Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS

by Lisa Rogak

Neither the Allied nor Axis soldiers realized it, but many of the broadsides, pamphlets, and other documents the defectors presented in surrender came from a common source. What’s more, they were totally fake, a secret brand of propaganda produced by a small group of women who spent the last years of the war conjuring up lies, stories, and rumors with the sole aim to break the morale of Axis soldiers.

The four women of Propaganda Girls—Elizabeth “Betty” MacDonald, Jane Smith-Hutton, Barbara “Zuzka” Lauwers, and celebrated German-American actress Marlene Dietrich—worked for General “Wild Bill” Donovan’s Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, the precursor of today’s CIA. Their department, the Morale Operations branch—or MO—was in charge of producing “black propaganda,” defined as any leaflet, poster, radio broadcast, or other public or private media that appeared to come from within the enemy country, either from a resistance movement or from disgruntled soldiers and civilians.

“Subtly planned rumor and propaganda [can] subvert people from allegiance to their own country,” he said. “It is essentially a weapon of exploitation, and if successful can be more effective than a shooting war.”

I don’t want to brag, but women can hurt people better, maybe, than men could think of. Women seemed to have a feeling for how to really fool people.”

True.

Donovan liked quirky people, and Betty, Zuzka, Jane, and Marlene definitely fit the bill.

Their motivations for joining the OSS differed—two wanted vengeance, two craved adventure—and one served stateside while three headed overseas. But the one thing they shared in common was that all four were determined to serve their country in the best way they could: by using their brains.

While the women often turned to spies and agents for intel to help them craft their writings, they occasionally had to do the dirty work themselves.

The women had to constantly fight for promotions and recognition, as well as deal with rampant sexism. Often, after her workday was done, Betty was called upon to serve coffee and sandwiches to her male coworkers, while Zuzka played cocktail waitress, serving drinks to male officers who she had brainstormed alongside just minutes before.

They even intercepted postcards and letters from enemy soldiers, erasing any positive messages and instead adding news of starvation and lost battles to dishearten family back home.

When the women who would become known as Donovan’s Dreamers first came on board, Donovan gave them some plum advice, words that none of the women had heard before: “If you think it will work, go ahead.”

He needed highly intelligent and creative women who could think on their feet, were fluent in at least one foreign language, and could hit the ground running.

The couple’s small, neat house overlooked a lagoon, and was just ten miles away from downtown, where they both worked as newspaper reporters. Betty loved her job as society and women’s editor at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, but her beat presented her with a nonstop soft-news cycle of luncheons, parades, and church fairs. At dinner each night, she listened to Alex’s tales of crime and corruption as a police reporter at the Honolulu Advertiser with barely concealed envy.

Like other Oahu residents, she was long accustomed to the regular emergency alerts that were broadcast over the radio due to proximity to the naval base and Hickam Air Field at Pearl Harbor. The alerts had become so frequent that most residents tuned them out, and indeed, a couple of minutes later, the choir returned to their hymns just as Betty poured more coffee.

As a police reporter, Alex was waved through police lines and yellow-taped crime scenes, but Betty needed a male escort to gain access to anything more than the usual ladies’ social events that she covered, and women were never allowed onto the military bases, escort or not.

As she contemplated her next move in the name of the Fourth Estate, she automatically asked forgiveness from whatever God could allow this degree of human devastation and reached for his little arm. Then she pinched him. Hard. A moment of stunned silence was quickly pierced by the shrill wail and shocked tears of a grieving child, probably shriller than they would have been twenty-four hours earlier. Betty jumped back and Hump moved in for his shot.

Two hours after the initial attack, almost 2,400 American civilians and military personnel were dead, 21 ships were destroyed, and 164 planes were obliterated.

By nightfall on December 7, martial law had been declared throughout Hawaii and residents were essentially thrust into life in a war zone: Windows were blacked out to prevent attracting enemy gunfire at night, food and gasoline were rationed, and curfews and other restrictions immediately took effect.

While he championed the truth in his pages, he drew the line at Betty’s story. “I decided not to print your story,” he told her. “I think it would be too frightening for the women to read this.”

Rude.

Though the US government would set up the Office of Censorship twelve days after Pearl Harbor, newspaper editors were already reviewing reporters’ copy with an eye toward not revealing anything that could be used by the enemy. Plus, the military had already instituted a strict censorship program hours after the attack, which covered radio broadcasts and newspapers and magazines, as well as letters and other correspondence sent through the postal service. First-person accounts in any form were particularly scrutinized.

When she wasn’t working eighteen-hour days for the newspaper, she helped set barbed wire along Waikiki Beach to supposedly keep the Japanese from invading.

But first she had to write a column telling housewives that using cheap cuts of meat like liver and lamb neck was a matter of national security.

In those days, newspapermen—and they were mostly men—frequently moved in order to move up even just one rung of the ladder.

When her brother came down with tuberculosis, her father looked for a job in a more temperate climate, so when the sports editor slot at the Honolulu Advertiser opened up in 1925, the Peets headed to Hawaii.

The 1931 Oahuan described her “as the originator of nine-tenths of the deviltry perpetuated in study hall and classroom … she confronts irate teachers with an abashed grin, stoutly maintaining her innocence.”

She skipped ahead a couple of years and graduated from high school in 1931, when she was only sixteen.

Plus, Oahu and the other Hawaiian islands were less affected by the severe economic downturn than the mainland. The temperate climate allowed residents to grow their own food year-round, and the sugar and pineapple industries flourished in the 1930s due to booming exports, providing the island with low unemployment and a thriving economy.

She and Alex started building a life together and thinking about the future. They both dreamed of becoming foreign correspondents in the Far East, preferably Japan, and set about becoming proficient in the language.

Betty also started freelancing for the San Francisco Chronicle, filing a regular column, A Letter From Honolulu, to report on upper-class society life on Oahu, everything from weddings to who was entertaining house guests from New York for the weekend, along with gala events and celebrity fundraisers.

The only thing missing, in Betty’s mind, was a dog, but they had a cat named Skeets who acted like a dog, so she couldn’t complain.

And then, on December 7, 1941, everything got blown to bits, including, eventually, her marriage.

It was an everyday occurrence to check for your gas mask before leaving the house. Fingerprinting of all residents was mandatory, ostensibly for identification in case of death but also for registration purposes. Everyone was required to be vaccinated against typhoid and smallpox. Gasoline was scarce, so people couldn’t drive anywhere.

In those first fragile days and weeks after the attack, she could never guess that the way that she tweaked the truth of the boy in the rubble would turn out to be her ticket overseas and the path to independence.

Božena was born on April 22, 1914, in Brno, a small city in the southeastern part of the country, about 120 miles from Prague, the capital of what is now the Czech Republic.

Despite the family’s prosperity, their lives were not without tragedy. She was given the name of a sister who had died while her mother, Olga, was pregnant with her.

To mitigate her grief, Olga turned away from Božena and toward her son.

Before she was out of her teens, she had become fluent in German and French, and took eight years of Latin and four of Classical Greek at the city’s elite high school, where she was one of only a few girls to attend. She graduated from high school in 1933.

On November 11, 1937, she graduated with a doctor of law degree and took a job at a law firm in her hometown.

A friend told her about a job in the advertising department at Bata Enterprises, a shoe factory in Zlín, which wasn’t far from Brno. Despite the fact that she’d never worked in advertising, Božena figured that it had to be more exciting than working in a law firm.

Božena found her circle of colleagues at the shoe company to be quite cosmopolitan: They hailed from different parts of Europe, and even the United States, and she loved the diversity because she was able to learn something new from every one of them.

Like Božena, that visiting friend—Charles Lauwers, a Belgian-American who worked for Bata in their Czech and Senegal branches—loved languages; he was fluent in English, French, German, and Czech. They started talking in Czech and didn’t stop for five days, when he and Božena announced that they were engaged to be married.

Then, on March 15, 1939, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, with Hitler riding into Prague in a red Mercedes to take a victory lap.

However, there was a problem: With his American citizenship, Charles was allowed to leave, but as a Czech citizen, his fiancée couldn’t … unless they were married.

At first, Božena viewed living in the small town of Léopoldville in the Congo as yet another adventure, but the thrill quickly wore off after they arrived.

the supply chains had been increasingly cut off by the encroaching war, which meant that he had to spend hours each day fixing broken machines and teaching employees how to make shoes by hand in addition to his regular responsibilities.

She contacted a few newspapers back home in Brno and offered to become a correspondent, filing travelogues and other articles for their pages. They agreed, and soon she had an excuse to travel around the region and talk to people for her stories.

When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the Axis blockade along the African coast became totally impenetrable: Nothing could get in or out.

By this time, Božena was getting tired of following her husband’s lead. She didn’t want to be stuck in Léopoldville any longer and decided to accompany Charles to Cape Town, South Africa, from which he left for New York in December 1940.

Shortly after he touched down in New York, Charles discovered that his plan to buy machinery and ship it back to the Congo wasn’t viable since American factories had already, long before Pearl Harbor, turned their focus to producing machinery for the war effort; a shoe factory in Africa was low priority.

Compared to the small cities she’d lived in, Božena found New York overwhelming with its bustle, noise, and crowds.

“Why are you wasting your time bumming around in New York?” he asked her. “Off with you to the embassy in Washington, we need people, and now.”