Partners in Blue

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{detailed description}In her Prologue Mrs. Bentley Beauman writes: 'The Royal Air Force has had a varied relationship with the Women's Royal Air Force. Since both came into being on April 1st 1918, what is often considered as the parent service may be regarded as a twin.'
When one considers the story, compressed in the short space of one book, of how women contributed to what appeared an essentially male activity, the war in the air, one realises that history misses a dimension : the women were all-important, and this importance has not been sufficiently stressed. Without their services—and their deaths—the Battle of Britain might have proved to be a useless effort : and this is but one in a series of victories where a true 'partnership in blue' paid dividends.
After fifty years of such devoted service it is worth while to ask what were the comparative contributions of the fighter pilot in his Spitfire, or the girl brooding for days over the photographs of German positions laid out for study on her desk. Over 180,000 women were 'partners in blue' during the Second World War. The woman in blue who spotted the German flying bomb in a photograph of Peenemunde was an heiress of those who, in 1914-18, daubed distasteful `dope' on to the wings and bodies of our fighters (stifling the smell of pear-drops, as did the women who 'doped' the fabric of our barrage balloons in the Second World War), and who took on such incidental duties as the care of carrier pigeons and the conduct of meteorology.
Mrs. Bentley Beauman has had access to all the relevant records which enable her to describe an astonishing achievement, over fifty years: the emergence of an organisation which began with a few suspect females and has ended in a true accord.
{Author / Publisher / Date}by Katharine Bentley Beauman
published by Hutchinson 1971 1st edn. 308pp illustrated, index, appendix, bibliography 16x24
{condition}boards damp stained, text block unaffected, otherwise good in tape repaired d/j.
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