This article appeared in  the August 2002 edition of Macleans Magazine.
  WHEN FRIEDA BINDMAN joined the Women's Royal Canadian Naval Service (Wrens) in early 1943, she assumed the navy would make use of her university studies in French and German as an interpreter. But after training as a wireless telegraphist, Bindman found herself assigned to the signals branch of naval headquarters in Ottawa. On her first night as duty officer, she received an
assignment that would have made the oldest sea salt jittery. "Late that night," recalls Bindman,now 85 and living in Ottawa, "a red-tagged [immediate action] message was lowered through the hole in the ceiling that connected us to the operational intelligence room. Stamped MOST SECRET, this diversion signal ordered us to warn our ships that a U-boat was in a certain quadrant. I had to choose the code that would be understood by both Allied naval ships and one very special merchant ship: the Queen Mary, crossing the Atlantic with 15,000 Allied soldiers aboard."

Bindman and almost 7,000 other 18- to 45-year-old Canadian women served in the Wrens, an almost forgotten service celebrating its 60th anniversary with a reunion on the Labour Day weekend in Edmonton. Now in their 70s, 80s and even 90s, these women who answered their nation's call to "Release a Man for Sea Duty" are fiercely proud of their role in helping to defeat Hitler's war machine. While they mostly worked away from the battle lines, many faced enemy action or threats of imminent attack.

In September, 1940, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, 28-year-old Irene Carter went to Ottawa on a mission to get Canada to follow the British Royal Navy's lead and establish a women's service that would free men, especially those engaged in electronic intelligence, for action at sea. "In 1940, the navy wasn't interested," recalls Carter who worked as a Morse telegraph operator for CN Telegraphs in Winnipeg. "But when I went back in the fall of 1941, it was feeling the pinch of a manpower shortage." Within days of establishing the service on July 31, 1942, three British Wrens on loan to Canada had travelled across the country torecruit what would become the nucleus of the service.

By the end of August, the first class of 67 Wrens entered basic training in makeshift quarters in Ottawa. Upon completion of the course, 22 of these recruits became naval officers, the first women to hold this rank in the British Empire.

Carter, who in 1945 won a British Empire Medal for meritorious service, was one of the first Wrens sent to secret wireless telegraphy stations scattered along the East Coast. Some of these posts were so isolated that attack by Nazi U-boats was a very real possibility. Audrey Jamieson, now 78, and Frances Mills, now 92, were two of some 50 Wrens who lived through at  least one such terrifying night in late 1944 on Nova Scotia's Atlantic coast. "Our building was very close to the shore," recalls Jamieson, then 20. "We were at our oscilloscopes when the two male technicians who ran the generator came in, told us there was a U-boat alert and set up a Bren gun and several Sten guns on the floor pointed toward the back door. They asked if we knew how to use them and, even more importantly, if we knew how to set off the dynamite that was positioned next to the cages in which we sat with the equipment." As it turned out, there was no enemy landing, but 60 years later Mills's voice still sounds a military note when she recalls:"Our orders were simple. Blow up the equipment first. Getting out was secondary."

The exigencies of war meant that very young women were sent overseas to serve in highly sensitive positions. Among them was Tish Manley of Ottawa, who in 1944 went to Newfoundland (then a British colony) where she served as a plotter in the Combined (Air Force/Navy) Operations Centre, three stories below an unassuming building in St. John's."Looking back, I can't believe how much responsibility they gave us girls. We were 20, 21, 22, and there we were, deluged with ever-changing bearings, speeds and positions of our ships and the U-boats, climbing up and down the ladders, changing the placements of the push pins and coloured strings that told where we believed our ships were and where the U-boats were."

The Wrens who served in the Newfoundland capital lived a more normal life than did those who served at the isolated stations. "But," recalls Manley, "everything we did was secret. We could not tell anyone -- and we never discussed what we were doing. No matter what we saw down there, when we left the operations centre, we had to have a smile on our face."

Among the 500 Wrens who served in England were Jenny Pike of Victoria and Blanche Lund of Toronto, who vividly remembers the V-2 attacks on London of late 1944 and 1945. "One rocket exploded when it hit a barrage balloon [a large tethered balloon intended to block the V-2] above the theatre we were playing in," recalls Lund, who together with her husband and professional
dance partner and choreographer Alan performed in Meet the Navy, a successful wartime variety production praised by such luminaries as Noel Coward and Rex Harrison.

A darkroom technician before she joined the Wrens, Pike slept in the basement of the Canadian naval mission in London to avoid the bombing. Late on June 7th, 1944, in her darkroom, she became one of the first to see pictures taken by Navy photographers of Canadians landing the  day before -- D-Day -- at Juno Beach. "It was thrilling to see, after five years of war, the beginning of the liberation of Europe," recalls Pike, who now lives in Victoria. "I can still feel the pride of having been there and getting the photographs out by wire photo to the Navy." Those very photos were transmitted to newspapers in Canada and used by naval intelligence.

By 1943, the Wrens had become so vital to the war effort that the government launched a PR campaign to "overcome the tradition that women's place is exclusively in the home . . . or at least not in military uniform." A confidential memo issued by the Wartime Information Board in March 1943, advised that recruitment material aimed at women should appeal to patriotism and avoid using "coy" advertising that put the decision to enlist on the same level as choosing a hat. It should also "emphasize the fact that only the Nazis, with their medieval view of women's place, exclude them from participating in the services."

For years after the war, when Elsa Lessard, who used to listen for U-boat transmissions that were always preceded by a telltale call signal, heard her water kettle boil she'd reach for paper and pen, ready to copy down another Morse code broadcast. "In the years I was at Coverdale [a secret listening post outside Moncton, N.B.], I must have copied down scores of messages to and from U-boats and sent them on to the Enigma code breakers. Many were important, but none more so than when we scooped the world after intercepting the message Admiral Donitz sent to his fleet announcing Adolf Hitler's death. It had been a long war, and we were all very proud of the role we played for our country."

Oct 1/22