World War II WAC
With most of the eligible boys in the Army and few to date, Helen (Kogel)Denton joined the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). As secretary to the post commander, Helen immediately raised her hand to volunteer when a telegram came in asking for a person to join GEN Dwight Eisenhower’s staff in England. Assigned a top secret assignment that she did not talk about for 50 years, Helen spent many days in early 1944 in a closed room, typing the orders for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, France, known as D-Day.
Nancy Love and the WASP Ferry Pilots of World War II
This is the story of Nancy Harkness Love who, early in World War II, recruited and led the first group of twenty-eight women to fly military aircraft for the U.S. Army. She checked out on twenty-three different military aircraft and became the first woman to fly several of them, including the B-17 Flying Fortress. Her World War II career ended on a high note: following a general’s orders, she piloted a giant C-54 Army transport over the fabled China-Burma-India “Hump,” the crucial airlift route over the Himalayas.
And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II
In World War II, 59,000 women voluntarily risked their lives for their country as U.S. Army nurses. When the war began, some of them had so little idea of what to expect that they packed party dresses; but the reality of service quickly caught up with them, whether they waded through the water in the historic landings on North African and Normandy beaches, or worked around the clock in hospital tents on the Italian front as bombs fell all around them.
Girl With A Star Spangled Heart: Based on a True Story of Character and Courage
Before the USA was thrust into World War II, Betty Nugen was a farm girl in the mountains of West Virginia. When Congress created the WAC—the Women’s Army Corp—she knew that was where she should be. Serving her country. Elaine Fields Smith gathered information from memories of her mother, Betty, from family stories and historical facts to create this story of a young woman who found a new life away from the only home she ever had known. This is a story of true American heroism, family, patriotism, and honor.
World War II Front Line Nurse
In late 1942, along with so many others who signed up to support the war effort, thirty-year-old Mildred Radawiec left a comfortable position as a nurse at the University of Michigan Hospital and postponed her marriage to a soon-to-be doctor to volunteer as a surgical nurse in the major battle theaters of the war. Radawiec’s first-person history recounts her wartime experience as a lieutenant with the Army Nurse Corps with sharp detail and grace and sets the stage for a you-are-there experience.
A WASP Among Eagles: A Woman Military Test Pilot in World War II
Before World War II most Americans did not believe that the average woman could fly professionally, but during the war more than a thousand women pilots proved them wrong. These were the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), who served as military flyers on the home front. In March 1944 one of them, Ann Baumgartner, was assigned to the Fighter Flight Test Branch at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. There she would make history as the only woman to test-fly experimental planes during the war and the first woman to fly a jet.
