It might feel like the entirety of World War II has been mined for storylines in books, movies and video games. What other tales could there be?
In Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS, Lisa Rogak finds one more. Some of the story of the disproportionately female workforce of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor of the CIA, might be known by true spy buffs. (Future culinary star Julia Child was one of the organization’s operatives, for instance.) Another famous recruit was German American actress and singer Marlene Dietrich, whose story plays a key role in Rogak’s book. Featured alongside her are three then-anonymous figures: Betty MacDonald, a reporter from Hawaii; Zuzka Lauwers, a multilingual Czech immigrant; and Jane Smith-Hutton, the wife of a naval attache in Tokyo.
Despite their diverse backgrounds, the women had a similar wartime experience, a common thread that ties their stories together in Propaganda Girls. Each was a highly skilled operator who overcame roadblocks instituted by patriarchal higher-ups to achieve a professional pinnacle that made postwar life feel insubstantial. All of the women used their skills to craft propaganda designed to discourage enemy troops and noncombatants. A single flyer rallying (or warning, or tricking) a certain subset of the opposing forces could directly result in hundreds of defections. Other times, their successes were less tangible, and they fought to have them recognized.
Rogak breezily tells their stories, with just enough backstory to establish a narrative foundation for each character. A more thorough interiority remains out of reach, however, given the book’s short page count and the incomplete archives Rogak had to draw from. What does fit into Propaganda Girls is a clean, compact story about four amazingly successful soldiers in one of our first information wars.
