Today's Reading
The four women loved their jobs along with the autonomy they brought, while at the same time faced a boatload of challenges regardless of where they were serving. The women had to constantly fight for promotions and recognition, as well as deal with rampant sexism. Often, after her workday was done, Betty was called upon to serve coffee and sandwiches to her male coworkers, while Zuzka played cocktail waitress, serving drinks to male officers who she had brainstormed alongside just minutes before. But they took it in stride. As Zuzka put it, "Scheuklappen, we were always reminded, German for blinders," she said. "Just look straight ahead at what you're doing, and don't worry about what the other guys are doing."
The stakes were high: They knew that not every "believable lie" they made up worked out, and there was the hard truth that people died as a result of their brainstorms. "I tried to push it out of my head," said Betty.
The women also faced constant danger, and their own lives were often at risk: Betty worked in India and behind enemy lines in China, where a sizable contingent of locals didn't want the Americans interfering in their affairs. Zuzka regularly interrogated German POWs who could snuff out her life with one well-aimed finger to the throat. And Hitler had placed a bounty on Marlene's capture from the moment she became a US citizen.
But if one more leaflet, radio broadcast, or well-turned phrase would cause just one German soldier to feel that maybe Hitler wasn't worth fighting for any longer, well then it was worth the twelve-hour days, giant bugs, lousy food, and living in tents thousands of miles from home.
The women were extremely productive over the roughly eighteen months they worked for the OSS, cranking out hundreds of articles, letters, leaflets, and radio scripts. They even intercepted postcards and letters from enemy soldiers, erasing any positive messages and instead adding news of starvation and lost battles to dishearten family back home. The women had to take particular care to make sure each piece would "pass," that civilians and troops would believe it
came from a resister or disgruntled soldier from within their own country. If there were any doubts, Allied soldiers could be at risk.
* * *
When the women who would become known as Donovan's Dreamers first came on board, Donovan gave them some plum advice, words that none of the women had heard before: "If you think it will work, go ahead."
For these unconventional women, planting victory gardens, wrapping bandages, and buying war bonds wasn't going to cut it. Wild Bill was happy to help. He needed highly intelligent and creative women who could think on their feet, were fluent in at least one foreign language, and could hit the ground running.
In Betty MacDonald (later McIntosh), Barbara "Zuzka" Lauwers, Jane Smith-Hutton, and Marlene Dietrich, he had found four of the best.
ACT ONE
GOING TO WAR
CHAPTER ONE
BETTY
For Elizabeth "Betty" MacDonald, the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, dawned like most days on the island of Oahu: sheer paradise. Warm and sunny with a light westerly breeze passing through the windows of the home in the mountains in Koko Head that she shared with her husband, Alex. The couple's small, neat house overlooked a lagoon, and was just ten miles away from downtown, where they both worked as newspaper reporters.
Betty loved her job as society and women's editor at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, but her beat presented her with a nonstop soft-news cycle of luncheons, parades, and church fairs. At dinner each night, she listened to Alex's tales of crime and corruption as a police reporter at the Honolulu Advertiser with barely concealed envy. She yearned for stories she could sink her teeth into, and regularly pestered her editor to switch her to the city desk, but he always said it was no place for a woman.
To compensate for the lack of a real challenge in her day job, she threw herself into studying Asian culture. Earlier in the year, she had traveled on an army transport to the Philippines for a series of stories for the paper, and she wanted to do more. Betty and Alex had lived with a Japanese family a couple of years earlier so they could become fluent in the language and customs.
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