Rachel Reads & Reviews

Just as the title implies Kathryn Atwood’s books center on sung and unsung heroines during WW2. She has several popular ones like Sophie scholl, Carrie ten boom, Josephine Baker, Irene Sandler and Martha Gelhorn, Nancy Wake, Noor Inayat Khan, and Virginia Hall, but she also shares plenty new ones. Split into seven sections of each country from the Western front, she introduces new heroes like:

German: Maria von Maltzan, a Countess who hid Jews right under the Nazis. Poland’s Stefania Podgorska whose prayers to God allowed her to save a family and meet her future husband. France’: ‘s Agent Rose aka Andrée Virot, Netherland’s Diet Eman; Belgium’s Fernande Keufgens who literally talked the Nazis into letting her escort a smuggled boy to freedom; Denmark’s Ebba Lund aka the Girl with Red cap that utilized the ports to smuggle families out, and Marlene Dietrich, the German movie star who converted to U.S. citizenship and was at the Battle of the Bulge.

Easy, thorough reads, Atwood continues her spotlight on these underrated bravery of ordinary women in her second book that focuses on the Pacific Campaign. Since the Western Front gets so much recognition, this women were all brand-new to me. Separated in four chapters covering China, the Philippines, Malay/Singapore, and Iowa Jim, Atwood gives age-appropriate information for young readers about such horrors as the Nanking Massacre, the Bataan Death March, “comfort girls” and human experimentation during the war. She explains why those atrocities weren’t given a reckoning in Japan and how there is still historical revisionism.

But in slightly more hopeful note here are some highlights of the survivors and heroes: Minnie Vautrin, a girl’s school teacher who helped women and girls stay protected in the Nanking Safety Zone while Gladys Aylward worked in the Shanaxi province to rescue war orphans.

Denny Williams was an American nurse in the Philippines who continued to work, operate and bandage under fire all while the upper brass decided to withdraw from the islands to go to the Western front, leaving Americans and their Filipino allies under Japanese fire.

Yay Panlilo: Atwood primarily focuses on Americans who found themselves stuck in the Pacific or had been living there during the war, but Panlilo is one of the few natives she spotlights and wow, does she deserve it. Panlilo worked as a reporter to boost morale for soldiers, but was actually an undercover agent for the US, and a guerilla fighter. Same with Claire Phillips whose espionage activities in Manila helped to help rescue prisoners of war, facing torture and near-death.

The most tragic would have to be the story of Maria Rose Henson who was repeatedly kidnapped and raped by Japanese soldiers when the war started (she was only 12), dealing with more abuse after she used her inside information to save her village from being burned down, and carried her traumas in silence after the war ended. Until 1992, when she bravely became the first survivor to tell her story. She made sure these crimes were put into the historical record, did press conferences and wrote a memoir, prompting calls for restitution and for Japan to acknowledged their war crimes.

Sybil Kathigasu was a nurse, and her husband was a doctor when the Japanese invaded Malay, and she continued to do her work under duress (even when the soldiers threatened to kill and her daughter) to ensure the guerillas were able to survive their wounds, and fight back against the invaders.

Finally, Dickey Chappelle was a war correspondent and photographer who followed the Pacific Campaign documenting Japanese and American atrocities only to have her accreditation stripped and never published because they were too “dirty” and depressing to see their soldiers like that. But she continued her work, dying in Vietnam on the frontlines.