Army Flash! World War II Female Civil Defense Workers in the Aircraft Warning Service

This poster uses visual materials to present the untold story of a group of female WWII civil defense volunteers who used a top-secret aerial viewing technology to protect their cities and regions from aerial attack. These women were plane “plotters” who volunteered for the bicoastal Aircraft Warning Service (AWS). The AWS trained “spotters” to watch for and identify planes overhead to telephone reports to their local or regional information and filter centers. When reporting their sightings, spotters began with the words, “Army Flash,” to ensure priority on the telephone switchboard. At the centers, female plotters received spotters’ telephone reports. They used special markers to plot the planes’ locations on a large operations board that showed a map of the airspace, which was demarcated by a grid. This grid was global: the whole planet was broken into squares within squares within squares, with each center responsible for a minute part of the grid. Meanwhile, male military officers supervised the plotters’ work from elevated balconies above the operations board. The men gauged threat levels, ready to activate defenses and alert local air raid wardens at any moment. Work at these centers meant learning to see the airspace over familiar cities and regions in a new, aerial way.

Plane plotting work is not well understood by WWII home front, women’s history, or visual culture scholars. This poster presentation will argue that, even as the women had a privileged position of looking down on the aerial map to plot flights, they too were objects of an aerial gaze: the male military and civil aeronautics personnel seated above them were focusing on the map, but also looking down on the women. In addition to shedding light on this little-studied topic, this presentation asks what gender dynamics were at play in these centers, where this type of “double” aerial viewing was the norm, and how plotting came to be defined as “women’s work.” Finally, it explores issues of race and class: who were the women who had the time and resources to volunteer for hours-long shifts, multiple times a week, and were these volunteer positions limited based on race and class?

The visual materials used on the poster will include photographs of women working in various filter and information centers, along with cartoons and other graphics showing plotting activities from publications like the Aircraft Warning Volunteer and Flash!, two newsy publications meant to boost morale and share updates among AWS volunteers. Newspaper quotes from plotters will bring their voices into the presentation. Finally, I will show images of what the global defense grid and the stands used to represent aircraft looked like. On my laptop, I may have the short film, Eyes Aloft!, playing on a loop. This informational short offers contemporary context for the greater Aircraft Warning Service system, from spotter to plotter.