Dorothea Barron watched over men who battled sea to perfect harbors seen as key to Normandy success

Dorothea Barron got a sneak preview of the Normandy landings from a tower overlooking the Solway Firth in southwestern Scotland.

During the spring and summer of 1943, she and her colleagues kept watch over the troops who tested the prototypes for two prefabricated harbors that would be constructed in the hours after D-Day to ease the delivery of men and equipment to the battlefield. Whenever someone got into trouble, Barron would unfurl her semaphore flags and signal for help.

“We were watching over them, shall we say,” she said. “If they got into difficulty, we would then inform their headquarters, their people on the land. ‘Boat so and so has been hit’ and things like that.”

Barron, then an 18-year-old rating in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, was a small part of the team that developed the Mulberry harbors, the system of breakwaters, pontoons and floating roadways that were built at Omaha and Sword beaches. Some 2 million soldiers, 4 million tons of supplies and 500,000 vehicles rolled through the two harbors by the end of 1944, contributing to Allied victory in the Battle of Normandy.

Barron just wanted to do her part.

“We were working for England,” she said. “We were English and we were going to stop the Germans from going into England. I mean, they bombed us!”

Barron seems far younger than her 99 years.

Welcoming visitors to the thatched-roof cottage she and her late husband bought soon after the war, she whimsically tweaks the ears of a mechanical horse named Dobin, making him whinny. After taking up yoga decades ago, she still teaches once a week.

The only thing that seems to trouble her is the macular degeneration that has dimmed her eyesight. But that wasn’t an issue during the war, when her sharp eyes were prized by the service.

“We were treated as equals, as sisters, not as some prospect,’’ she said. “And I feel so strongly the pressure that young girls are under today, which we never were. We were accepted as people in our own right.”

Until, that is, victory was declared. Then women like Barron were drummed out of the service with nothing more than a few extra clothing coupons to help buy civilian clothes at a time when wartime rationing remained in place.

The bitterness of that remains, especially since recognition of the contributions women made to the war effort came too late for many of her fellow Wrens.

It was a crushing blow for Barron, who had been determined to join the Wrens _ even if she had to cheat a bit.

Standing less than 5-feet 3-inches tall, Barron was too short for the service. So she improvised, piling her hair up in a tall bun and putting cardboard in her shoes.

“I stood very tall and they said, ``Hmmmm,’’ she recalled. “And then they saw I was so determined, they allowed me to crawl in.’’

So the woman nicknamed Pixie became a signaler in the Wrens.

Given the limitations of technology at the time, that meant learning semaphore to send messages during the day and Morse code for nighttime communications.

At the time she was working in the observation tower, Barron had no idea that the men she was watching over were training for the biggest operation of the war. All she knew was that it was her job to prevent them drowning as they struggled with tides and waves and tons of steel.

She’ll be thinking about those memories when she visits Normandy next month for the 80th anniversary of the landings.

“I’m going to be thinking: I wonder if there’s any Mulberry left underneath on the sand and have a look through the waters to see,’’ she said. “And I’m going to be thinking, this is where we started to drive the Germans away from Europe, from our part of Europe and the French part of Europe.”