The Birds That Wouldn't Sing, by Professor Justin Smith
The untold history of a group of women and their secret work planning for D-Day and its aftermath has been revealed in a ground-breaking new book by a history professor from De Montfort University, Leicester (DMU).
The Birds That Would Not Sing: Remembering the D-Day Wrens, by Justin Smith, Professor of Cinema and Television History at DMU’s Leicester Media School, tells the story of a select group of Wrens - members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service.
The team worked under Allied commanders in a key role, planning and executing the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944and the subsequent hard-fought campaign to liberate Europe.
And for Professor Smith, writing the book was an act of homage, remembrance and discovery – one of the main protagonists was his late mother, Joan Prior.
The collective narrative focuses on a handful of the 90 or so Wrens who worked under Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the Allied Naval Commander-in-Chief Expeditionary Force (ANCXF), planning Operation Neptune, the codename for the naval element of Operation Overlord which aimed to liberate Europe, starting on the beaches of Normandy.
The book is the culmination of more than a decade’s work for Professor Smith who explained how his mother kept quiet about her wartime exploits.
“I grew up in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember being aware that mum had served in the war, but she never really spoke about it,” he said. “They were told that this was top secret and that they should not talk about as long as they lived.”
While Joan kept her wartime secrets, later in life she did attend some commemorative events such as the 60th anniversary of D-Day in 2004. But Professor Smith he had no real idea of his mother’s role, or its significance, until ill-health required him to take charge of her affairs and he discovered a collection of pictures and letters from her time as a Wren.
The partial history glimpsed there only served to whet his appetite. Over the next decade, Professor Smith, an archival historian by trade, further explored the largely untold history of the ANCXF Wrens by mining an array of open-source material and archives including the BBC’s WW2 Peoples War project, the Imperial War Museum, the Churchill Archives, and the D-Day Museum Archive as well as the National Museum of the Royal Navy, and the Rubenstein Library in the USA.
Using these and many other sources, Professor Smith tells the story of the Wrens’ secret administrative and logistical support for the D-Day landings, and their exploits as they follow in the wake of the troops fighting their way from the beaches of Normandy towards victory in Berlin, revealing the changes in their roles, and their interactions with local people as they push through France and into Germany.
The book’s title is a nod to the involvement of Winston Churchill. Following suspicions that security lapses had contributed to the disastrous 1942 Raid on Dieppe in which thousands of allied soldiers were killed and captured, Churchill insisted that planning for Operation Overlord must be served only by the Wrens, whom he dubbed “the only birds that would not sing”.
Joan died in 2021, at the age of 97. In 2023 she was afforded the military honours due to all members of the Association of Wrens when her ashes were scattered at sea from a Navy vessel off Spithead, outside the Royal Navy’s historic base at Portsmouth Harbour.
In keeping with De Montfort University’s commitment to open access publications, and with the support of Open Book Publishers, The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing: Remembering the D-Day Wrens has just been published as an open-source online book. It is filled with multi-media links to online content such as photos, letters, Movietonews news clips and so on, and will be free to anyone who wants to read it.
Prof. Smith said: “Although this book has been a long time in the making, I feel its time has now come. It will be published, fittingly, at the end of the year that marked the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
“And the advent of open access online publication enables the richness of its archival sources to be presented in the ideal form.”
Mandy Thomas, DMUs Research Governance Officer for Open Research, said: "Open Access makes DMU’s research available to a much wider audience and means that important works, such as this intriguing hidden history are accessible to anyone, anywhere, for free.”
Posted on Wednesday 8 January 2025