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The women’s work that made D-Day a success

The women’s work that made D-Day a success

From identifying weather windows for invasion or creating plans to – quite literally – foil the enemy, the roles of women surrounding D-Day were varied and vital. Elisabeth Shipton explores the jobs women held during the planning and execution of the invasion, and the ways they can be remembered today

A black-and-white photograph shows Squadron Leader Jimmie E Parker of the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) seated indoors reading a newspaper announcing the D-Day landings. The headline “Invasion Begins!” dominates the front page, capturing the significance of the Allied assault as news of the operation spread around the world.

Published: June 6, 2026 at 1:10 AM

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“I was sent with a team of other Wren officers, to a strange secret hideout in the cellars of the old Barclays hotel, where we sat down in front of huge sheets of statistics, with columns and columns of figures,” former WRNS meteorologist Paulina Nichol recalled. “And all we had to do was add the figures up.”

Nichol was talking about a particular assignment covered by the Official Secrets Act; the plan for when the invasion of Normandy, known as D-Day, would take place. Women, she says, were used “as calculators”, just one of the vital ways that women’s labour shaped the events of 1944 and beyond.

The enormous degree of planning and detailed work that made Operation Overlord and the subsequent battle for Normandy a success is rightly well-remembered, and D-Day is widely commemorated each year. Perhaps less often foregrounded is the role of women, who were involved at almost every level of the operation well before 6 June 1944 – whether as members of the Allied military services or as civilians.

More than 80 years on, it is worth delving a little deeper into the varied ways that women took part.

The women who planned D-Day

RAF Medmenham in Buckinghamshire was home to the RAF’s Central Interpretation Unit. Using photographs from reconnaissance missions, the unit constructed three-dimensional images of key targets. Between 1941 and 1944, the staff grew from 231 to over 1,700, going on to provide key intelligence reports and monitoring the railways around the Normandy area to assess the impact of bombing raids, in a bid to delay German reinforcements.

Read more | D-Day: the spearhead of the invasion

The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) undertook many roles at Medmenham, one being photographic interpreters, who included in their ranks Sarah Oliver – the daughter of Prime Minister Winston Churchill – and Mary Harrison, who crafted physical models of major targets, including the Normandy beaches. Precision was essential, using photographs and maps to recreate every contour and building accurately with papier mâché, plaster of Paris and lino. Mary explained: “You looked for guns and artillery and defence and they were marked usually in red… all the time you were looking for things… that the army or the landing troops could look for.”

This three-dimensional view of the beaches allowed military staff to visualise the landing site, identify landmarks and strategic goals, assess potential enemy strong-points, and plan their progress inland.

The women who trained for D-Day

When preparing to land on the beaches of Normandy, the troops had to practise with the landing craft, and training exercises were timed to the second. Margaret Seeley of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS, and officially known as the Wrens), was stationed at the signals office, HMS Squid in Southampton.

She described her role in a major exercise: “I had to cancel my leave, and I was told to go down to the Hard, which is down in the harbour, and it was the only time in the war I had to wear my tin hat.

A black-and-white photograph shows members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS), known as Wrens, pushing a torpedo mounted on a wheeled trolley across a naval base. Dressed in working uniforms and berets, the women are carrying out an essential wartime task, highlighting the growing role of women in supporting Royal Navy operations during the Second World War.

Wrens help transport a torpedo to a submarine in Portsmouth, 1943 | Credit: Getty Images

“We had to look out the window and see every landing craft that came in, note its exact time, how long it took to load and when it sailed. And then report this over the phone back to head office,” she said. There’s a sense of their work as being essential. “I was told that when the actual thing happened, I would be able to do this job and I was thrilled.”

To Margaret’s disappointment, though, when the time came for invasion, she wouldn’t get any closer to the operation. “Towards the end of the exercise they decided it wasn’t the place for women, so I had to hand over to a naval rating, who was a young lad.

“He didn’t even know how to use a telephone and I had to show him how to do this job. I was rather disappointed, but, you know, one just obeyed orders and that was it.”

The women who prepared the landings at D-Day

After the initial invasion and once the Allies had formed a bridgehead into Normandy, gaining important territory, they installed artificial ‘Mulberry Harbours’, temporary portable harbours that allowed more troops and equipment to arrive.

Ahead of D-Day, Elizabeth Rowell was one of the many factory workers manufacturing different components of the harbours. Working in Sunderland, her job was to splice ropes. It was heavy, dirty manual work. Groups of eight women stood in a circle, winding wire coils, over and under around a cable base. They would then insert hooks and thimbles (rings) at either end. These heavy wire cables were then used to hold the Mulberry Harbours together, although many of the factory workers didn’t know this until after the war.

A black-and-white photograph shows members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service working among rows of field guns in a military workshop. The women are applying waterproofing and carrying out maintenance tasks on artillery pieces destined for the Normandy invasion, illustrating the vital contribution of female personnel to Allied preparations for D-Day.

Members of the Auxiliary Territorial Service carry out waterproofing work on Allied field guns ahead of the Normandy invasion | Credit: Getty Images

The woman who chose the date of D-Day

D-Day was initially earmarked for May 1944 – and meteorologists were tasked with selecting the best exact date, tracking the moon, tides and the most unpredictable element, the weather.

Wren Officer Paulina Nichol, a meteorologist, explained how it worked: “They were constantly trying to discover how best to choose the day for invasion. And this was to do with phases of the moon, it was some slightly crack-pot theory.

“This being before the days of calculators, they used us as calculators.”

Ultimately, 5 June 1944 was selected for D-Day, but with just 36 hours to go, Maureen Flavin, an Irish postal clerk in County Mayo, was the first to forecast a storm approaching from the Atlantic. As a result, D-Day was pushed back 24 hours until the weather was sufficiently improved.

The woman who fooled the Germans

To confuse the Germans, the Allies created ‘windows’ where RAF planes dropped strips of metal foil over the English Channel. This fooled German radar by giving the false impression that a large Allied fleet was sailing for the Pas de Calais area of northern France.

This technique had been devised by Joan Curran, a Welsh physicist who had been a PhD student when the war broke out.

The women codebreakers

Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes was home to Britain’s codebreakers, and over three-quarters of the staff were women.

Intercepting transmissions and breaking codes, the staff at Bletchley gathered information on enemy movements, monitoring whether deception tactics were working, and whether the Germans anticipated the Allied invasion. After 6 June, Bletchley relayed information about German counter-attacks.

The women intelligence agents

Special Operations Executive (SOE, established in 1940) deployed both male and female agents in occupied Europe, to gather intelligence and galvanise the local resistance.

Gradually, SOE occupied several buildings on Baker Street in London, with Colonel Maurice Buckmaster leading ‘F section’, overseeing agents in France. Many of the Baker Street staff were female.

Odette Brown, an officer with the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry described her role as secretary: “One of the things I did… was type out the personal messages that went out on the BBC radio, and especially the D-Day messages. I knew them by heart, which message applied to which circuit. There were two lots of messages, there were ‘A messages’ and ‘B messages’.

Read more | Why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day

Brown’s messages relayed crucial information across the network, she explained. “Now the agents had been warned as D-Day approached, they had to listen to the BBC on the 1st and 15th of every month and that if they heard the A messages, then they knew the invasion would happen within the next two weeks. So, then they had to listen daily until they heard the B message, which meant the invasion would start the next day.”

A black-and-white portrait shows SOE agent Lise de Baissac standing on a rooftop or terrace, dressed in a dark tailored suit and smiling towards the camera. Taken shortly after the Second World War, the photograph captures the woman who carried out dangerous undercover missions in occupied France and was later awarded an MBE for her wartime service.

Lise de Baissac pictured in c1946. The SOE agent was awarded an MBE for her courage and initiative during the war | Credit: Getty Images

SOE agent Lise de Baissac was in her hometown of Paris when she heard the BBC broadcast. Lise had fled the German invasion, eventually arriving in London in 1941 and was recruited by SOE in May 1942. Four months later, she parachuted into occupied France and worked as a courier for her brother Claude’s network in Bordeaux, before setting up her own network in Poitiers. After a period back in England as a liaison officer training other SOE agents, Lise returned to France in April 1944 to support her brother’s new network in Normandy. “There were groups of Maquis (French resistance) and I had to pass on orders from one to the other. What my brother couldn’t do for himself, I did for him.”

Read more | Churchill and D-Day: did the prime minister oppose the Normandy landings?

Recruiting in Paris when she heard the BBC broadcast, Lise raced back to Normandy, avoiding large German military formations. For the next three months, Lise and Claude’s network sabotaged German reinforcements and sent critical intelligence reports to the Allies.

The women who oversaw the operation

Before the days of computers, the WAAF at Fighter Command HQ at RAF Bentley Priory plotted out air force positions in real time on a large map. Overlaid with a grid, the map extended from the South of England across the Channel to the Normandy coastline. On the eve of D-Day, plotter Joan Seaman recalls how the map table was suddenly transformed:

“On the table, we plotted convoys, just a circle of card with the convoy name on it… That was all the ships going over. There was so much… the whole plotting table was just a complete mass of coloured arrows, a complete mass of it.”

As the invasion began, the female plotters marked out the Allied positions. It was fast and frantic work, but Joan remembers it as “extremely exciting… to give a complete picture of everything that was going on around the shores of the British Isles”.

A black-and-white photograph shows three members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force studying maps and aerial photographs during a training session. One trainee uses a pair of dividers to measure distances while the others examine the material closely, demonstrating the specialist analytical skills required to interpret reconnaissance imagery during the war.

Three Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) trainees practise map-reading and plotting of aerial photographs at the Royal Air Force No 2 School of Photography in Blackpool | Credit: Getty Images

Elsewhere, General Dwight D Eisenhower oversaw the Allied Invasion from Southwick House near Portsmouth.

Deep underground there, Wren Marie Scott was a radio operator, alongside other women from the WRNS, the WAAF and Auxiliary Territorial Service.

On landing day, Marie was relaying messages directly to the men on the beaches. To her alarm, the sounds of warfare filled her ears. “In my earphones, I was on the beaches of Normandy, I heard everything… Machine gun fire, cannon fire, bombs, men shouting orders, men screaming… it was the chaos of war.”

With no conflict training, the female radio operators had no preparation for this, but they had no option but to continue their work.

The women nurses of D-Day

Some of the first women to arrive in Normandy after the landings were military nurses. Amy Dunnett served with No 3 Casualty Clearing Station.

Taken out on a landing craft, Dunnett recalls nurses scrambling down the nets, wearing heavy army boots and tin hats, packs on their backs, landing on Gold Beach in mid-June. They went to a tented hospital in a field full of tall grass and flowers. “It was very primitive”, but they had to make do as casualties came in thick and fast. “I worked in the operating theatres, on one occasion working for 56 hours without a break.”

The women of D-Day, both military and civilian, played a crucial role in the Allied victory. Their tireless work contributed to the success of Operation Overlord and helped pave the way for the liberation of Europe.

Elisabeth Shipton is a military historian, television and radio documentary researcher, and author. Her books include Female Tommies: The Frontline Women of the First World War (The History Press, 2014)