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

by Lisa Rogak

She told Masaryk that she’d leave the next day, but Charles put his foot down. She was his wife, which meant that her main job was to support him and stay by his side, even if she was bored to tears.

Eye roll.

But two days before Christmas—two weeks after Pearl Harbor—Charles enlisted in the Army Air Corps. With her husband gone, Božena could do what she wanted to do for a change.

Masaryk was right: There was a lot of work at the embassy. As ghostwriter, she wrote speeches, papers, and reports, and with every word she knew she was helping.

At the embassy, in addition to serving as the primary ghostwriter, Zuzka also wrote the monthly reports for the military office, providing updates for the 310th Czechoslovak Fighter Squadron, which was part of Britain’s Royal Air Force.

Colonel Hess started to reminisce about the Battle of Britain, which had been a pivotal victory for the UK in 1940. In addition, it was the first battle ever to be fought primarily in the air, not on land.

Three months later, We Were in the Battle of Britain was published to positive acclaim in book form after first being serialized in a Czech newspaper in New York. Colonel Hess had the byline—not Zuzka, nor did the book credit her—but she didn’t mind in the least.

He told the head of the embassy that he would rather serve in the Czech army, and Zuzka typed up the letter to the US Department of War as part of her regular duties. About a week later, he received permission to serve in the Czech army, but then he said he changed his mind and declared he would be better able to serve while working at the embassy.

The balls on that guy.

Women weren’t sent into direct combat, so if a woman enlisted in the military, she’d be able to take a job in a support role that a man had been handling.

She resigned from her job at the embassy, and the next day she headed for the district court to apply for American citizenship, which was required before she could enlist. The rule didn’t apply to men, only women. Zuzka didn’t think it was fair, but then again, this wasn’t her country … until now.

That's A Double standard.

“What kind of name is Božena?” “A common Czech name,” Zuzka replied. “Not anymore,” the officer said as she crossed it out. “You’ll have to sign your name many times in the Army and you’ll hold up everybody by spelling it. Why don’t you adopt an American name like mine? Barbara. It begins with a B and ends with an A just like yours, so in the Army, you’ll be Barbara.”

So racist.

As the wife of a naval attaché, Jane lived with her husband, Henri, and young daughter, Cynthia, at the American embassy in Tokyo in 1941, which satisfied her zest for adventure. Like Betty, Jane loved Asian culture, particularly anything Japanese, so she was thrilled at the opportunity to immerse herself in Japanese art and culture and achieve a near fluency in the language. She even won several awards for her skills in Japanese brush painting.

But by mid-1941, lavish embassy dinners had become increasingly difficult to pull off due to dwindling supplies and bare shelves at the market from Japan’s ongoing war with China.

Jane and the other embassy wives and employees coped as best they could, frequenting back alleys where black markets for food and household staples operated, as well as placing orders to be shipped from a San Francisco wholesaler.

Even Jane’s Japanese friends had stopped dropping by since the military police made a regular practice of interrogating any Japanese citizen seen leaving the embassy premises, sometimes for hours on end. Ultimately, only a skeleton crew of sixty-four remained, including Jane, Cynthia, and Alice Grew, the wife of Ambassador Joseph Grew, who had become one of Jane’s closest friends.

On the morning of December 8—Tokyo is almost a full day behind the United States—a team of Japanese military police barged into the embassy compound, ordering all residents not to leave the premises for any reason.

One station reported that Japan had bombed Shanghai, which was entirely plausible due to recent news stories boasting that the Japanese army had made great inroads into China over the last few weeks.

According to a broadcast from a San Francisco radio station, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor; another station had confirmed the shocking news.

In an all-hands-on-deck frenzy, the staff grabbed every vaguely sensitive file, folder, telegram, and scrap of paper they could stuff into briefcases, boxes, and pockets before running down several flights of stairs to the parking garage, where they crammed everything into trash cans, doused the papers with kerosene, and struck a match. Then they ran upstairs for more.

So metal!

A few minutes later, a screaming knot of military police forced their way inside and pushed toward the communications room, grabbing radios and pieces of transmission equipment as they went. They even pulled the wires from the walls.

After what seemed like hours, the MPs finally left the premises, arms overflowing with equipment and paper.

Jane Ming was born in Globe, Arizona, on October 19, 1912, and from the way she lived her life, it seemed like she was always trying to escape the memory of that small mining town about ninety miles east of Phoenix.

Her father, Marcus Aurelius Smith Ming—who was of Welsh descent, not Chinese—joined the Arizona National Guard in 1910.

While Marcus was overseas, his wife and two young daughters lived with Ellen’s family in Globe. It was not a peaceful existence: Jane and Mary Louise constantly fought, while Ellen was an alcoholic, prone to dark periods of depression, who felt stuck in Globe while her husband was in Europe. Plus, young Jane was sickly, and Ellen’s maternal tendencies were few and far between.

She applied for a passport for herself and Mary Louise—but not for Jane—and took off for Europe to visit her husband at a military base in Germany. Young Jane had mixed emotions. She was glad to be free of her sister and her mother, but she was jealous of the fact that the other members of her family were off on a grand adventure.

Who did you leave her with?

Fortunately, her grandparents turned out to be better caregivers than their daughter, and Jane thrived as a result. Her grandmother loved to read and encouraged Jane to explore art, drawing, and painting, which she took a clear interest in.

Jane’s peaceful existence lasted until 1923, when her parents and sister returned to the States. The Ming family bounced around a bit, first living in Stockton, California, before moving to Tacoma, Washington, where they lived at Fort Lewis.

Couldn't She stay with the grandparents?

After she graduated in June of 1930, she headed for Eugene, Oregon, where she enrolled at the University of Oregon.

She was also intensely curious about the world, and despite her unhappy home life, she fully recognized the benefits and opportunities for travel that the military provided. So a few months after starting her freshman year, she married Milton Johnson, a naval officer she had met in Tacoma, at Fort Lewis, on January 1, 1931.

After the wedding, they immediately left for the Philippines, where Johnson was scheduled to deploy. But Jane didn’t mind being alone. In his absence, she rented a small apartment in Manila, enrolled in classes at the University of the Philippines, and even traveled to China by herself several times.

Go girl!

After one of his leaves, Jane discovered she was pregnant, and while she didn’t want to stay married, she also knew she couldn’t support herself, let alone a child, during the depths of the Depression.

Cynthia was born on April 23, 1934. Though Jane and her mother still didn’t get along, at least living at home provided her with built-in childcare, which was fortunate since motherhood wasn’t Jane’s primary interest. She enrolled at the University of Iowa, where she studied composition, history, art, and home economics.

So random.

Southern California had several military bases, and with a population of 1.3 million, Los Angeles was a sizable city with a mix of cultures and a significant university.

So she moved to Los Angeles in 1935—the same year her divorce was finalized—and enrolled at UCLA, where she took classes in journalism, psychology, art, and literature.

Does she ever get a degree?

Despite the demise of her first marriage, Jane was smart enough to realize that the only way out of her situation was to marry the right man, preferably a military officer who could provide her with some status and degree of financial comfort so she could continue her studies, along with a way to travel the world.

It didn’t take much to take a shine to Jane, a statuesque blonde with a brain that she didn’t hesitate to use.

When she met Henri Smith-Hutton in San Diego, she immediately set her sights on him.

He was obviously smitten, and two months later, on June 10, 1936, he arrived in Norfolk, Virginia, where he met Jane and Cynthia before they headed for Sioux City, Iowa, where they were married on June 26, 1936.

After the wedding, Jane, Henri, and Cynthia left for San Francisco in order to board the SS President Hoover, which was leaving in July for Shanghai, where Henri was to serve as communications officer on the USS Augusta, the flagship of the US Asiatic fleet.

But Henri didn’t want to be away from his family. This was his first marriage, and he was determined to be a good husband and father. So in February 1937, he transferred to a new job on dry land as an intelligence officer and moved into the small house in Tsingtao. His presence had a calming effect on Jane, and despite the fact that they had spent a total of maybe three months together since they had met, their relationship appeared to be compatible. In addition to speaking Japanese fluently, Henri also dabbled in Russian, German, and French.

Oh boy.

Tsingtao largely escaped the tension that was building in much of China in the late 1930s as the Japanese army continued to build up troops throughout the country.

While many military families would have been happy to head back to the US after three years away, both Jane and her husband preferred to stay overseas.

The Smith-Huttons moved into a four-bedroom Western-style house adjacent to the embassy. It was a neighborhood where French and Italian diplomats also lived, and Jane was happy to live within an enclave of foreigners.

She appreciated Henri because he respected her intelligence, unlike her first husband, who had wanted her to be satisfied with living a more traditional woman’s role of housewife. Henri also confided in her … up to a point.

As the summer approached, the writing was on the wall in terms of future military engagement with Japan. In May 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared an “unlimited national emergency” in the United States, designed to empower the government to do whatever it took to prepare and protect its citizens in wartime, both at home and overseas.

“The Japanese police are constantly checking on foreigners, providing annoyance, irritation, mental or physical discomfort.”

When the train stopped, the attendant pulled the shade down in their berth and told them to keep it lowered. Shortly after they returned to Tokyo, the US Army ordered all officers to leave the country.

The Smith-Hutton family and more than sixty others were being held captive by the Japanese inside the US embassy.

As the only family in the embassy, the Smith-Huttons moved into Ambassador Grew’s one-bedroom apartment. Cynthia was in third grade at the time, and Jane homeschooled her as best she could.

Jane and the other women cut up the embassy’s curtains to make enough jackets and scarves for everyone.

The only contact the Japanese allowed them to have with the outside world was Mr. Hausherr, the Swiss minister to Tokyo at the time, who had first been allowed into the compound ten days after Pearl Harbor was bombed.