British soldiers dressed as women during World War II

As part of his work for RAF intelligence, on a visit to the Coastal Defence of the Royal Artillery at Fort Shornemead, County Kent, England, photographer John Topham took these curious photographs of several British soldiers dressed as women. These are a series of images taken by this British photographer in 1940, during the Second World War, which as soon as they reached the British Ministry of Information were quickly censored.

In some of the images you can see the gunners doing their daily work in women's dresses while wearing their usual helmets, while other photographs show the men making up or preparing to perform in one of the shows that used to be organized for entertainment during the war.

The reason for these surprising images was that during one of Topham's visits, a bomber alert was received at the Base by the Luftwaffe, indicating that the Germans were ready to cross the Channel to England. The soldiers had no time to change and went to their posts still dressed as women.

After the war, Topham himself revealed that the images were censored because the British Ministry of Information was concerned that these images might undermine the morale of the troops. There were fears that the British troops were not as masculine as the public thought, or that Nazi propaganda would use the photographs to ridicule them.