War Military Women

When war broke out, the young women of Sheffield had their carefree lives turned upside down. With their sweethearts being sent away to fight, they had no choice but to step into the men's shoes and became the backbone of the city's steel industry. Through hard toil and companionship in the gruelling world of factory work, they vowed to keep the foundry fires burning and ensured that soldiers had the weapons, planes and ships needed to secure victory over Hitler.

In 1942 one young social worker, Irena Sendler, was granted access to the Warsaw Ghetto as a public health specialist. While she was there, she began to understand the fate that awaited the Jewish families who were unable to leave. Soon she reached out to the trapped families, going from door to door and asking them to trust her with their young children. She started smuggling children out of the walled district, convincing her friends and neighbors to hide them.

In June 1952 a woman was murdered by an obsessed colleague in a hotel in the South Kensington district of London. Her name was Christine Granville. That she died young was perhaps unsurprising; that she had survived the Second World War was remarkable. The daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and his wealthy Jewish wife, Granville would become one of Britain's most daring and highly decorated special agents.

The Nine follows the true story of the author’s great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a 10-day journey across the front lines of World War II from Germany back to Paris. Drawing on incredible research, this powerful, heart-stopping narrative is a moving tribute to the power of humanity and friendship in the darkest of times.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that in war there are innocents on all sides who suffer. German citizens who had no connection to the atrocities committed by their countrymen nonetheless endured great hardships because of them.

Amaryllis Fox's riveting memoir tells the story of her 10 years in the most elite clandestine ops unit of the CIA, hunting the world's most dangerous terrorists in 16 countries while marrying and giving birth to a daughter. Life Undercover is exhilarating, intimate, fiercely intelligent - an impossible-to-pause record of an extraordinary life, and of Amaryllis Fox's astonishing courage and passion.

Venice, 1943: The world is at war, and Stella Jilani is leading a double life. By day, she works in the lion’s den as a typist for the Reich; by night, she risks her life as a messenger for the Italian resistance. Against all odds, Stella must impart Nazi secrets, smuggle essential supplies and produce an underground newspaper on her beloved typewriter. But when German commander General Breugal becomes suspicious, it seems he will stop at nothing to find the mole, and Stella knows her future could be in jeopardy.

When Aline Griffith was born in Pearl River, New York, in 1923, one might have guessed from her exceptional beauty that a career as an actress or model might be in her future. Few would have imagined that twenty-one years later, she would find herself in Spain as a deep-cover OSS agent, infiltrating the highest levels of Spanish society, or that five years later still, she would marry a Spanish grandee and become one of the most watched, most admired, most fascinating women of international society. This is the story of Aline, Countess of Romanones, a story of courage, beauty and success that is far more exciting than any fictionalized thriller.

Fresh out of high school, Kelsi Sheren, a diminutive nineteen-year-old woman, sought to join the military to help liberate those oppressed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. While she was often the smallest person in basic training, she proved she had the biggest heart and often the most energy. She made it to Afghanistan and joined a British military unit for house-to-house insurgent patrol. What she saw there was unimaginable death and destruction.

Who is Nola Brown? Nola is a mystery. Nola is trouble. And Nola is supposed to be dead. Her body was found on a plane that mysteriously fell from the sky as it left a secret military base in the Alaskan wilderness. Her commanding officer verifies she's dead. The US government confirms it. But Jim "Zig" Zigarowski has just found out the truth: Nola is still alive. And on the run.

During World War II, Germany’s Nazi forces stormed across Europe, committing horrific crimes against Jewish people and others. In 1942, 21-year-old Sophie Scholl formed a student-led, anti-Nazi organization called the White Rose. Their goal: distribute informational pamphlets to draw public attention to Nazi crimes—and, ultimately, stop them.

When Florence Finch died at the age of 101, few of her Ithaca, NY, neighbors knew that this unassuming Filipina native was a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, whose courage and sacrifice were unsurpassed in the Pacific War against Japan. Long accustomed to keeping her secrets close in service of the Allies, she waited 50 years to reveal the story of those dramatic and harrowing days to her own children.

1942: World War II is in full swing. Odette Sansom decides to follow in her war hero father’s footsteps by becoming an SOE agent to aid Britain and her beloved homeland, France. Five failed attempts and a plane crash later, she finally lands in occupied France to begin her mission. It is here that she meets her commanding officer, Captain Peter Churchill. As they successfully complete mission after mission, Peter and Odette fall in love. All the while, they are being hunted by the cunning German secret police sergeant, Hugo Bleicher, who finally succeeds in capturing them.

In 1944, Benito Mussolini's daughter, Edda, gave Hitler and her father an ultimatum: release her husband, Galeazzo Ciano, from prison, or risk her leaking her husband's journals to the press. To avoid the peril of exposing Nazi lies, Hitler and Mussolini hunted for the diaries for months, determined to destroy them. Hilde Beetz, a German spy, was deployed to seduce Ciano to learn the diaries' location and take them from Edda. Drawing from in‑depth research and first-person interviews, Mazzeo gives listeners a riveting look into this little‑known moment in history.

The Watchmaker’s Daughter is one of the greatest stories of World War II that listeners haven’t heard: the remarkable and inspiring life story of Corrie ten Boom—a groundbreaking, female Dutch watchmaker, whose family unselfishly transformed their house into a hiding place straight out of a spy novel to shelter Jews and refugees from the Nazis during Gestapo raids. Even though the Nazis knew what the ten Booms were up to, they were never able to find those sheltered within the house when they raided it.

On January 24, 1943, 230 women were placed in four cattle trucks on a train in Compiegne, in Northeastern France, and the doors bolted shut for the journey to Auschwitz. They were members of the French Resistance, ranging in age from teenagers to the elderly, women who before the war had been doctors, farmers' wives, secretaries, biochemists, schoolgirls. With immense courage they had taken up arms against a brutal occupying force; now their friendship would give them strength as they experienced unimaginable horrors.

Prior to World War II, Josephine Baker was a music-hall diva renowned for her singing and dancing, her beauty and sexuality; she was the most highly paid female performer in Europe. When the Nazis seized her adopted city, Paris, she was banned from the stage, along with all "negroes and Jews". Yet, instead of returning to America, she vowed to stay and to fight the Nazi evil. Overnight she went from performer to Resistance spy. In Agent Josephine best-selling author Damien Lewis uncovers this little known history of the famous singer's life.

On October 25, 2011, aid worker Jessica Buchanan was kidnapped at gunpoint and held for ransom by an organized band of Somali land pirates. For the next three months, Jessica was terrorized by more than two dozen gangsters. Every terrifying moment Jessica spent suffering in captivity was matched by that of her adoring husband working behind the scenes to deal with her captors. Finally, on January 25, 2012, President Barack Obama ordered a rescue operation by a team of 24 Navy SEALs. Impossible Odds is a harrowing and heart-wrenching memoir of Jessica's kidnapping, her three months in captivity, and her rescue by the Navy SEALs.

In the aftermath of a NASA rocket launch gone terribly wrong, Captain Calli Chase comes face-to-face with her missing twin sister - as well as the startling truth of who they really are. Now, a top secret program put in motion years ago has spun out of control, and only Calli can redirect its course. Aided by cutting-edge technologies, the NASA investigator and scientist turned Space Force pilot sets out on a frantic search for the missing link between the sabotaged rocket launch and her predetermined destiny…a search that someone else seems very interested in stopping.

Nancy Sorel’s portrait pays homage to these unsung heroes. They came from Boston, New York, Milwaukee, and St. Louis; from Yakima, Washington; Austin, Texas; and Sioux City, Iowa; from San Francisco and all points east. They left comfortable homes and safe surroundings for combat-zone duty. As women war correspondents, they brought to the battlefields of World War II a fresh optic, and reported back home what they witnessed with a new sensibility.