I know that in the UK and America, the women were given much of the factory and industrial jobs that were vacated by the younger men who left to enter the service. What else was there?
Ferry pilot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBnHri8oHE
http://www.npr.org/2010/03/09/123773525/female-wwii-pilots-the-original-fly-girls
A good example, the WASPs, I forgot all about them.
In the UK you had an increase in the numbers of women serving and the roles they could do.
Direct support to the services through NAAFI and WRVS type services of course increased.
Womens Land Army - volunteers at first with limited conscription later
What was the function of the Women’s Land Army?
The Womens Land Army supplemented the manpower for agriculture (along with POW’s) - this happened during both world wars with their final demobilisation at the end of the 1940’s.
The US had something similar while Germany already had a larger percentage of women working in agriculture than the UK pre-war
Same in Australia in WWII for women http://www.diggerhistory.info/pages-conflicts-periods/ww2/land-army.htm
Italian POWs were often highly valued farm labourers in Australia because of their rural skills and work ethic and personality, to the extent that many were sponsored by their farmer employers as migrants after the war.
Don’t know the basis for his belief or if there was anything to justify it, but my paternal grandfather was solidly opposed to his daughter, my aunt, joining the Australian WLA because of his perception that in some quarters WLA women were of, as they said at the time, easy virtue.
Thanks for the info leccy.
Thanks for the info Rising Sun. Why did they send Italian POWs all the way to Australia?
Good question, which hasn’t occurred to me until you asked it. I suppose it’s one of those cases where someone knows something as a bit of history but doesn’t think beyond that knowledge.
Apparently it was because Britain requested it, according to the preamble in this link. http://ehlt.flinders.edu.au/deptlang/fulgor/volume1i3/papers/fulgor_v1i3_oconnor.pdf , but I don’t know if that is accurate.
Maybe part of it was because Australians captured a rather large number of Italians in North Africa and it was thought that Australia should be responsible for them, such as capturing close to 40,000 at Bardia, although an early contemporary account put it at about 30,000 http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/44911341
Could also be part of Britain sending unwanted internees / POWs to Australia http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10409026 which, after all, was how Britain founded this nation and kept us well supplied with its convicts until the middle of the 19th century.
That’s very interesting! Do you think very many decided to stay in Australia after the end of the war?
My understanding is that no Italian POWs were allowed to stay, but were repatriated to Italy after the war from where some came back as migrants.
I don’t know what percentage came back but, from anecdotal evidence from a few farmers I knew back in the 1960s and from wider reading since, there were some strong bonds formed and some farmers sponsored their former Italian POW workers for migration. There was also a very large Italian migration to Australia after the war independently of POWs.
Several reasons have been put forward and they are all pretty obvious ideas really
Security - Hundreds of thousands of Axis soldiers kept in a small country like the UK - reasonably close to the European landmass, more chance they will attempt to escape, especially early during WW2.
Feeding - Britain suffering rationing - move those hundreds of thousands of mouths out of the UK to where the food comes from (Canada and US also took them along with Cyprus at least).
Accomodation - It was hard to provide accomodation and training areas in the UK for the allied troops, makes sense to keep the number of axis prisoners kept in the UK at a lower level.
I guess escape was not an option down under. LOL 
Actually, it was. I think the Cowra Breakout by Japanese POWs may have been the largest escape by POWs in WWII. http://www.anzacday.org.au/history/ww2/anecdotes/cowra.html
Germans made their contribution as well, being typically rather more sophisticated than the Japanese Banzai type escape, although the Germans were aiming to live but the Japanese generally weren’t and had their aim to die rather than be prisoners largely accommodated by the Australian forces. http://www.awm.gov.au/blog/2009/08/12/the-not-so-great-escape/
I don’t know if any POW succeeded in escaping from Australia, but at least two Germans made it back home from Canadian POW camps in WWII, so it would have been possible if they could get to islands to our north occupied by the Japanese. http://www.pegasusarchive.org/pow/franz_von_werra.htm
I thought it was just one that got away - hence the name of the film they made ‘The One That Got Away’
So did I, but the von Werra link I gave in my last post (courtesy of Google as I couldn’t be bothered typing out von Werra’s history) says another German got home before him, but gives no details.
Hardy Kreuger’s performance in the film was good, as was the film.