The W.A.A.A.F. Book, edited by Clare Stevenson and Honor Darling, is one of those volumes that is valuable not because it offers a sweeping operational history, but because it preserves the voices of the women who served. Published by Hale & Iremonger in Sydney in 1984, the book runs to 288 pages and includes illustrations, facsimiles and portraits. Its subject is the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force, wartime service, and the personal experiences of Australian women during the Second World War.
The WAAAF was formed in March 1941, initially to release male RAAF personnel in Australia for overseas service. It became the largest of Australia’s Second World War women’s services, with more than 18,000 women serving at its peak in October 1944 and about 27,000 enlisting across the life of the organisation. That simple set of figures is important, because it reminds us that the WAAAF was not a minor footnote to the war. It was a major part of the Australian wartime machine, and without it the RAAF would have struggled to function at the scale it did.
The great strength of this book is that it is close to the experience. It is not written from the comfortable distance of later academic interpretation. It is a book shaped by memory, service, comradeship and reflection. That gives it a different character from a conventional military history. The emphasis is not on campaigns, aircraft types, command decisions or grand strategy, although all of those things sit in the background. Instead, the book brings forward the human experience of women who entered a military world that had not been built for them, learned new skills, endured restrictions, performed essential work, and then often saw that contribution pushed to the edges of the national war story.
Clare Stevenson was an especially significant figure to have associated with such a volume. She was appointed Director of the WAAAF in June 1941 and was responsible for the management and expansion of the service. The Australian Dictionary of Biography records that she fought for standards, rights, training, housing, clothing, education and better treatment for WAAAF personnel, all while confronting discrimination in pay and conditions. This matters when reading the book. Stevenson was not simply an editor looking back fondly on old times. She had carried much of the burden of making the WAAAF work.
Honor Darling also brought an appropriate background to the task. She had been a journalist before joining the WAAAF in 1942, served until the end of the war, and edited a magazine for WAAAF members. That editorial experience shows in the purpose of the book. It is a gathered memory, but not a shapeless one. It has the feel of a service community trying to tell its own story before it disappears into scattered recollection.
For the modern reader, the book is particularly useful because it captures the texture of service. The WAAAF was not glamorous in the way wartime recruiting posters sometimes suggested. Its members worked in administration, signals, transport, technical trades and other ground roles, taking on work that had previously been treated as male work. They had to prove themselves twice over: first as competent service personnel, and second as women in a system that often doubted they should be there at all. That tension gives the book much of its importance.
As a source, it needs to be read with some care. Memory books tend to soften edges. They can favour pride, humour and affection over bitterness, conflict or institutional failure. That is not a flaw so much as a feature of the form. This is not the last word on the WAAAF, and it should be read alongside later historical work on women’s wartime service, gender, labour and the Australian home front. But it remains a valuable primary style collection because it preserves how former WAAAF members wanted their service remembered.
The book also reminds us that the Second World War changed Australian society in ways that were not confined to the battlefield. Women who joined the WAAAF entered uniformed service, handled responsibility, gained training, worked within a military organisation, and demonstrated that the old assumptions about women’s capacity were increasingly difficult to defend. The war did not produce equality, and many of the old barriers returned once the emergency passed, but the experience could not simply be undone.
The most moving aspect of The W.A.A.A.F. Book is that it gives dignity to work that was often treated as background labour. Aircraft did not fly because pilots alone made them fly. They flew because clerks, drivers, teleprinter operators, cooks, mechanics, storewomen, wireless operators and many others kept the system moving. The WAAAF did not merely “release men” for other duties. Its members became part of the operational fabric of the RAAF.
In that sense, this is a book about recognition. It records a generation of women who served in a military organisation that needed them, even if it did not always know how to value them properly. It is affectionate, sometimes nostalgic, and necessarily partial, but it is also important. For anyone interested in Australian military history, women’s service, the home front, or the social changes produced by the Second World War, The W.A.A.A.F. Book is well worth reading.
It is not a battlefield history. It is something more intimate: a record of service from those who lived it. I loved it!