Wrens
The Women's Royal Naval Service (abbreviation: WRNS ; German about: Königlicher Marinedienst der Frauen ), in common parlance and also officially called Wrens , referred to the part of the Royal Navy , i.e. the United Kingdom's navy , to which women were accessible. They themselves were also briefly referred to as the Wrens ( singular : Wren , German literally: " Wren ").
organization
This British naval organization was founded in 1917 during World War I to free men for frontline service. The women belonging to her worked, for example, as cooks , secretaries , telegraph operators or electricians . At the end of the war, the service comprised a total of around 5,500 members, of whom around 500 held the rank of officer . In 1919 the organization was dissolved.
With the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 , this female naval service was re-established and the functions for women expanded, who were now also licensed as radio eavesdropping specialists or pilots for transport aircraft, for example . With the most important and highly secret feature some they serve a cryptanalytic machine, called the bombe with the help of the German, Wehrmacht with the key machine Enigma encrypted communications by the British broken could be.
A well-known slogan for recruiting women was " Join the Wrens - and free a man for the fleet " (German: "Come to the Wrens - and a man can join the fleet"). In 1944 the service comprised around 75,000 female members. About 100 of them died during the war. Some received awards and medals for bravery, as in this example from 1946 when the English king decreed that the medals should be awarded to "the Princess Royal , the Duchess of Gloucester , and the Duchess of Kent ". The former was recognized for her leadership role in the Auxiliary Territorial Service since 1941. The second was "Air Chief Commandant of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force ". The Duchess of Kent finally received the distinction of commander of the "Women's Royal Naval Service" since 1940; According to the British Admiralty, she “inspected the wrens at many naval bases and accommodations in all conditions and in all weather”.
The organization was not dissolved again after the Second World War and was finally integrated into the “regular” Royal Navy in 1993 .
See also
- ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) , the women's division of the British Army
- WAVES , the American counterpart to the Wrens
- Women in the military
literature
- Diana Payne: The bombes . In: Francis Harry Hinsley, Alan Stripp (eds.): Codebreakers - The inside story of Bletchley Park. Oxford University Press, Reading, Berkshire 1993. ISBN 0-19-280132-5 . (A Wren reports on her work on the Bombes in Bletchley Park)
