LONDON — On D-Day, Marie Scott experienced the landing of British forces on the coast of Normandy through her headphones.
Stationed in an underground tunnel 100 feet (30 meters) below the southern coast of England, Scott was safe from carnage. But she heard it all.
As a 17-year-old radio operator in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, she would broadcast messages to the beaches of Normandy and wait for the recipient to open their channel and respond.
“And when it did, in my headphones, in my head, I was at war because what I heard was continuous machine gun fire. The heaviest ones, like cannons. Screaming men. Men shouting orders. Men screaming,’ she told The Associated Press. “It must have been horrible on those beaches. The Germans had machine gun nests that were very well hidden and they just cut them down when they went to the beaches, and I could hear all that.”
Scott was one of about 700 people who worked at Fort Southwick, the D-Day communications center, where military personnel gathered information about the landings and kept senior officers informed about what was happening on the beaches and in the Channel. the stain.
Operating a radio on the most important day of the war was a big job for a teenager who had joined the Wrens less than three months earlier.
Scott’s formal education ended when Nazi bombers began bombing London. He soon began working for the General Post Office, which managed Britain’s telephone system, and trained as a telephone operator.
That gave her the skills the army needed as Britain prepared for D-Day, and the Wrens took her in even though she was not yet 18, the normal enlistment age.
The military trained her in the then-revolutionary VHF radio technology, in which only one part could transmit at a time. After delivering their message, the operators had to stop and listen to the response. Think of old movies where speakers end the broadcast by saying “over” as a signal for the other party to speak.
Deep beneath his duty station, Scott worked 48-hour shifts with 24 hours off in between.
Then June 6th arrived and the sound of war filled his ears.
“The communicator who sent messages from the beaches must have been very brave. Just sitting there texting when fireworks were going off all around him. I mean, cannon, everything. Weapons of all kinds. So, yeah, I take my hat off to that communicator that day. “Unbelievable,” Scott said.
“I mean, I was deep in the earth, very safe, but he wasn’t.”
She never knew his name or if he survived.
“He was a voice, just a voice. As was mine.”
After the war, Scott married and started a family. She put her finely tuned ears to use to indulge her love of opera.
On his wall there is an image of the La Scala opera house in Milan. Maybe one day she will leave.
Scott, now 97, is not bothered that the contributions women made to the war effort have received little attention. In her view, men made the greatest sacrifices.
But he is also proud to have received the Legion of Honor, France’s highest order of merit, for his role on D-Day, even if the letter informing him of the award said: “Dear Sir.”
“Some wars simply have to be fought,” he said. “And I believe, honestly, that World War II was one of those wars.”
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
