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The War That Lasted 38 Minutes and Other Fascinating Warfare History

Khalid Elhassan November 18, 2021 35 min

Destroyed Ottoman equipment and carriages after the 1918 Battle of Megiddo. Imperial War Museums

24. Raised a Pacifist, This Woman Set Pacifism Aside to Fight the Nazis

Princess Noor Inayat Khan studied music at the Paris Conservatory and became an accomplished harpist and pianist, as well as a virtuoso on the veena – a stringed Indian musical instrument. She also studied child psychology at the Sorbonne. She also became an accomplished poet, wrote children’s stories, was regularly featured in children’s magazines, and was frequently heard on French radio. Noor did all that before she was 25-years-old. When the Germans invaded and overran France in 1940, she and her family fled to Britain.

Although she had been raised a pacifist, Noor and her younger brother Vilayat decided to set their pacifism aside in order to fight Nazism. In November 1940, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) as an Aircraftwoman 2^nd Class and began to train as a wireless operator. It was mind-numbingly tedious work, so to relieve the boredom, she applied for a commission in 1941, in the hope that she might get a more interesting assignment. The assignment she got was extremely interesting.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.