Tag: OSS

Propaganda Wars: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS by Lisa Rogak (Non Fiction — History)

Propaganda Girls follows the lives of four women who worked in WWII’s OSS spinning propaganda webs that demoralized the enemy and helped speed the war to an end. Taking place in the European theater, behind enemy lines in occupied China, and in Washington, D.C., the story follows each of the women from her recruitment, through her placements and work, through her post-war life. The women: Marlene Dietrich — well known German actress who worked non stop for the effort; Betty MacDonald (NOT of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle fame) — the women’s editor in the Oahu paper, one of the first on the ground during Pearl Harbor; Jane Smith-Hutton — wife of a Naval Attache, fluent in Japanese, and held with her family for six months in the Tokyo American embassy after Pearl Harbor; and Barbara (“Zuzka”) Lauwers, a Czech national polyglot married to an American, who worked the European theater.

Each got into the work wanting to do something more for the war — and also wanting to do all that they were capable of doing, rather than living the traditional life available for most women. The story was full of details of life in that time period, the actual strategy and implementation of a propaganda war, and the (often ignored) contributions women made.

So many details were fascinating: The weird training they went through, details on procuring the exact right kind of papers, inks, and using the current language idioms. The arrays of people who had to be recruited with special skills. One story told of an innovative propaganda delivery system — condoms born up and stuffed with a pamphlet that could float across the water. The strategy for determining targets, fake stories, and deployments. How to deal with targets who were not actually literate. Special issues in places like India with hot, ink-melting climates and irregular electricity. But my favorite was a description of the “manual” face lift Marlene Dietrich had to undergo before filming, a kind of elastic pulling of her face, bound back into her hair. Painful and not permanent!

Part personal story, part full program debrief, the book was readable, entertaining, and enlightening.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for providing an advance copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. The book was published on March 4th, 2025.

A Woman of no Importance by Sonia Purnell (Non fiction — History)

This is the story, compiled and abstracted from scores of historical documents, of Virginia Hall, the only woman to have earned her own section in the CIA Museum catalog (the other four being men who became directors of the CIA). Her role in supporting and mobilizing the French resistance over the years of Nazi occupation resulting in the successful liberation of France was eventually hailed with accolades from high and low … many, many years later. However, during her lifetime she spent most of her time wanting to be useful and consistently relegated to low level desk jobs despite her incredible success as an agent on the ground.

I’m not much of a history buff, but I found this story deeply compelling, both in terms of the actual work she did (described at a whole new level of detail than anything I had read before about this particular time and place) and the mechanics and psychology of war work and the place of women in it at the time. The narrative covers the truly incompetent beginnings of the British SOE and American OSS; the turmoil brought to experienced military types having to succumb to “modern” warfare, including the “immoral” use of spies; the creative ways the resistance engaged in harassment and sabotage and rescue operations; the various factions working against each other, rather than against the nazis when liberation drew near, to the brave and somewhat crazy Maquis; and the innate nastiness of more of the French people than I would expected — I guess severe deprivation and fear can bring out the worst in people.

Virginia was really like the James Bond of the WWII French Theater (minus the womanizing, obviously, although the number of male agents who caused great damage through casual pillow talk was horrifying). I had trouble at times keeping track of who was who but it kind of didn’t matter as long as you could easily keep track of her role. An impressive piece of work that neither undersold, nor oversold, her story. Highly recommended.