D-Day 80 The Last Veterans: Dorothea Barron
Dorothea Barron, Age: 99, Women’s Royal Naval Service
Interviewed 1 October 2023
A visual signaller based on the south west coast of Scotland, Dorothea Barron helped train boat crews preparing for D-Day.
Signalling in morse code on an Aldis lamp and also using semaphore, her job was to help Navy personnel learn signalling techniques at sea.
She said: "We didn’t know it but we were training people pre-invasion. You never ever disclosed what your job was.
"They saw VS on your uniform and knew it stood for visual signaller but they didn’t know where you were or what you were doing,
"We were in our control tower which incidentally at high tide in a gale we used to be inundated by the waves coming along Firth of Forth.
"And I signalled in Morse code at night, Morse code in the day - in Scotland it was normally pretty gloomy, and semaphore during the day. And then at night again in Morse code.
"By Aldis lamps. We discovered we were training the boat crews who were taking the men off the big liners set out in the Channel and then these smaller boats would ferry them to the Normandy beaches.
"We weren’t actually teaching them. We were relaying messages to them. ‘Tell that boatman he has to move in closer,’ that sort of thing. We were on in shifts 24 hours a day.
"You never questioned anybody. You were always warned ‘Be like Dad, keep Mum’ which they wouldn’t dare print these days.
"We knew these young sailors we were going to the cinema with were doing this boat run but we never asked questions."
Mrs Barron remembers how she felt when she heard the news about D-Day.
"Joy that we were hitting them back. Absolute ecstasy that at last we were doing something. Having inadvertently and not knowingly trained these troops to disembark from a big liner, then get into a tiny boat with all their equipment and food and then be carried to the sand then yes it really was a contribution but everybody contributed.
"I felt I had had a purpose. I had really done something.
"I wish it had helped the poor chaps landing better. But we couldn’t stop the Germans bombing them on the beaches."
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