WATCH: WWII veteran and author Doris Gregory joins Global News to talk about her memoir ‘How I Won the War for the Allies: One Sassy Canadian Soldier’s Story’.
VANCOUVER – Before Doris Gregory was even shipped overseas to serve in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps during WWII, she had already become the first woman to publicly challenge a University of British Columbia professor on women’s rights.
And it became front page news of the UBC paper, the Ubyssey.
Gregory had only just graduated from high school when WWII started. But before she even knew she wanted to join the army, she wanted a university education.
“In those days, opportunities for women were very limited,” said Gregory. “You could become an office worker, a secretary, in which case you would take the commercial route in high school, or you could become a nurse, which didn’t require university, you went right in to nurses’ training.”
“Or you could become a teacher and I didn’t want to become any of those things. I wanted to be a journalist.”
When she got to UBC the first thing she did was to join the Ubyssey paper on the Tuesday edition.
She had to take English as one of her courses and was really looking forward to it, but she was placed in an all-female class with assistant professors and none of the senior professors.
“I was quite bored with that English class but I did my best, I worked hard,” she said.
One lecture a week, 10 female students could attend the male-only class, but in January of 1941 they were told they could not attend those male-only classes anymore.
So Gregory, along with about 20 other women, decided to crash the male-only class. When the professor came in to the class and saw them he said “I am not accustomed to lecturing to young women in this class and all such young women will kindly vacate the room at once.”
They did, but Gregory had her first story. It ran on the front page of the Ubyssey.
“That got me a lot of attention,” laughed Gregory and it was picked up by other publications across the country.
But at the end of 1941 many on the UBC campus started going off to war.
“I felt as if I was kind of in a backwater and the action was elsewhere,” said Gregory.
“All these things were happening and here I was, and besides, I was desperate to get away from home. I wanted to travel, I wanted adventure and the army seemed terribly attractive to me.”
“I never felt that I fitted in anywhere completely,” she added.
In May 1942, she signed up for the army. From then on, her life changed forever.
She was sent to Victoria for a clerk’s course to learn typing and shorthand, along with army protocol such as marching and following instructions. From there she went to a military hospital in Nanaimo and after about six weeks she was asked if she wanted to go overseas.
“I mean, everybody wanted to go overseas,” she said. “There were about 21,000 women who joined the Canadian Army but only 3,000 of us got overseas, so I was tremendously lucky.”
“We were there to free men up for combat. I don’t think I would have joined if I thought I had to shoot somebody.”
Gregory was actually her commanding officer’s third choice for the job.
“I was reasonably intelligent but I doubt I was very mature or sensible,” she laughed.
But she was selected and a month later she was transferred to Ottawa and then in Halifax she boarded a ship with 17,000 troops on board, bound for Scotland.
“We were a lot safer on that ship than if we were in a convoy,” she said, “because a convoy has to go as fast as their slowest ship and they were sitting ducks for U-boats.”
Gregory wasn’t nervous about what lay across the ocean, she couldn’t wait for the adventures that lay ahead.
When the ship landed in Greenock they were then transported to London and their homes for the next few years. From December 1942 until D-Day, June 6, 1944, she was in London and was transferred to Aldershot, southwest of London.
She was at the headquarters for the Canadian Reinforcement Units and loved most of her time there.
“We were 100 girls set down in the middle of thousands of soldiers, good looking young guys, who were very eager to date us and have us come out to their events,” Gregory said. “So I had an absolutely glorious time.”
“I mean we had so much choice. Part of that summer I was being squired around by a group of four guys.”
“It was really quite a delightful time,” she laughed.
Gregory even had access to the records of each solider so if she met someone she could look him up. “Whether they were married or not, that was very important, so many of them lied about that,” she said.
In late fall, 1944, as more reinforcements were needed, the camp started to empty out and the young men were sent off to war. “It was kind of a depressing time,” said Gregory.
But she knew how to take full advantage of her time in the military and made sure to take full advantage of every leave she had.
One of her most memorable escapades was with her good friend, Jeanne.
They wanted to go to the Republic of Ireland but it was not going to be an easy journey.
The wrong paperwork and an attempt to hide in the bathroom of a train almost got them turned around to go back to England but eventually they did make it to their Irish destination.
“But that was just the beginning of our adventures,” laughed Gregory.
“Of course we never had any place to stay or anything, one night we tried sleeping in a field, I fell asleep in the bottom of a telephone kiosk, we had one hilarious adventure.”
Gregory still keeps in touch with Jeanne, who now lives in Ottawa, by email or phone every week.
Gregory said her time overseas in the Canadian Women’s Army Corps was the most vibrant experience of her entire life.
She has set it all down in a book called How I Won the War for the Allies: One Sassy Canadian Soldier’s Story. The book is available in all bookstores and on BC Ferries.
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