some of the air crew when they came to see what we were doing, the job was all done at long distance.  The only thing we got really close to was later on when we were controlling Pathfinders, mainly Mosquitos. We were right on the tip of England and could see France. One day we were trying to eliminate the launch sites for V1 and V2 rockets. We were right on the coast and we could see the planes – it was a beautiful day with clear skies, but we couldn’t hear them. We were sometimes shelled by the big guns in Calais which could reach across the Channel. It was called “hellfire corner” down there.   I hadn’t been there long – it must have been the end of 1943 and we had gone with a little group to sing carols at a local hospital. It was interesting because the whole place held its breath for a whole minute. You heard the warning and it went again a minute later if there was going to be shelling. While we were there at the hospital the shelling warning went. We were worried because we were billeted in the town but some young doctors came up and said, “It’s okay. You can go home. They’re shelling further up the coast.”    Another night I was on duty and we were on the heights between Deal and Dover. If we weren’t actually working a few people could go to a little hut outside to have a rest. On this particular night we heard they were going to start (shelling) and I was asked to go outside and fetch them in. So I did and then I thought, “Oh dear, I don’t think I put the lights out. I’d better go back and have a look.” The hut had been damaged. It was just as well I had the wit not to touch the bits on the floor. They would have been red hot. Parts of the shell had come through the roof – it was only a tin roof after all. I scuttled back. The other building was sandbagged so it was alright. All the radar operators were women. We were a bit miffed because later on some of the men who were trained as operators were to go once the invasion (D-day) happened. They were to take the mobile units over and work from there. We thought; dash it all, we had been doing it all these years. Why can’t we carry on but they wouldn’t let us go. All the mechanics were men and so were the controllers who were controlling the operation. They were air crew who had finished their tours. I would have liked to have gone to the continent and played a more active role but I couldn’t have gone anyway because I was not old enough. You had to be 21 to do overseas service in those days. I think if I had been a nurse I could have gone to the Far East or Middle East but the general administrative staff didn’t go until much later when the war was nearly over.   There were no women pilots or air crew and for a long time they didn’t have women working as mechanics on the aircraft. But towards the end women worked as frame fitters and engine fitters. I was involved in D-day in a way. One was aware of things going on but continued to operate as usual. Everything was a bit eerie. There was no one around. There had been lots of troops but they gradually collected down the coast and then went to the continent. We saw the flying bombs (V1s) coming over. We didn’t know what on earth they were. We thought it was an aircraft on fire but making no noise. Escorting a Prisoner At one point I was sent from Norfolk to Yorkshire. I was there for a fortnight and during that time I had to escort a prisoner. This girl had gone absent without leave and had to be brought back from London. Why I was picked I don’t know. There were two of us escorts with the same rank as her and a corporal. The girl was also accused of theft as she had taken a flying jacket. You can imagine Kings Cross station during the war. It was dark, crowded and had very long platforms. Our compartment had been reserved for us right at the front of the train. There were lots of trolleys piled high with mail bags. We thought, “Oh dear, we’d better keep an eye on her.” It would have been only too simple for her to duck behind one of these trolleys and we would have lost her completely. Fortunately she didn’t feel that way inclined. I remember I was clutching the evidence – the flying jacket. I don’t know what happened to her. She was probably confined to camp, lost privileges – that kind of thing. She wouldn’t have been sent to prison or anything like that.     Social Life The social life was good on the big stations. There were dances and various get togethers. There was a cinema where they changed the film twice a week but there was some class distinction. If you were an officer you sat at the back, then came the sergeants and corporals and the others at the front. But it was decreed after a bit that it wasn’t good for the girls to be down at the front with the men. So we were allowed to move back and sit with the stripes!   When we were at the outstations there really wasn’t very much social life. There was no village there and we were on a 3 or 4 watch system so we were working odd hours.  On the 4 watch system you got a whole day off every 4 or 5 days which wasn’t bad. We went to Deal and there was a cinema there. We had one week’s leave every 3 months or a weekend every month. If you lived very far away such as Scotland, you got an extra day for travel. We got a free travel pass for the week away and half price fares for the weekend. Interview by Lynda Abbott and Katie Towse. April 2012
Keywords	WAFF; radar operation, Fighter Command; Bomber Command; "oboe"; G and HS2; V1 and V2 rockets
Collection	Women at War
Place	South East England
Year	World War 11
Conflict	World War Two
File type	html
Record ID number	218

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