D-DAY GIRLS

A history/biography of a group of courageous
women spies in World War II.

Most military historians agree that
the anti-Nazi resistance played a critical role in reviving defeated nations’
self-respect after the war but contributed only modestly to the Allied victory.
Hollywood and popular writers often disagree, and their number includes
journalist Rose (For All the Tea in
China: How England Stole the World’s Favorite Drink and Changed History,
2010). Working diligently in the archives, the author turns up stories of
Frenchwomen who found themselves in England after the war’s outbreak and
volunteered to return to France to organize resistance groups, gather
intelligence, and direct sabotage. Hollywood’s version would begin with “based
on a true story…” and then make wholesale changes. Forced to stick closer to
the facts, Rose delivers a swift-moving account that makes for
sometimes-painful reading. French volunteers in the Resistance were
overwhelmingly amateurs; sadly, this was also true of Britain’s military
Special Operations Executive, which, cheered on by Churchill, recruited,
dispatched, and supplied agents. Definitely not amateurs, Gestapo
counterintelligence officers monitored radio transmissions, broke codes,
transmitted their own disinformation, and arrested agents regularly. By 1943,
the heart of the French Resistance and many of Rose’s subjects had been
arrested or killed. By 1944, the Allies had gotten their act together,
parachuting men and adequate supplies into France in preparation for the
Normandy landings. Sabotage from the newly energized Resistance, including a
few of Rose’s survivors, made it more difficult to send German reinforcements
across France, and its strength grew as enemy forces disintegrated. A skilled
journalist but also a member of the history-is-boring school of writing, the
author adds novelistic touches throughout, such as her subjects’ inner thoughts
and emotions. Readers who tolerate this approach will encounter an expert
blow-by-blow account of the surprisingly tedious, always dangerous, and mostly
short lives of some heroic women.

A readable spy thriller that fights
against the idea of “the original sin of women at war.”