War Stories: Experiences of Women in the Second World War

After listening to his mother-in-law talking about her experiences in the Second World War, David Bolton set out to record the wartime memories of British women before it was too late. Many of those he interviewed were child evacuees, some were single mothers, two were ambulance drivers and another was the girlfriend of an American GI killed on D-Day. Other women remembered their experiences working as a young doctor in a POW camp, in a munitions factory filling shells or as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park.

War Stories archives the memories of over fifty women in their own words, supplemented by memoirs and diary entries. All tell their very personal war stories with honesty, humour, an amazing memory for detail and a boldness sometimes bordering on the confessional – perhaps because this was their last chance to describe what it was really like to be female in those extraordinary times.