How four women raged a secret propaganda war against the Nazis during World War II

The first time I learned about a group of women who created propaganda aimed at Germany and Japan during World War II, I was intrigued. These four women – Betty MacDonald, Zuzka Lauwers, Jane Smith-Hutton, and the actress Marlene Dietrich – worked for the Office of Strategic Services, which would morph into the CIA after the war.  

Americans are used to hearing ‘Rosie the Riveter’ stories; the women who took jobs in factories to build ships, planes and weapons for the war effort. Tens of thousands more worked as ‘government girls’ in Washington DC.

But the work of Lauwers, MacDonald, Dietrich and Smith-Hutton caught my attention because they worked for Morale Operations, a secret division of the OSS, where they forged letters and military orders, published entire newspapers and produced songs designed to convince both civilian and military populations in Germany and Japan that they were on the losing side of the war. 

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The women came from far-flung corners of the globe: MacDonald was a newspaper reporter in Honolulu, Lauwers was a lawyer from Czechoslovakia fluent in five languages, Smith-Hutton – the wife of an attaché at the US Embassy in Tokyo – was skilled in Japanese watercolour and flower art, and Dietrich was based in Hollywood, starring in movies that were banned in her native Germany after Hitler put a bounty on her head when she renounced her country to become an American citizen.

The women all had one thing in common: After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, they wanted to help the United States fight – but not by planting victory gardens and buying war bonds. They wanted to use their brains, and general William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the head of the OSS, was happy to have them on board.  

Donovan had studied Nazi propaganda and knew how effective it could be. “Subtly planned rumour and propaganda can subvert people from allegiance to their own country,” he said. “It is essentially a weapon of exploitation, and if successful it can be more effective than a shooting war.” He launched a division named Morale Operations and while officers in other departments refused to hire women, Donovan sought them out. 

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“General Donovan believed that we could do things that the men couldn’t,” MacDonald said years later. “We were able to think of a lot of gossipy things to do for MO that men never would have thought of.” 

Indeed. Lauwers brainstormed the idea of toilet paper with Hitler’s face on it with the phrase Diese Seite Benutzen – Use This Side – printed on it to distribute in German-occupied areas of Italy. Smith-Hutton designed leaflets aimed at the Japanese military population, informing them that their wives back home were forced to work in factories, and that their unsupervised children were suffering accidents at home.  

MacDonald wrote scripts for radio shows beamed into occupied China, everything from announcing that the Allies planned to attack Hong Kong to coming up with ideas for the nightly astrological show. 

And when Dietrich recorded the songs that would be beamed into Germany each night, designed to depress the morale of her former countrymen, she knew exactly how to twist the lyrics of “Lili Marleen”, the song that had made her famous. That catch in her voice was real, because when she sang it in a clandestine recording session in the middle of New York’s Times Square, she thought of all that she had lost when she renounced the country of her birth, and all that Germany had lost because of a cruel monomaniacal dictator, and she wanted her former countrymen to feel it too.

I spent six years researching these women, and every page from books, unpublished articles and declassified OSS documents brought me great respect for their fight, not only against Hitler and the Emperor, but against the people who were wilfully preventing them from doing their jobs. Lauwers and Smith-Hutton faced fierce blowback from men doing half the work for twice the pay who didn’t think women should strive to be more than secretaries and helpmeets.

I found dozens of documents where Lauwers and Smith-Hutton begged for more money and promotions so that they could more effectively do their jobs.  

When the war ended, all four women admitted they felt lost. The energy and danger of wartime made them feel alive and gave them a common purpose. And for the rest of their lives, all four remembered Donovan’s early words to them, plum advice that none of the women had heard before: “If you think it will work, go ahead.” 

Propaganda Girls: The Secret Women of World War II Intelligence by Lisa Rogak is out now (Footnote, £16.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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