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ATS girl in full marching order, with gasmask satchel strapped across the chest and gascape rolled and attached to the shoulders. The water-bottle is slung on the left hip in a leather 'cradle'; the steel helmet is looped by its chinstrap to the left shoulder-strap of the tunic. The kitbag is dark blue. (Imperial War Museum) 

power so striking, that no state can afford to ignore the potential contribution of women. Against heavy initial opposition from conservative elements, women came to play a vital rôle in the British war effort of 1914-18, though at this stage almost exclusively on the home front. Their social emancipation is generally recognized too owe a direct and incalculable debt to their participation. As in so many fields, the lessons of war were forgotten in peacetime, and the outbreak of World War II found the authorities unprepared for the task of harnessing the willingness and skills of the nation's women. Their contribution had not been forgotten, however, and despite isolated examples of resistance to the idea of women in the services, the movement was not seriously hindered. Once again hundreds of thousands of women left the more or less narrow confines of home life and learned to practise a multitude of crafts and trades; and under the new conditions of total war, the gap between their duties and those of their menfolk grew ever narrower. Women worked in munitions factories, on the railways and the road transport systems, in a thousand different clerical jobs, in sophisticated communications duties, on combat airfields, at sea, in overseas combat areas, as pilots, as searchlight crews on operational anti-aircraft sites--their rôles became integral with the national military effort, far beyond their traditional province of nursing the wounded. 

Apart from the uniformed women's military services of the main combatant powers, which are the subject of this book, there were also many volunteer organizations formed especially to aid the civilian and military authorities. Their contribution, too, was incalculable, but to describe them all would be impossible in a study many times this size.

Great Britain 

The ATS 

The decision to raise the Auxiliary Territorial Service for women as part of the Territorial Army was taken on 9 September 1938; like all other British women's services, this was a revival of the concept which had short-sightedly been abandoned in the years after World War I. The grant of a Royal Warrant gave women official status as an integral part of the army, and by the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939 no less than 17,000 women had enlisted, under the leadership of Dame Helen Gwynn-Vaughan. 

The first units of the ATS joined the British Expeditionary Force in France late in the winter of 1939; these were bilingual telephonists who manned army telephone exchanges in Paris. Their short stay in France ended with the collapse of the Allied armies in June 1940, and they were evacuated, all arriving home safely on 16 June. The next group to see overseas service were a detachment of twenty officers who were trained