More Stories To Tell

I’m often asked if there are stories about women in WWII that I wasn’t able to include in my book, The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line. Of course, there are many more women I would have liked to include. Some I couldn’t find enough material on to flesh out a complete story. Others I didn’t know about then. But wish I had.

I first learned about Charlotte Mansfield from speaking with staffers at Florida State University’s Institute on World War II and the Human Experience. It was too late for me to get her story into my manuscript. The story was already in final edits and getting ready for printing. But hers is a story that should not be forgotten.

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Charlotte Mansfield was born in Hanford, CA and moved to Oklahoma when she was eight. But she had already fallen in love with photography by then. At age four, her Dad took her along on a visit to an old Army buddy. The man owned a store with a darkroom where the little girl saw strips of negatives and photos hanging on a line in the dim light. She was enthralled with the magic of photography from then on.

Charlotte bought her first camera in high school, and her graduation gift from college was a camera, a rarity at the time. She thought about joining the Army to serve with the Women’s Army Corps in WWII. Her Dad told her she should be an officer, and with a BA in English from the University of Central Oklahoma, she was certainly eligible.

But Charlotte wanted to be a photographer. And the only way for her to be able to work in her chosen field was to enlist. She knew she would be highly sought after, not only because of the degree but because she had her own
camera. The Army was short both – good photographers and good photographers with their own cameras.

She completed her basic training with the Women’s Army Corps in the fall of 1942 and then was one of the first fifty women to be trained at Lowery Field inColorado at the aerial photography school. After that, she had follow-on training in photo mapping in Washington.

She received orders for her first assignment, overseas and landed in England on June 5, 1944. Charlotte was assigned to the Eighth Air Force’s 325th Photo Wing, Reconnaissance at High Wycombe, about thirty miles northwest of London. She along with other women assigned there lived in ‘huts,’ and worked at Wycombe Abbey. Charlotte was doing what she loved, documenting with her personal photos the everyday life of women and men during the war and working to develop the photos and footage that pilots brought back from their reconnaissance and battle damage assessment flights.

She continued her career as a photojournalist after the war, first with the Army Air Corps and then with the U.S. Air Force. She spent a number of years in Germany during the 1950s and was the Noncommissioned Officer in Charge of the Army/Air Force Hometown News Center. Through the years she continued to receive accolades for her photography. Much of her collection now resides with the Institute on World War II at Florida State, gifted by her longtime companion Lorraine Caddy. The University has produced a documentary about her life and work which first aired last year during Women’s History Month.

It is a little more than half an hour long. If you have the opportunity and can locate it on a PBS station, please tune in and learn more about this remarkable woman. It is called, “Charlotte Mansfield, A Woman Photographer Goes to War.”