Wonder Woman of the Week: Vera Deakin White

"Australian Red Cross worker Vera Deakin" [Photographer Unknown]

The first major Wonder Woman film may have depicted the titular hero on the front lines of World War I battlefields, but this week's Wonder Woman was a heroine that was actually on the front lines of the war caring for soldiers, deploying aid packages, and keeping spirits high during one of the most brutal wars in human history. Vera Deakin was born in Australia in 1891 to a philanthropist mother and a political father (who was the second Prime Minister of Australia in fact). The young Vera was on track to become a professional music as her educational upbringing emphasized her interest in the field and led her to London to pursue a musical career.

While in London working to jumpstart her musical career, war erupted in mainland Europe following the death of an Austro-Hungarian noble that plunged the world into a global conflict like no other war the world had ever seen. Vera Deakin immediately signed up with the Australian Red Cross and delayed her musical dreams to take nursing classes to become a front-lines nurse. After following her father on a political assignment in the US, Vera ditched her family to board a ship bound for Egypt where a massive Commonwealth campaign was set to begin. Once in Cairo, Vera Deakin launched an organization known as the Australian Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau to help track down missing Australian soldiers in the Gallipoli Campaign. In 1916, the organization moved to London to expand its scope to including other Commonwealth soldiers- including British troops- on the Western Front.

Over the course of the conflict, Deakin oversaw a staff of sixty personnel who investigated thirty-two thousand cases of soldiers missing in action capable of greater success that the military itself in connecting families back home with their missing relatives from the front lines of the war. For her work in the organization, Deakin earned the Officer of the Order of the British Empire award by the war's end in 1918. Part of this work not only including tracking down missing persons in far off trenches, unregistered field hospitals, and- in some cases- hastily dug graves; but also in tracking down Commonwealth troops held as prisoners of war and organizing efforts with the Australian Red Cross to get care packages to them from their families back home. That might be what drew Deakin to marry a former prisoner of war one month after the end of the war- Thomas White- who had managed to escape an Ottoman prisoner of war camp, and a POW with whom Deakin had personally written to during the war.

Deakin's humanitarian work did not end with the war either. Deakin became a leading figure in the Australian Red Cross as a regional head of the Victoria branch of the organization. When the Second World War raged soon after, Deakin White helped organize further efforts to connect families with soldiers missing in action on the front lines of the Second World War and oversaw emergency training programs for staffing a revised version of her WWI program. Deakin White also served as a director for a children's hospital, and was a major advocate for music therapy in mental health facilities after founding the Committee for Music in Mental Hospitals. After the World Wars, Deakin White founded organizations to assist wounded veterans and handicapped children in Australia.