PROPAGANDA GIRLS

Valiant women at war.

Journalist Rogak, biographer of media personalities Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, among others, uncovers the eventful history of four women recruited by America’s Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, to create and disseminate propaganda aimed at breaking the morale of Axis soldiers. They were 28-year-old Betty MacDonald, Czech-born Zuzka Lauwers, Navy wife Jane Smith-Hutton, and international film star Marlene Dietrich. Restless, feisty, and ambitious, each wanted to participate in the war effort, preferably overseas. Betty had worked as a reporter in Hawaii when her husband was stationed there; Jane, who spoke fluent Japanese, had been held captive in Tokyo for six months with her husband, a naval attaché; multilingual Zuzka had worked at the Czech embassy in Washington, D.C., before enlisting in the Army. Among the 21,640 employees of the OSS, they joined a department known as the Morale Operations branch, where they carried out tasks that often put them in mortal danger. Zuzka, for example, digging for military intelligence, interrogated German POWs “who could snuff out her life with one well-aimed finger to the throat.” Betty worked behind enemy lines in China, writing radio scripts to strike fear in Japanese soldiers; one of Jane’s projects was producing a phony field service code manual for Japanese soldiers designed to incite them to surrender. Marlene, who made USO tours and sang on clandestine radio broadcasts aimed at German civilians and soldiers, had a bounty on her head. But her need for revenge against the Nazis made her fearless. Rogak recounts the projects that energized them during the war, the sexism they faced within the largely male OSS (only 4,000 employees were women), and their profound feeling of letdown when the war—and the intense excitement of their jobs—ended.

An enjoyable and briskly told group biography.