Royal Army recruit carried out ‘dreadful’ tasks during WWII

For longtime Newport Beach resident Harriet Bemus, who recently turned 97, Aug. 14 will kindle countless memories of her World War II military service.

The date is the 70th anniversary of the surrender of Japan and the end of WW II, and British-born Bemus, who served 4 1/2 years in the Royal Army’s all-female Auxiliary Territorial Service, or ATS, has tales galore of her military adventures in war-torn Britain and the Middle East.

“I joined the ATS as a private ... the lowliest of the low,” she recalled. “ ... and one of my first assignments was to clean out lice and bugs from the hair of female recruits who had come from the slums. This was during the Blitz, when German planes were bombing London.

“During the bombings, we had to take refuge in air-raid shelters set up in the underground Metro. Many people were killed and injured during the attacks, and hundreds of buildings were destroyed across London. When the bombings ended, and we emerged from the tunnels, we could see houses, buildings and churches burning.

“It was a terrible time for all of us,” said Bemus, who lives in Newport’s Bayshores community.

After transfer to a training company in the countryside, she said, “We did nothing but march, march, march. We slept in an old castle near a base, where members of the Free French forces were working with the British.”

And, she added, “I must say that some of the British officers had an eye out for me.”

Soon, Bemus was promoted to corporal, and because of leadership skills acquired in the ATS and as a teenager at the private, all-girls Malvern St. James James School, she was sent to an officer-training academy at Durham.

Following graduation, she was promoted to second lieutenant in the ATS, whose officers later included Princess Elizabeth, who became Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, and Mary Churchill, daughter of British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill.

Col. Henrietta Niven, the granddaughter of a lieutenant general and the mother of actor David Niven, was one of her commanding officers following her next promotion, to first lieutenant, said Bemus, whose further assignments included leading a unit that instructed new recruits in cleanliness and physical conditioning, commanding an all-female coastal artillery regiment, and administering women attached to the army’s famous Black Watch Regiment and attendance at another officer training school, where she was promoted to captain.

Then she was ordered to an ATS camp at Nottingham, where she supervised a group of enlisted women processing “return to sender” letters written by parents and girlfriends to soldiers who were never able to read them because they had been killed in action.

“Nottingham was a miserable place to serve because of the sad duties we had to perform,” she said. “And there were no men at the camp for us to date.”

In 1944, she was granted her request for transfer to the Middle East. Transported by troop ship to Suez in Egypt, Bemus was taken by truck to an army base far out in the desert, where she was one of three female officers among 300 men.

But upon arriving at her post, she learned that the fighting in Egypt and across northern Africa had essentially ended following the defeat of the armies of German Gen. Erwin Rommel by the forces of U.S. Gen. George Patton and British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery.

But new challenges were rapidly developing in the Middle East, and Capt. Bemus was given unique responsibilities in Cairo that taxed her military training and civilian background.

One of these, a “dreadful task,” according to Bemus, was to supervise the care of a group of Australian army nurses who had been held for years in Japanese prison camps, where they had been starved, beaten, tortured and sexually abused by their captors.

“These poor women were en route by troop ship from Japan via Cairo to England, where they were then to be returned to their homes in Australia,” said Bemus, who noted that the nurses’ experiences in the prisoner-of-war camps were chronicled in the 1997 motion picture “Paradise Road,” which starred Glenn Close, Cate Blanchett and Frances McDermond.

The women “were in tatters ... so we had to find clothes for them in Cairo. This was truly a heartbreaking assignment,” Bemus said.

Bemus and her unit also were responsible for assisting European Jews who had managed to reach Egypt in their quest to find haven in Palestine, which was administered by the British military.

The refugees, who had arrived at Egyptian ports in overcrowded boats, were in desperate condition. Many had served time in German prison camps, where members of their families had been gassed.

“It was a ghastly time for these people, and we had to find clothes and provide care and sympathy for them like we did for the Australian nurses,” she said. “But, of course, it was on a much greater scale.”

Following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S. Army Air Corps in early August 1945, which predicated Japan’s Aug. 14 surrender agreement and formal surrender signing to Gen. Douglas MacArthur on Sept. 2, Bemus was released from the ATS and returned to England.

After visiting her family for several months, she lived with relatives in Bermuda for six months and traveled to the U.S. for the first time as a tourist.

“I ended up in Southern California, and while visiting Newport Beach, I met a charming, wonderful and handsome man named Bill Bemus. We got married, I became a U.S. citizen and we raised two boys and a girl,” she said.

“Bill, the love of my life, died in 2004, when he was 86 and I was 85. We were married for 54 years, and we had a wonderful life together.”

She added, “Today, our kids take great care of me, and I have 13 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.”

Grass hasn’t grown under the feet of Harriet Bemus, who has received more than a dozen commendations for service on numerous civic and charitable organizations, including the Orange County Grand Jury, the Juvenile Justice Committee, the Public Law Center, the Domestic Violence Council, the Childrens’ Services Coordination Committee, the League of Women Voters and the Orange County Museum of Art.

Bemus, who has traveled to dozens of nations, including Cuba, since moving to Newport Beach, also proudly tells of her membership in the Newport Beach Lawn Bowling Club.

But tossing the bowling ball will have to wait awhile. Bemus has been sidelined by a mild stroke and uses a walker to navigate her house and gardens.

But she’s recovering “rapidly,” works on her computer, sending messages to friends on Facebook, and looks forward to driving once again to the shops on 17th Street and continuing her service to the community.

“I’ve lived an exciting life and have many more good years ahead of me,” she said.

Contributor David C. Henley is a resident of Newport Beach, a longtime foreign correspondent and a member of the Board of Trustees of Chapman University.