World War Ii Women

Devon, 1940: When 15-year-old Daisy is evacuated from her home in London, she knows she must look after her younger sister, Peggy. She is the only one who can reassure Peggy that life will go back to normal, reading to her from their one battered children’s book, ensuring she takes the cough medicine their mother tucked in the pocket of her gas mask bag.

As a young girl growing up in Vienna in the 1930s, Orly has an idyllic childhood filled with music. Her father plays the viola in the Philharmonic, her mother is a well-regarded opera singer, her beloved and charismatic older brother holds the neighborhood in his thrall, and most of her eccentric and wonderful extended family live nearby. Only vaguely aware of Hitler's rise or how her Jewish heritage will define her family's identity, Orly spends her days immersed in play with her best friend and upstairs neighbor, Anneliese.

In February, 1922, at the western-most entrance to Victoria Station in Manchester, a massive plaque was unveiled. Beneath a vast tiled map showing the lines of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway network, a series of seven bronze panels recorded the names of the men of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway who gave their lives for King and Country in the Great War - a total of 1,460 names. In March, 1940, a group of women of varying ages and backgrounds stands in front of the memorial, ready to do its bit in this new World War....

Corfu, Greece, 1943. Though they don’t know it, five-year-old Matilde and three-year-old Anna have kissed their mother for the last time. The Nazis have reached their sun-scorched home, and they are being taken to a place of safety, on the northeastern tip of the rocky island. They are to be hidden, at great risk, by kindly Agata and her husband, until the terrible war is over. Matilde and Anna’s tears are soothed by Agata’s bedtime stories, but she is always alert.

On November 8, 1943, U.S. Army nurse Agnes Jensen stepped out of a cold rain in Catania, Sicily, into a C-53 transport plane. But she and twelve other nurses never arrived in Bari, Italy, where they were to transport wounded soldiers to hospitals farther from the front lines. A violent storm and pursuit by German Messerschmitts led to a crash landing in a remote part of Albania, leaving the nurses, their team of medics, and the flight crew stranded in Nazi-occupied territory.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Sisters of Battle Road by J. M. Maloney, read by Annie Aldington. In 1939, Annie Jarman and her six young daughters were evacuated from their South London home and sent to the Sussex countryside to wait out the war. Little did they know what was in store for them or how their lives would change.

In April 1943 a young woman washes ashore on a deserted beach in Cornwall, England. With shorn hair and a number stitched on her tattered chemise, Alice is the survivor of a ship torpedoed by a German U-boat. She's found by the mysterious Viscount Jack Trewella, who suspects that she's a prisoner of war or a spy. But the secret Alice asks Jack to keep is one he could never have guessed, and it creates an intimate bond he never expected.

Occupied Italy, 1944. In the mountain regions south of Bologna, Liliana Nicoletti’s family finds escaped POW James Foley behind German lines. Committed to the anti-Fascist cause, they deliver him to a powerful band of local partisans. But when the SS launches a brutal attack against the Resistance, Liliana’s community is destroyed. Forging an unbreakable bond, James and Liliana's only hope of survival is to make it to the Allied lines. Twelve years later, fate reunites Liliana, newly widowed, and James, now a journalist for a New York magazine.

Evelyn Varley has always been ambitious and clever. As a girl, she earned a scholarship to a prestigious academy well above her parents’ means, gaining her a best friend from one of England’s wealthiest families. In 1939, with an Oxford degree in hand and war looming, Evelyn finds herself recruited into an elite MI5 counterintelligence unit. A secret society seeks an alliance with Germany and, posing as a Nazi sympathizer, Evelyn must build a case to expose their treachery. But as she is drawn deeper into duplicity, some of those close to her become embroiled in her investigation.

Vibrant and scrappy Maggie McCleod tried not to get fired from her wartime orchestra, but her sharp tongue landed her in trouble, so an overseas adventure with the USO’s camp show promises a chance at a fresh start. Wealthy and elegant Catherine Duquette signs with the USO to leave behind her restrictive life of privilege and to uncover the truth behind the disappearance of the handsome pilot whose letters mysteriously stopped arriving. The two women are joined by an eclectic group of performers.

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.

As the weather turns bitterly cold in the dark days of November 1941, fewer pigeons are being conscripted for missions into occupied Europe and Olive fears her covert program may be dropped altogether. In fact, the new CO of the Baker Street intelligence operation at Brickendonbury Manor, Major Blighty, has expressed his doubts regarding her birds—not to mention Olive herself—and assigned her to a far more insignificant role: escort to a visiting officer of the Royal Navy Intelligence Special Branch.

London, 1940. After her fiancé breaks off their engagement, Evelyn decides to do her part for the war effort by signing up for construction work on Waterloo Bridge. Grieving after her little boy dies in an air raid, Gwen is completely lost when her husband sends their younger children to the countryside for safety. Enlisting as a construction worker, she is partnered with cheerful Evelyn. The two women strike up a heartwarming friendship.

1938: Magda has led a sheltered life in her small village until the day she is forced from her home by the invading Nazi army. Torn away from her family and the only place she has ever known, she is offered refuge in an alpine villa owned by brilliant Dr, Tauber and his talented, beautiful wife. But despite having friends in high places, the Jewish Taubers are living on borrowed time. When the Gestapo come to arrest them, Magda is asked to protect something more precious than the silver and jewels they leave behind. Their newborn son Samuel.

Three generations of women come together in this addictive debut full of family secrets, heart-wrenching drama, and the promise of second chances.

Desperate to be reunited with her husband, Daniel, Elica walks into the dreaded den of the ruthless Gestapo. She's ready to sacrifice anything for their love. Anna and her family find themselves at the mercy of Anna's heart-throb, Ulf. Ulf's obsession with Anna puts him in a quandary—between his loyalty to the Fuhrer and his burning desire for the forbidden fruit.

This is a short collection of untold stories about the women heroes in the extraordinary World War Two. These women have been footnotes in history, and at least one of them was a model for women in James Bond books and movies. The women, however, have remained in the shadows of the stories of the Second World War. These women fade into history even though their actions were crucial in changing the outcome of the war.

On the eve of Pearl Harbor, impetuous and overindulged, Lucy Stanhope, the granddaughter of an earl, is living a life of pampered luxury in Singapore until one reckless act will change her life forever. Exiled to England to stay with an aunt she barely remembers, Lucy never dreamed that she would be one of the last people to escape Singapore before war engulfs the entire island, and that her parents would disappear in the devastating aftermath. Now grief stricken and all alone, she must cope with the realities of a grim, battle-weary England.

In 1939, Hitler's tyranny approaches western Poland. A prosperous Jewish family - Julius and Josefina Kohn and their two teenage children Peter and Suzanna - flee their homeland, embarking on an unexpected odyssey of 6,000 arduous miles. They evade Nazi capture, only to be arrested by the Soviets, who have invaded Poland from the east. Deported to northern Russia, they endure savage conditions during 18 months of forced labor in a prison camp, where death lurks around every corner.

Weaving together information from official sources and personal interviews, Barbara Tomblin gives the first full-length account of the US Army Nurse Corps in the Second World War. She describes how over 60,000 army nurses, all volunteers, cared for sick and wounded American soldiers in every theater of the war, serving in the jungles of the Southwest Pacific, the frozen reaches of Alaska and Iceland, the mud of Italy and northern Europe, or the heat and dust of the Middle East.