Why did you enter the Royal Signal Corps?

Margaret: I volunteered for the army when I was 17-and-a-half years old. We had lived in London up till the bombings started. That’s when we had to get out. We lived in the Kensington Area. I went to a lovely school, St. Mary Abbott’s.

“Margaret, what you should do is volunteer before you’re 18. Because they will draft you. So if you volunteer before you turn 18, you can make a choice of what you do. From my experience, I would advise you to do the same as I did – the Royal Signal Corps. Because you’ll be with more educated people. Otherwise you could find yourself in with some pretty rough people.”

My sister Frances had already gone into the Royal Signal Corps. And she said, “Margaret, what you should do is volunteer before you’re 18. Because they will draft you. So if you volunteer before you turn 18, you can make a choice of what you do. From my experience, I would advise you to do the same as I did – the Royal Signal Corps. Because you’ll be with more educated people. Otherwise you could find yourself in with some pretty rough people.” And I did four years of teletype and that awful Morse code that nearly drove me insane.

 

Your family was split up during the war?

Margaret: I came from a large family, we had five girls. Eileen was the oldest in the family. At the age of 20 she met in 1935 a German boy in England. He was at the London College there. They dated for a while. The next thing we heard was that Peter had gone back to Germany. Summer came, and Eileen went over for what we thought was a visit, though she went and then married. She waited till she was 21 to do that. They had three children by the time the war broke out in 1939. Things really started to get bad. She wasn’t able to write to us. So we didn’t hear from her for six years. During that time, Peter was drafted into the German army. He lost a leg at Smolensk in Russia. They were living in Neubrandenburg, right on the Baltic. When the Russians were coming, they had to just shut the doors to the house, grab whatever they could in their backpacks, and started walking. They were trying to get wherever the Americans were coming in — or the British. They got quite a way – wore their shoes out – and met up with the British. A British soldier started talking to them, looking at their papers. When he heard Eileen speaking fluent German as well as her English, he was very happy. He said, “Why don’t you come and stay at the base, and be our interpreter?” That is what they did. My sister who is older than me, Frances, was in the same branch of the army that I was. The British didn’t have enough men in their Signal Corps, so they sent several of the English girls over and let them do that for them. Anyway, Frances got permission to travel to where Eileen was at this British depot. A British soldier, when he came home on furlough, visited my parents, and told them how Eileen’s family was – the condition they were in. They were eating now, and feeling better but they were in great need of clothes. They couldn’t get clothes in Germany. In England, everything was so tight with rationing that mom had to beg around her friends for some more coupons. So she was able to go shopping to get shoes and warm sweaters. The soldier came back to get this stuff from them, and bless his heart, he brought the clothes to my sister’s family. After that, when the war ended, we got Eileen and the children back. But Peter wasn’t allowed to come with them. He had to stay back and go through a lot of red tape. They eventually all came over. He didn’t live long, and one of the children committed suicide at the age of 16. Eileen lived a long time by herself, but close to family.

 

How did being cut off from your sister affect your family?

Margaret: We just didn’t know. I know it was hard on my parents, but it was hard on all of us. Here we were, three of us in the women’s army fighting against the country where she lived.

 

Did the USS Harding survive the war?

It later went off to the Pacific, a kamikaze hit right [in the foreword] area.  If I had been on it, I wouldn’t be here today. My general quarters station was covered with black powder and projectiles, and that is where the kamikaze got it.  …Went all the way through the ship. I was extremely fortunate not to be with them when that happened.  Palmer was off — I think he became a rear admiral — but the captain then, when that hit, he immediately threw the ship into reverse. With the watertight compartments, the bow went down in the water but it didn’t sink. It went into … a … drydock, which was near Okinawa. And they patched it enough there that it could get back to Pearl Harbor. There, they worked on it some more. Later, it went back to Norfolk, Va., and they took it on a shakedown cruise and pronounced it unseaworthy, and it ended up in the scrap heap. I didn’t know what had happened to the Harding until Margaret was reading a magazine and read about it. I got in touch with some reunion people and Taylor Watson who is in Maryland, on Chesapeake Bay.  We started going to the reunions and have been all over the U.S. for reunions. All these people, I am telling you, about are all gone now. I have been meaning to call one to find out who else has died, but this is the state we are in.  The last reunion was in 2010 in Daytona Beach, Florida. Margaret and I decided we just couldn’t do it anymore. But, I hosted a reunion here in Hendersonville in 2004. You learn at these reunions what had happened through talking to this person and that – this experience and that – and everyone had something to contribute.

 

Have you ever gone back to Normandy?

We went back to Vierville Church a few days before the 50^th anniversary of D-Day. The fellow that lives there asked us all to come in as he wanted to drink a toast to us. The church had been rebuilt. His house [was near the church], so he invited us in. He said, “I just want to let you know that when you were zeroing in on that church, you got my house and blew it up.” His house now was his old stable. None of us knew that we did that, but he was very gracious. “Although you might have destroyed my house, we were very appreciative that you got the Germans out of our house and out of our lives.” And he drank the toast to us!