War Military Women

WASP of the Ferry Command is the story of the women ferry pilots who flew more than nine million miles in 72 different aircraft - 115,000 pilot hours - for the Ferrying Division, Air Transport Command, during World War II. In the spring of 1942, Col. William H. Tunner lacked sufficient male pilots to move vital trainer aircraft from the factory to the training fields. Nancy Love found 28 experienced women pilots who could do the job.

Personalities. Characters. History. John C. Waugh, the author of the popular and award-winning The Class of 1846, presents forty of the most memorable and impactful individuals he has come across during his three decades of researching and writing about the American Civil War—or as he calls them, his “Unforgettables” in the aptly titled, Unforgettables: Winners, Losers, Strong Women, and Eccentric Men of the Civil War Era.

In January 2003, 28-year-old GCHQ translator Katharine Gun received an email from the US National Security Agency that would turn her world upside down. The message requested Katharine’s assistance in co-ordinating an illegal US-UK spy operation which would secure UN authorisation for the Iraq invasion. Horrified, she decided to leak the information to the British press. Katharine’s decision would change her life forever, as she was arrested under the Official Secrets Act whilst becoming a cause célèbre for political activists.

Christian Lamb is one of the last surviving Wren officers to have served throughout the Second World War, from Blitz ravaged London, to the important radar and operations rooms and undertaking a vital role in D Day. Escaping both the Spanish Flu pandemic when she was born and the pandemic we are emerging from today, she has reached the impressive age of 101. Now she leads us through the story of her extraordinary life and the wartime experiences of her fellow Wrens.

Fighter Pilot's Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War details author and Professor Mary Lawlor’s unconventional upbringing in Cold War America. Memories of her early life—as the daughter of a Marine Corps and then Army father—reveal the personal costs of tensions that once gripped the entire world, and illustrate the ways in which bold foreign policy decisions shaped an entire generation of Americans, defining not just the ways they were raised, but who they would ultimately become.

As she did so provocatively with military spouses in Army Wives, Tanya Biank gives us the inside story of women in today’s military - their professional and personal challenges from the combat zone to the home front. Since 9/11, more than 240,000 women have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan - more than 140 have died there, and they currently make up 14 percent of the total active-duty forces. Despite advances, today’s servicewomen are constantly pressed to prove themselves.

"The War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865" is an evocative and historically significant diary penned by Eliza Frances Andrews, which vividly captures the tumult and transformation of the American South during the waning days of the Civil War and the onset of Reconstruction.

In 1993, U.S. women earned the right to fly in combat, but the full story of how it happened is largely unknown. The Fly Girls Revolt chronicles the actions of a band of women who overcame decades of discrimination and prevailed against bureaucrats, chauvinists, anti-feminists, and even other military women. Drawing on extensive research, interviews with women who served in the 1970s and 1980s, and her personal experiences in the Air Force, Eileen Bjorkman weaves together a tale of the women who fought for the right to enter combat and be treated as equal partners in the U.S. military.

The United States Naval Academy has no monopoly on heroes—naval, marine, or otherwise. But over the last 10 years, the most popular living author of American sea fiction has spent thousands of hours researching for Shipmate, the Academy's magazine. The extraordinary personal stories of adventure and courage he's collected span American history, from the Mexican War to the War on Terror.

The wake of war leaves marks that don’t always look dramatic from the outside. Inside, a tempest of trauma rages. Consumed by darkness and depression in the aftermath of war, Ewa Reid-Hammer’s story is the journey of a terrified child’s transformation to adulthood. With reflections on the emotional wounds left not only on herself, but those close to her, Reid-Hammer’s account depicts the complexities of survival and self-recovery in the face of distress. From horror to healing, her story reveals the truth of what it is to be a child of war.

In a country bent on controlling women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom, a resistance has formed. An armed group of women known as the Hamiyat have made a name for themselves protecting those too weak to fight back. And now they are going on the offensive. Three women among its ranks must make the hardest choices of their lives.

Forced Out: A Nikkei Woman’s Search for a Home in America offers insight into “voluntary evacuation,” a little-known Japanese American experience during World War II, and the lasting effects of cultural trauma. Of the roughly 120,000 people forced from their homes by Executive Order 9066, around 5,000 were able to escape incarceration beforehand by fleeing inland.

Ex-British Army Soldier, John Carney, ran a close protection operation in Iraq for oil executives when he was asked by the family of a young Dutch woman to extract her from the collapsing Islamic State in Syria. Hearing first-hand of the shocking living hell of tricked naive young girls, many from the West, trapped, sexually abused and enslaved by ISIS, he knew only one thing - he had to get them out. Armed with AK-47s and 9mm Glocks, he launched a daring, dangerous and deadly operation to free as many as he could.

When Cheryl Dietrich joined the US Air Force, she began a transformation from overweight introvert and military neophyte into one of the key personnel redesigning the structure of the Air Force within the Pentagon. In this stirring and revelatory memoir, Cheryl - one of only a hundred female officers of colonel rank or higher - explains what it takes to stay the course, overcome male domination issues, break the glass ceiling more than once, and deal with the political issues facing the Pentagon.

This is the story of how America's first women soldiers helped win World War I, earned the vote, and fought the US Army. In 1918 the US Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, demanded female "wire experts" when he discovered that inexperienced doughboys were unable to keep him connected with troops under fire.

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.

CBS News correspondent Kimberly Dozier battled back from critical injuries sustained in a Baghdad bombing, a prominent incident that claimed the lives of her two crew members, an Army officer, and his interpreter. In Breathing the Fire, Dozier offers a personal memoir of tenacity as well as dedication and drama.

Throughout World War II, when Saturday nights came around, servicemen and hostesses happily forgot the war for a little while as they danced together in USO clubs, which served as havens of stability in a time of social, moral, and geographic upheaval. Meghan Winchell demonstrates that in addition to boosting soldier morale, the USO acted as an architect of the gender roles and sexual codes that shaped the "greatest generation".

U.S. Army Captain Kimberly N. Hampton was living her dream: flying armed helicopters in combat and commanding D Troop, 1st Squadron, 17th Cavalry, the armed reconnaissance aviation squadron of the 82nd Airborne Division. On January 2, 2004, Captain Hampton was flying an OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter above Fallujah, Iraq, in support of a raid on an illicit weapons marketplace, searching for an illusive sniper on the rooftops of the city. A little past noon her helicopter was wracked by an explosion....

Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War explores gender, age, and Confederate identity by examining the lives of teenage daughters of Southern slaveholding, secessionist families. These young women clung tenaciously to the gender ideals that upheld marriage and motherhood as the fulfillment of female duty and to the racial order of the slaveholding South, an institution that defined their status and afforded them material privileges. When differences between the North and South proved irreconcilable, Southern daughters demonstrated extraordinary agency in seeking to protect their futures as wives, mothers, and slaveholders.