In Propaganda Girls, bestselling author Lisa Rogak reveals the incredible untold story of four women who spun the web of deception that helped win World War II and changed the course of history. Read on for an introductory book excerpt.
Introduction
During the last brutal eighteen months of World War II, American troops in the European and Far East theaters began to notice a significant uptick in the number of Axis soldiers and collaborators who were surrendering—peacefully and willingly—to the Allies.
Defeated German and Japanese troops stumbled across enemy lines in Europe and Asia with one hand thrust in the air, waving a piece of paper with the other. In some cases, it was a tattered scrap of fabric fashioned into the globally recognized white flag of surrender. But many of the war-weary soldiers brandished leaflets, newspapers, and letters that had served as their personal breaking points, convincing them that theirs was a war that was no longer worth fighting for. One half-starved German even handed over a couple sheets of rough toilet paper with Hitler’s face printed on it as his ticket out of the war.
The Allied welcoming committee patted down the enemy soldiers before sending them on to intelligence officers, followed by the first good meal they’d had in months. They tossed the well-creased, sweat-stained papers in the burn pile along with their enemies’ threadbare uniforms.
Neither the Allied nor Axis soldiers realized it, but many of the broadsides, pamphlets, and other documents the defectors presented in surrender came from a common source. What’s more, they were totally fake, a secret brand of propaganda produced by a small group of women who spent the last years of the war conjuring up lies, stories, and rumors with the sole aim to break the morale of Axis soldiers. These women worked in the European theater, across enemy lines in occupied China, and in Washington, DC, and together and separately, they forged letters and “official” military orders, wrote and produced entire newspapers, scripted radio broadcasts and songs, and even developed rumors for undercover spies and double agents to spread to the enemy.
Outside of a small group of spies, no one knew they existed.
***
The four women of Propaganda Girls—Elizabeth “Betty” MacDonald, Jane Smith-Hutton, Barbara “Zuzka” Lauwers, and celebrated German-American actress Marlene Dietrich—worked for General “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the precursor of today’s CIA. Their department, the Morale Operations branch—or MO—was in charge of producing “black propaganda,” defined as any leaflet, poster, radio broadcast, or other public or private media that appeared to come from within the enemy country, either from a resistance movement or from disgruntled soldiers and civilians. In essence, black propaganda was a series of believable lies designed to cause the enemy soldiers to lose heart and ultimately surrender, but it was also aimed at occupied populations and soldiers captured for cheap labor, to encourage them to rise up against their oppressors and join the winning side.
Donovan, who had studied Nazi black propaganda, knew how effective these tactics could be. “Subtly planned rumor and propaganda [can] subvert people from allegiance to their own country,” he said. “It is essentially a weapon of exploitation, and if successful can be more effective than a shooting war.” While officers in other departments refused to hire women, Donovan specifically searched them out when he began to staff his new MO branch, as he believed they would excel at creating subversive materials.
“General Donovan believed that we could do things that the men couldn’t,” Betty said years later. “We were able to think of a lot of gossipy things to do for MO that men never would have thought of. I don’t want to brag, but women can hurt people better, maybe, than men could think of. Women seemed to have a feeling for how to really fool people.”
***
Donovan liked quirky people, and Betty, Zuzka, Jane, and Marlene definitely fit the bill. All had careers that were highly unusual for women in the 1930s and ’40s, and they all yearned to escape the gender restrictions of the day that dictated they be mothers and wives, or teachers or nurses if they absolutely had to work. They all wanted more than their present lives provided, though they never lost sight of the fact that their efforts would have just one aim: to help win the war and bring American soldiers back home.
Their motivations for joining the OSS differed—two wanted vengeance, two craved adventure—and one served stateside while three headed overseas. But the one thing they shared in common was that all four were determined to serve their country in the best way they could: by using their brains.
Every office and project in every theater was woefully understaffed, so the women quickly learned to multitask everything while happily taking advantage of the utter lack of supervision to call their own shots. While the women often turned to spies and agents for intel to help them craft their writings, they occasionally had to do the dirty work themselves.
And because the work was so clandestine, when it came to paying contract workers and locals for their assignments, a little bit of creativity was in order: Betty became well practiced at slicing off the exact amount of opium to compensate a Burmese spy, while Zuzka paid a group of German POWs with an afternoon at a local Italian brothel.
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 1
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.
This morning, she woke just after eight o’clock and decided to let her husband sleep in; they’d been to a party the night before and Alex was a bit hungover. Betty switched on the radio to listen to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir while she waited for the coffee to percolate. Just as she was taking her first sip, a harsh buzz interrupted the mellifluous tones of the singers.
Another drill, Betty thought. Like other Oahu residents, she was long accustomed to the regular emergency alerts that were broadcast over the radio due to proximity to the naval base and Hickam Air Field at Pearl Harbor. The alerts had become so frequent that most residents tuned them out, and indeed, a couple of minutes later, the choir returned to their hymns just as Betty poured more coffee. But then the phone jangled, and she picked up after the first ring to avoid waking Alex.
“Something’s happened down at Hickam,” her photographer Allen “Hump” Campbell blurted out, skipping his usual pleasantries. “We need to get down to the base now.”
News of the war in Europe and in the Pacific appeared regularly in the paper, but many citizens tuned it out. After all, the various battles and skirmishes were thousands of miles away. Besides, many residents of Hawaii—at the time a US territory, not a full-fledged state—had already lived through the destruction of World War I and had become isolationists as a result, against war at any cost.
But Betty had recently covered stories about troop movements in and out of Oahu on their way to other parts of the world, so she knew something was brewing. Even she, though, had no way to predict the enormity of what was to come.
She gulped her coffee past the lump in her throat, but in addition to fear, she had to admit that she felt something else: a frisson of excitement. Maybe now I’ll get to cover something more than flower shows and society luncheons, she thought.
As soon as she hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was Alex’s editor with the same message: Get down here now.
She shook her husband awake and poured him a coffee. He threw on some clothes, and after a quick kiss, he ran out the door. As a police reporter, Alex was waved through police lines and yellowtaped crime scenes, but Betty needed a male escort to gain access to anything more than the usual ladies’ social events that she covered, and women were never allowed onto the military bases, escort or not. She downed the rest of her coffee while she waited for Hump to show up, and that’s when she first heard it, a low rumble coming from the west. She switched off the radio and heard it again, louder this time: a boom followed by several muffled explosions.
A bomb.
Hump pulled up to the house a few minutes later, slowing down just enough for Betty to yank open the door and hop in. As they raced toward the harbor, they passed people walking their dogs and others heading to church. Palm trees lining the roads swayed in the light breeze. Just another Sunday morning on Oahu. Betty’s mind started playing tricks on her. Had she imagined the explosions? Maybe it was a drill after all.
She relaxed slightly, but then she saw the birds. At first, a few small, feathered bodies peppered the sidewalk, mostly doves and sparrows. They looked peaceful, as if they were napping. A few short blocks later, tiny corpses covered the asphalt, their feathers ruffled and askew. Hump’s jaw clenched as he swerved to avoid the birds, mostly unsuccessfully.
The concussion of the bombing had killed them.
This was no drill.
As their car crested the hill near the Punchbowl neighborhood, the ocean came into view. Betty never tired of the sight of Pearl Harbor and the sugarcane fields sprawled out in the distance. But now she only saw thick columns of smoke billowing up into the sky from the harbor. The water looked like it was on fire.
A few small fighter planes loop-de-looped in graceful arcs overhead. Betty craned her head outside the window. The insignia on the side of the plane was a red circle, the symbol of Japan, land of the rising sun.
“Suddenly, there was a sharp whistling sound, almost over my shoulder, and I saw a rooftop fly into the air like a pasteboard movie set,” she remembered years later.
She watched as the planes turned toward the harbor, where they paused momentarily in midair before plunging straight down into the ocean.
“For the first time, I felt that numb terror that all of London has known for months, of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you,” she said. “It’s the terror of sudden visions of a ripping sensation in your back, shrapnel coursing through your chest, total blackness, maybe death.”
The war had finally come to America.
