As a graduate student, Lena Andrews, A09, thought she had read everything about World War II. She had majored in political science as an undergrad at Tufts and was studying under Barry Posen, an expert on the war at MIT, where she was writing her dissertation on the use of tactical air power. So she was surprised when she happened upon a museum exhibit dedicated to a part of the war she had not heard much about: the women in uniform.

During the war, hundreds of thousands of American women served as secretaries and nurses, but also as codebreakers, truck drivers, parachute riggers, metalsmiths—just about any job that did not require firing a weapon on the front lines.  

After getting her doctorate, Andrews worked for the RAND Corporation before joining the Central Intelligence Agency as a military analyst, but in her spare time she began researching those servicewomen.

Having developed a deep understanding of the importance of defense logistics in her line of work, she could fully appreciate the behind-the-scenes roles that women played during the war. Because World War II ushered in advanced technologies like radar and aircraft carriers, as well as modern combat strategies, it called for millions of military personnel to help with training, transportation, communication, and countless other unsung tasks.

“Victory required an unprecedented supply and support infrastructure to sustain forces on the front lines,” Andrews explains in her new book, Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II. “For the first time in American history, these demands could not be met by the male population alone.” Ultimately, she writes, it was women who helped win the war for the Allies.

The book, based on archival research and Andrews’ interviews with World War II veterans and their families, shares several personal stories from the war, many of them never written about before simply because no one ever asked. Here, Andrews, who will join the University of Maryland as an associate research professor in the spring, talks with Tufts Now about the roles these women played, the discrimination they faced, and their legacy in the military and society.

Tufts Now: What surprised you once you started researching the servicewomen of World War II?

The first thing was just the number of women who served—350,000 people. Relative to the 16 million personnel in World War II, it is small, but it’s the size of today’s active-duty navy. What also struck me was how much they were doing, how important the work was, and how little was out there about it. I saw that I could learn something new about the war by looking through the lens of women.

Why do you say they were essential in winning the war?

Aside from the number who served was the content of their contribution. They were in support roles, which I think people generally underestimate. You don’t necessarily think of sorting mail or fixing planes or providing uniforms as critical tasks, but they are.

One of my favorite examples is aviation. Women weren’t flying combat planes over Europe and dropping bombs. But women like Susan Ahn were training pilots to fly. Women like Anne Baumgartner were flying planes around the country so they were in the right place at the right time to be deployed. Jessie Kontrabecki was fixing planes when they came back. So they were touching every part of the supply and support infrastructure, but they were cut out of the story, in part because they were women but also because these are undervalued roles in the military. Most folks on the front lines will tell you that they can’t do their job without the 15 people standing behind them, making sure they have the equipment and the training that they need.

People think of it as a sepia-toned war, but there was a ton of new tactics. You had amphibious assault, you had strategic bombing joint operations. There were 300,000 aircraft, 1,200 combatant ships, and millions of trucks and tanks being deployed. All these things are swirling together on the battlefield, and the connective tissue, making sure they’re working and doing the right thing, is people. And you find women filling that gap.

You share some dramatic stories about nurses wading to shore under gunfire on the North African coast, servicewomen who spent nearly four years as prisoners of war in the Philippines, and 38 female pilots who died testing and transporting planes. But you also find heroism in the seemingly mundane, like the women of the 6888^th Central Postal Directory Battalion, an all-Black battalion tasked with sorting through an enormous backlog of mail.

The Six Triple Eight, as they were known, is one of my favorite stories in the book. On the face of it, it’s mail—who cares? But mail was the lifeline for men on the front lines. They had no connection to home and the reason that they’re fighting. And a piece of mail, it’s like a heartbeat that brings them back to life. These women gave the men the morale boost they needed to do their jobs.

To me, that is incredibly important, especially when they’re doing it in the face of extraordinary discrimination not only as women in uniform, but Black women in uniform. It epitomizes the complications of the time, but it’s also one of the more inspiring stories because of the way that they served despite such harassment.

What kind of harassment?

A lot of the mistreatment—of women of color, of white women, of women who would identify today as queer or LGBTQ—was appalling. That said, the 1940s was a very different time, especially in the military, when it came to discrimination on the basis of sex. That was just sort of your day. Many of the women that I talked to explicitly said they did not have a term for it. They were just expected to put up with things that today would be totally inappropriate, like going on dates with senior officers, or being ordered to go to dances after work, up to and including much more egregious acts of sexual violence.