By Melanie Kirkpatrick

When my mother was asked why she joined the Navy during World War II, she would reply: "We were at war. I had to do something." Mother was one of 100,000 women who enlisted in the Waves -- Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service -- established for the purpose of replacing male workers, who were thereby freed to fight. Decades later, women who served their country in manifold ways during World War II would become the subjects of numerous novels and histories.

Lisa Rogak's "Propaganda Girls" chronicles the stories of four women who worked for the Office of Strategic Services $(OSS)$, predecessor of today's CIA. Ms. Rogak is the author of many books, including biographies of Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart and Stephen King.

One of the missions of the OSS was to create, produce and disseminate propaganda that would demoralize enemy soldiers and civilians. The women of "Propaganda Girls" worked in Morale Operations, the department that produced leaflets, posters, radio broadcasts and other media that "appeared to come from within the enemy country, either from a resistance movement or from disgruntled soldiers and civilians," Ms. Rogak writes.

The objective was to make the enemy decide that Hitler and Hirohito weren't worth fighting for anymore -- to cause soldiers to surrender and civilians to despair or even resist. Verisimilitude required that a fake newspaper, say, be printed on paper from the targeted country and that radio scripts include local slang and references to local institutions or happenings. "If there were any doubts," the author notes, "Allied soldiers could be at risk."

William "Wild Bill" Donovan, who in 1942 founded the OSS, liked "quirky" people, the author reports, and the four operatives of "Propaganda Girls" had personal backgrounds that were unusual for women in the 1940s. Betty MacDonald was a Japanese-speaking society reporter for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Barbara "Zuzka" Lauwers grew up in Czechoslovakia, spoke five languages and was a private in the U.S. Army. Jane Smith-Hutton, the wife of a naval attaché at the U.S. embassy in Tokyo, spoke Japanese and had delved deeply into Japanese culture. Marlene Dietrich, a German-American, was the big-name movie star known for her sultry persona.

The work the women produced for the OSS ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. In the latter category was toilet paper featuring the image of Adolf Hitler, which OSS agents delivered surreptitiously to German latrines. The TP was the brainchild of Lauwers and her co-worker Saul Steinberg, who would later win fame for his New Yorker cartoons.

Smith-Hutton came up with the idea of creating a fake version of Japan's pocket-size code of military conduct. While the real manual ordered soldiers to fight to the death, Smith-Hutton's version informed them that surrender was an honorable act.

Drawing on a propaganda campaign that had been successful against German troops, MacDonald designed a program to plant worries in Japanese soldiers' minds about whether their wives and girlfriends back home were being faithful to them. MacDonald produced radio scripts and newspaper articles describing a fictional program -- supposedly introduced by the Japanese government -- ordering women, single or married, to get pregnant "by any means possible" so as to honor the emperor by increasing the population.

Dietrich's work for the OSS exploited her fame in her homeland, where she was so popular that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis' chief propagandist, had tried to recruit her to star in German films. Instead she signed up to entertain the Allied troops in the European theater. In 1944 Donovan enlisted her for the top-secret Project Muzak, which delivered broadcast news and entertainment to German soldiers and civilians.

Dietrich's role was to sing, in German, popular songs whose lyrics had been changed -- often by Dietrich herself -- to discourage and dishearten German listeners. The new lyrics of the formerly upbeat "Taking a Chance on Love" told of lovers who "will never meet again" and referred to "a cross on a grave." Another song, equally depressing, was sung from the point of view of a soldier who knows he will lose his girlfriend and his life.

Ms. Rogak's prose is serviceable but far from sparkling. Her narrative sometimes reads like a series of bullet points that have been strung together. But not always. The first chapter, which recounts, from MacDonald's perspective, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, makes that familiar story fresh again. The day had begun as "just another Sunday morning on Oahu," Ms. Rogak writes, describing MacDonald's incredulity that Honolulu was under attack. "Had she imagined the explosions? Maybe it was a drill after all."

Also gripping is the author's account of Smith-Hutton's imprisonment, for 6 1/2 months, in the American embassy in Tokyo. Reminiscent of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind," Smith-Hutton repurposed the embassy curtains into winter clothing. She and the other internees would not be released until June 1942, when a Swiss diplomat arranged for their freedom in exchange for Japanese citizens held in the U.S.

Each of the four women in "Propaganda Girls" had her own reasons for joining the OSS. MacDonald was sick of writing for the women's pages and longed for professional challenges. Lauwers craved adventure. Smith-Hutton hated the Japanese war machine that had held her captive and was defiling the culture she admired. Dietrich reviled the Nazis.

But they all shared a deep patriotism and a desire to serve their country. In words nearly identical to those of my mother, Dietrich said it well: "I couldn't do much, but I had to do something."

--Ms. Kirkpatrick, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is a former deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 02, 2025 12:00 ET (17:00 GMT)

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