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and helped win world war ii. in the "d-day girls," sarah rose calls on finals and oral history to do with throwing mostly unknown story of remarkable women who destroyed wines, and bush nazis and gathered crucial intelligence laying the groundwork for the invasion proveofproved to be the turningt in the war. refinery 29 calls it a thriller in the form of a nonfiction book and the book is comprehensive and compelling. readers get to know these amazing women as individuals and as the duties unfold against the backdrop of the war and go smoothly into developing events of the biographical details and the french wartime society calling it a satisfying mix of social history and biography. sarah rose is the author of all the tea in china. she's written for "the wall street journal," outside magazine, the saturday evening

post and the men's journal and in 2014 was awarded the thomas prize in travel writing. we are so glad to have you here today. thank you. [applause] >> thank you all for coming. before i start, i want you to know you have a responsibility here and that is i need you to ask questions. i will do a short reading and then the responsibility is in your hands. with that in mind, i want you to picture a war that is being lost. they were three years into a losing war and you have nothing to celebrate. there isn't a battle that you have succeeded in. your city has been practically leveled in many respects by a foreign bombing. all of europe is gone. there isn't a democracy left on the continent and you get a call from the government and they say we need your help.

you have three children under the age of six, the youngest still in diapers and the government says we need your help we can't quite put what we need you to do but will you come work with us her husband sat up front so she was a single mother alone and she had given the choice to help england. help europe come help democracy. leave your kids behind. and i found this a very challenging choice who leaves three little girls potentially mother with her father was a friend of the potentially parentless and they framed the

entire conversation in a mother's language. what happens to my little girl if england is gone. if it's not just europe, the last democracy, england is also taken over, then where do they go, what kind of world are they growing up in, shouldn't i do everything i can to make it safe for them even if it means leaving them, so she did. she joined the war. in a first class of women in combat, 39 women. they were mothers, they were divorcees, the aged from 22 to 55 and they were recruited by a government agency it's for the

day that everybody came back and to the continent. there was someone preventing the reinforcement from getting to the beaches. so a 30-year-old single mother trained in parachuting in secret writing and encryption in hand-to-hand combat achievement 100 ways to kill him and silently with her bare hands and she is one of 38 women did the same thing and we don't know

about it because me then write e histories and women don't. so "d-day girls" is the story of the first class of those that were recruited. they were doing a job that women were forbidden. they were swimming upstream in every respect and they got a super woke in the middle of the war and wanted to be magnanimous towards women. they had run out of that. they were three years into hitler's war and every single man is at the front and there is

a very specific need. whoever goes to france has to speak french. they have to be habituated didn't look likclicka provisiono blend in. not just to pull the germans, because the germans were pretty easily fooled. three years into the war every able-bodied man had ever been conscripted. winston churchill gave his approval to send women into combat in part because he bugged guerrilla warfare he thought it was cool and in part he didn't have a choice. there were no soldiers in the continent but also in part because it made good sense. you could say 40, 50,000 men in combat if you were to put women in soldiers wars to become roles allowing them to shoot an airplane overload. what general would try to make use of every available as if there were women in england who

spoke french well enough to teach a teenager how to use a gun, and they wanted to go, they should go for they were the first women in combat. odette sansom isn't the first, there was also a woman named lise de baissac who is a very different. odette sansom was very -- in aristocrat and came from an island off the coast of africa that had been french captured in the napoleonic war england used as a cooling stop on the way to its far east empires and she spoke french, and if she had a british passport and lived in paris most of her adult life that day that hitler marches and she becomes an enemy alien.

if she stays in france, she will end up in a concentration camp so she flees and get to london where her brother is already working for the secret government agency, hands her name to the recruiter and for her it is a very commonsense position. why wouldn't i do everything to save france? there is no balance for her. she's the second female paratrooper ever in history, but this is what captured my imagination about the story she was commanding troops in normandy on d-day and we don't know about her. there were soldiers under her command answering to her orders when the allies arrived she was the second behind enemy lines. on the most important day of the 20th century, and you haven't heard her name.

she was the second paratrooper. the very first had an even more interesting story. she was 22 when she parachuted us the first female paratrooper. andrée borrel is completely different where lise is a sophisticated parisian and when hitler marched into paris, she marched out with 6 million others she walked south of the demarcation line into occupied france and volunteered to become a member of the red cross. she trained as a nurse and while working as a nurse, she joined the underground and became a part of an underground railroad where she helped get 65 allies

and air men out of vans and back to england so they could continue bombing hitler did 65 is a high number. the entire underground railroad over the course of the war liberated the 600 air men. she was responsible for 110. at the moment somebody betrayed her and her partner. she had to leave france on the underground railroad so she hikes over the make it to spain and she could stay but she says no. i have to get back in the fight. she goes to london where she trains as an agent and goes back to france and becomes a member of the resistance that raises up the entire battery of circuits along the channel coast ahead of

the landing so from the moment this takes root as a systematized governmental strategy for taking on hitler on the day of an attack nobody named, women were part of the battle plan and women were there leading troops and making a difference. it's not like they were first and it matters. they made a difference. june 5, 1944 a signal goes out to all of france and the resistance circuits knew what they were about to hear and it says we've been dropping weapons and explosives for two years. we've been training you how to use these and this is the night we need you to take that into action. they get the signal on june 510

hours before the allies arrived and they go to work. if they blow up bridges, train lines, they dropped tree is a crossroads, take down power lines and phone lines. when they arrived at 6 a.m. on june 6, 1944, normandy is isolated. you can't get there from anywhere else in france. there've been 900 e. across the roads and bridges over france it took three weeks to reinforce

the beaches. those were critical three weeks and all happened because the arms of the french resistance and they were able to arm the french resistance because women were part of that plan. and you don't know about it because then write more history. until now. with that in mind, this is a fun book to write because not like a great meaty story there's nobody worse on earth than a nazi and others know better story than terrorism you don't know about, but it was fun in other respects it was fun to research because these women were my age and they were busy day ordinary women i thought if they can do it, shouldn't i at least try so i jumped out of an airplane and learned to shoot a gun and went

to a boot camp. i tried to go through much of the training they went through only to discover i would make a very bad spy. not only was i not fluent in french but i have never spoken french. the first thing i had to do was learn so it was fun to write and research and found to interview veterans and their families but it was also fun to write because you get to load stuff up which as a writer is fun. but if i'm going to review is about one of my characters, someone who worked with both andrée and lise. she was 45 and was the first female sabotage agent.

they didn't want to send her in, she was about to become a grandmother and a thought a french teenager is going to, are they going to respect her at all or think that they are sending some jokes. they must be in such a bad way to be sending grandmas to train troops but she was the first and was incredibly successful as we are about to see. so for the parachute reception and when the whole sky went dark but for the stars the longest sabotage as it turned to winter in a small party they traveled to the little village. barely 5-foot 2 inches on her toes she was a student of yoga, whose weight was only at 80 pounds. she was the only person who could do the job of the allies needed to at night. she suspended in a parish of harness her lines quadrupled for strength while searching for the

ground. her flashlight beam through the clouds and beyond her life there was nothing no hint of light from the opening from either end of the overpass and there were no noise is either that the steady drip of water somewhere. her hands were cold and sticky and smelled like almonds from the plastic residue. her clothing with tatters. but also somehow much younger than tha the year before. in the best possible sign come it took years off her life and the commanding officer. she looked 15 years younger and definitely found her niche. her porch light flooded the tracks below. there was a straight drop down

no obstacl obstacle would impeda package of explosives that were low word from the air shaft above. it was one of an elevated space. she signaled to her man that she had what she needed at the center of the tomball. she had a swift procession and was the only person who could wriggle up through the railroad passage and was also the only one who could perform the reconnaissance by education and authority. there was a small splash of white and black smoke filled the tunnel. it was alternating in the bright

light of the star in a warm yellow with a bonfire. the flame grew until they consumed the oxygen in the pathway. bloopers, bricks and debris tumbled down withering tracks. she didn't need to be near the village to follow the explosion. the blazes and elemental chaos reward like cans crushed that one didn't linger long after. she knew all too well she had been home on the night of april 16, 1941 in london when herman had one of his best nights and in that one night a precision bombing with the houses of parliament and admiralty and the national gallery declaring we shall go

out and they also destroyed her home and working class. mayor victoria station to parachute mines and three bombs went off at once in the blasts took out houses. this is the house where she raised her daughter through adulthood and watched the marriage crumble into study it for philosophy and practice meditation and played boardinghouse three unique eccentrics aneccentrics andkooky gone. ceilings collapsed. chimneys stood alone. gas mains exploded, the fire burned through the morning. the neighborhood smell of charred wood. her house was declared

uninhabitable. everyone survived except for the family cat. it was this she said that her cat more than anything else which made me somehow determined to fight back, and she did. with that, i'm hoping that you will all have questions for me and if not, i will prompt you to have questions for me. of the women in the book, only one is still alive, she lives in new zealand and is not well and is private. she's in the book, however, so i got to the story almost at the beginning there were 438 but parachuted into france and when i started there were three

alive. i got to interview one. so there was a sense of sad mess that this story had passed but also a sense of discovery because we don't get access to their finals until they are dead so i get to be the very first historian in some respects to witness the back story with the commanders thought was going on around them. i got to know their families many of them, but when you have that connection you feel the desire to tell a story they want to tell and that they think is important to tell people that matters is the direction which i didn't want to do, i wanted to tell the story as i saw from a journalist and historian and storyteller's point of view and without feeling obligated. i wanted to honor them but also

to be able to charge and belie believe. i did get a chance to talk to people who had lived through this, but i didn't get a chance to talk to my people. yes, maria. >> [inaudible] >> that' >> that's a good question. were the women spies better than men. the answer is everybody that did this was an agent. they went into the territory behind enemy lines without any prediction of soldiers and they were incredibly brave and human. many of them made mistakes, and the women didn't make more or different mistakes band demand. they have a higher success rate. one third were captured and killed and half of the men were captured, but there were so many more men, ten times, but it's not a very good example, comparison.

.. . >> in a peace treaty everybody exchanges their soldiers with negotiated settlements. but hitler kept the french for four or five years so the entire french army was imprisoned there were many more women in france with

conscription and slavery and the membership allowed germany to go to war which means sending a man into enemy territory was an obvious move. and with an able-bodied man who was not at war that is an obvious tell and with that natural demographic all because of the work they were doing with clandestine and recruitment they were significantly better than men that women had an advantage it requires a lot of caretaking. from a teenager that doesn't go. we will send guns to you and

train you for the day that the allies come back. and listening to their concerns and then to listen to other people's concerns. so to realize recruitment required a great deal of compassion and caretaking. and that was such a place but to send everything to the eastern front. so the allies recruiting french teenagers to fight for the resistance they were getting food dropped from the sky. so they need a lot of female traits to do the job but they were more naturally equipped and to teach the allies in

fact, this was a very important part of a job this was the first time this kind of warfare had ever been tried and this was an important job. >> how do you come across this story in the first place quick. >> i am a reporter i was doing a lot of freelance work i knew i wanted a book and wanted a long project and i rented the marathon and this was in 2015 and us was looking at combat exclusion after january 1st 2016 in america a woman can be in any combat role that a man can be and know where she is

forbidden if she can get through the training even special forces she can join the navy s.e.a.ls. so what's even more interesting this book began in hawaii was doing research because i don't like being cold. so many of my friends were in the military and they defy my preconceived notions so i have this notion like junior executive and that is so not who they are. they are incredibly feminine and incredibly credentialed i go hiking with these women and i'm the only one who doesn't have a doctorate. they are mind blowing the interesting and that is surprising to me because they are in a very e-mail space

leading very feminine lives. they were interesting to me. this story was coming up and i was sitting in a hot tub and hawaii. [laughter] and i asked the question, who was the very first woman in war? i thought maybe vietnam or afghanistan or iraq to point to the first female combatant. a few google searches later it wasn't recent not even vietnam but 75 years old. women in combat in world war ii. we didn't know because men have been telling the story. so keep that in mind i did some reading and i came up with what i thought was the

story and my editor got it and the project began then i started to learn french. [laughter] . >> was that women in combat on the russian front quick. >> there were. 1942 marks the first moment of women in combat it was happening simultaneously on the western front behind enemy lines but in the west they were never categorized as combatants. the russians had no problem calling them soldiers. the russians had very different approach. for them it was a numbers game they were throwing bodies at hitler you are in war with the deep pocket you could recruit so it was just one more force you could add to the over pouring - - overpowering force against hitler.

in russia there was a force but again that wasn't qualified for combat so those kind of differences that ultimately add up by 1942 women were being recruited hand over fist but 1942 marks a moment it was going on forever. you need everybody you can get. . >> these women were recruited in england quick. >> yes. >> how did they find them quick. >> they cover a lot of ground. there was a very big missions

intelligence agents but these were sabotaged agents. there were americans. virginia hall was the 31st woman considered a member. she was a reporter. she works for "the new york post" and by virtue of being american she could go into an occupied france. britain could not british passports were not allowed however an american was not in the war and didn't declare war on an occupied france. so she could still get in by virtue of her passport when other agents came in she got ration stamps. and with the underground railroad. so she is a one leg good

american journalist helping allies out of france and arming and training other agents. she was american there was another woman in the core whose mother was a cousin of an american so by citizenship standards she was not american in the current sense by virtue of her mom and was also a celebrated agent for mom was indian so it cast a pretty wide net. the commanders were british. but they couldn't have french passports they did not like

the idea of any frenchman with an allied commander because he didn't want france to be in the war he cannot envision a moment where it was protected state under winston churchill which wasn't so much better to him so he wouldn't let his own citizens fight for the core which meant the sabotage agent i read about was french format married to an italian who had a british passport because born in france but married to a britain so everybody brought the french had to be fully habituated. . >> what do the archives look like? .

>> it is very bureaucratic you get a lot of summaries of conversations that people are having, training files but on the french side it's harder to find. britain has led to the sunshine and everybody is dead and declassified the cold war is over france is very much the opposite it is incredibly hard to shake material out of france. they have not come to grips with their collaboration and world war ii and have only apologize for killing their french jews in the mid- nineties. so their sense of reconciliation makes it bureaucratically very difficult and then in america everything is great. [laughter] you don't have to go anywhere it's all online. [laughter]

so it's a lot of voices from the past and you are re- telling a story through the bits and pieces of information. you can get a sense of people's personalities through their interrogations the one thing that stroke - - that struck me was the anti- semitism and it came across in these files. so you can be mad at them anti-semitic then but it is shocking that you can just that nobody had to be a problem with it. . >> so these were the first women so as a result of what they di did, could the attitude shift? and then as a follow-up, now

you will talk to people in congress just as a result of your book? . >> i hope so. the reason one rises to spend 32 nights on an airplane but bring up the stories and maybe change minds. so i hope, these women did this extraordinary thing came back from the front to be celebrated as heroes and the women were symbols. britain was not as forthcoming it was secret and was classified the government didn't tell you what was going on but one third of these women ended up in camps and britain did not tell people. they were very close about what happened so they became symbols for a country that was lying to itself.

and rather than celebrating them as heroes it's a way for not being better in the war. but also they were diminished almost immediately to be clerical or secretarial and seem not to be as important as careers or radio operators but so were men they were celebrated as soldiers and they were britain doesn't even have a mechanism to keep women in the army but they were doing combat roles. so they squeezed them in without recognizing them as a status of a service member with that era of declassification came in it was the nineties now it's

something to celebrate we know about their missions than at that moment they became the heroes they deserve to be but they had to survive 70 years after the war for that to be true. my hope is i want to tell them a story about these women in war but i have not read any war stories with hunger up until this moment but once i got what i was doing in my editor helping me to understand that it became fun to think about if i cast a feminine lens over everything it changes our interpretation of the whole war. winston churchill stopped being a colonialist and imperialist but becomes a

depressive alcoholic who likes to paint. that was true. he was always a depressive alcoholic who likes to paint and then have not been telling that story we have been getting a one sided view of the entire war. and it just wasn't being told. so my hope is as more women write about it more women are in war, more attitude will change. and to speak to congress i hope to change those attitudes. [laughter] . >> first of all, thank you for writing about this history but i'm curious about the research and we working a day job? . >> was extremely fortunate for

two years this was my job and nothing else. it took me one year to research which included learning french and then another year to write. from final submission in your hands is about another year a lot of that was footnotes. it occupied my life for three years but one year of research and writing. how did i learn french? . >> first i moved to the beach in france and i took an immersive france - - french and i have family that lives there they let me live with them a lot. [laughter] so i could get better and do my work. . >> when you started your reading there was something i didn't quite get.

>> she is hanging in a tunnel she was hanging over the tunnel she doesn't want to get to the ground they have to pull her up since they have these harnesses that so they are dropped in they repurposed it for this to turn into a climbing harness for her to hang her over and use it as a swing to look at the tunnel below ample her backup. they were holding it pulling her up and over fist. they drop a man from the airplane it's a bomber with a hole in the floor. in the days before radar this was invented in the middle of the war they can only fly in on a full moon that the only time it's light enough so you would be in the fuselage that

a plane is built for bombs you are all tucked in then they drop you in and you are about 800 feet over your target not today like 1 mile up then you pull your parachute out and hope it opens. you land in a moonlit field in france at night. if you are being dropped in from above you are just wearing a harness and then you use it as a swing. >> being young when the war was over and fascinated by the resistance and chinese young teenagers fighting the japanes japanese, were there any films that showed women in

this role? . >> i try to stay away from the fictionalized version like charlotte gray or these wonderful celebrations of these women because i didn't want to be affected by the fictionalized version but stick to what i was reading and getting from interviews. but that said their excellent documentaries including the famous one where they interview not just interviewers but collaborators and they cut back and forth for those who collaborated with him and those who relive there extremely difficult lives so they say teenagers i mean very young man if you are old enough in 1942 fight the blitzkrieg you were in a camp.

as you got older in 1942 you would be slave labor and sent to germany so using soldiers for the resistance they are going to the fringe of france they are old people that our useless for a german war factory and too old to fight or they are kids who are just coming up. so there is a lot of documentary evidence i couldn't look at that was film but i did not look at fiction. i'm not sure if that answers your question. >> there was one movie about specifically getting france ready for d-day. >> this is interesting. they needed to communicate

inside enemy lines with london and not get caught they could send a letter maybe it is intercepted and it's very slow. or if an airplane is dropping in charles de gaulle got very - - got out very early by airplane you could get out that way but to broadcast commands in country to give battle orders you have to have a quicker dialogue than letters via courier. so in london they would telegraph to the resistance and they would telegraph back and agree on code phrases than they are broadcast into france on the bbc it sounded like fairy tales and nursery rhymes and dirty jokes that you would hear your dirty joke whatever

the end of the limerick was in say that means bombed this church on the 15th because that's where the nazis are holding up. so we get a lot of those in pop culture like the eagle has landed these phrases came from a moment the bbc is broadcasting into france every night and this is how charles de gaulle became charles de gaulle he is in london broadcasting to the bbc every night telling france stop what you are doing. he's not your guy he is not a hero he is in bed with hitler and you should not agree to just lie down if you're working in a factory make the ball bearings the wrong size slow production do not keep the war machine going. if you are a mom don't just raise your kids, feed a rebel

and help us out. right newspapers and slip them under doors. help the underground railroad and keep fighting charles de gaulle nightly on the bbc arguing to the french resistance matters that is what would get them through. and it is an amazing project because nobody knows their own future they don't even get to know how the war ends he had nothing but a few officers and people who had stayed in france to be president of france after the war to get there by mobilizing people from the radio every night. at the end of the program you get the nursery rhymes and the dirty jokes from the

resistance. >> could you speak with some of the teachers? . >> what is great about this across-the-board everyone wants to tell you there war experience i was five and my mother told me where she was on d-day. stories i had not heard before but she remembered she remembers everybody standing still and she remembers pearl harbor. i have not heard the stories but want to start working on a project like that everyone wants to share and be part of that collective moment it is very gratifying. >> will this be an exhibit at the d-day museum? . >> i hope so. [laughter] there ought to be but the fact there were women on the ground and nobody was talking about

it but that is why he wrote this book. . >> now may be a good time to start signing books. thank you for coming. [applause] . >> thank you for coming. we have the books available at the register and you can pick your book up here form a line and thank you for coming. [inaudible conversations]

. >> larry is an international best-selling author of nonfiction spy thriller into the lion's mouth a true story of a world war ii spy, patriot and the real-life inspiration for james bond. which has been translated into multiple languages throughout the world. prior to becoming a full-time writer a corporate attorney and adjunct professor of law please give a warm savanna welcome. [applause] . >> good morning savanna.