This week we are discussing D-Day Girls by Sarah Rose, Ch. 7-19.
Trigger Warning!!! This book contains situations and subjects related to: war, sexism, death, anti-Semitism, racism, white supremacy, murder, torture, prison, rape, concentration camps, suicidal ideation, cannibalism, and illness.
Discussion:
Michaela: Hello friends and welcome to our second discussion of D-Day Girls by Sarah Rose. This second section was so long! I truly had such a hard time reading this section. I know I said this last time but historical non-fiction is just not my forte. There are still plenty of interesting facts and stories in this section of the book though. We followed more of Odette and Yvonne stories which both are at a pretty unfortunate circumstance at the end of this section. It feels so weird to be reading these stories about real women who experienced these things not even a hundred years ago. With movies, TV, and media you can easily distance yourself from these historical events because we weren’t around to see it but reading these women’s stories really gives you a grasp on what all went into ending WWII.
Jacilyn: This section was quite long, and a whole lot happened. I will say though, once the courier’s briefcase was stolen, I got hooked back into the story itself. It didn’t necessarily make it easier or faster to read though, just due to the volume of information I was taking in. I knew the moment the briefcase was stolen that things were going to unravel. Everything that happened to take down Prosper’s network all came down to easy mistakes. I mean, honestly, while reading it I thought “who would do something so stupid as carrying around written lists of cyphers, names, safehouses….” but let’s be real, I have never had a great memory and all of that would be difficult to retain.
I will give the writer this, the way they weave the story is well-done, particularly in this section. We learn about the build up of Prosper’s network, the successes of the various cells across France, and then the bricks all start to tumble down around it all. I can’t imagine the difficulty of being in the agents’ positions, at the mercy of the Nazis. And so many of them refused to crack. It’s truly impressive. You’re right in that it becomes easy to distance ourselves from the people who lived through WWII. In the grand scheme of things, it didn’t happen all that long ago. People that were alive to experience that are still alive now, although not as many as there once was of course. But we’ve never experienced something even remotely similar in our lifetimes.
Michaela: That briefcase moment was a jaw drop moment for me because we totally just glossed over it until a few chapters later. Rose just wrote that and was like ‘ah yes a good cliffhanger’, I was stressed! It literally all came crashing down because of not one but TWO briefcases full of info being taken or left behind. It just reminds you that everyone here is human and makes mistakes and sometimes those mistakes can be world ending. Another mistake being Odette not following instructions after being found out, she stays behind to wait for Peter which ultimately leads to their arrest and her torture. Yvonne and Pierre are also subjected to the consequences of bad decisions but I think in their case it was whoever decided to send the Canadian agent who spoke horrible French with a heavy accent. Literally, these last few chapters of this section were gripping! Everything was just all happening at once.
Then of course the biggest mistake of them all, in my opinion, was committed by none other than London itself, in particular a man refusing to listen to a woman who was an expert in her field. Are you shocked? I’m not. Gilbert is literally trying to signal that he is under duress by skipping an identity check and Colonel Buckmaster (the man himself) decided that the women who had been communicating with Gilbert this whole time didn’t know anything and we should just trust Gilbert. This is what turns Gilbert away from London and he agrees to work with the Germans. I am so mad, friends. I was fuming reading that part.
Jacilyn: I cannot believe that the man who got these entire networks started by advocating for the use of female agents would dismiss a clear tell like that. In that moment, Buck handed an even worse fate to his agents.
Honestly, though, that’s not the worst thing London did in this chapter. I’m glad that Rose brought to attention the anti-Semitism that was entrenched in global consciousness. Not just within the Nazis, oh no, but across the entire world. There are still so many anti-Semitic stereotypes, jokes, and sayings that get tossed around willy-nilly, and not because people actively think that Jews are nefarious or lesser, but because those things have become so normalized throughout history that a lot of people are ignorant to their origins or true meanings. This wasn’t mentioned in this book, but something I know from my history studies in college is that the United States turned Jewish refugees away from our borders. Not just from afar, but with a boat full of refugees fleeing the war and Hitler’s cruelty sitting in our port. They were turned away, when the United States government was well aware of the horrors that would await them back in Europe. I have studied various aspects of history for quite some time, with quite a bit of emphasis on Holocaust history, and somehow I still never knew that fact until the Genocide class I took my senior year of college. It’s no wonder right wing Q-Anon conspiracy theorists tout anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the United States, loudly and proudly.
I have felt tense quite often while reading this book, waiting to learn what happens next, but nothing has made me cry… until learning about Bones. I can truly empathize with someone being radicalized into fighting back by the death of their beloved cat at enemy hands. Yvonne went on to become such a skilled resistance fighter! It was truly enjoyable reading about the calm and confident way that Yvonne and the other agents carried out these incredibly dangerous and high-stakes missions. Imagine, calmy riding your bike down a country road with a backpack full of explosives!
Michaela: I also feel that tension reading this book. It was just such a horrible time in history. These women were so touch and just badass going through all they did. We have Yvonne who blew up trains and lived through a bullet to the head, Andree blowing up pylons, Odette was arrested and tortured. Which that scene was a tough one for me to read, the way she described being able to remember the voice of one of her torturers, that was gut wrenching.
This section was so jam packed with information and facts, I know I have forgotten a lot of it despite taking notes. I wanted to share some of my favorite facts and quotes from this section. My absolute favorite was of course again about fashion (no one in surprised I’m sure!), the people of France could not rebel against the Germans in any direct way without direct consequences. At one point Rose talks about how if the Resistance killed one German soldier then Hitler deemed that 350 French lives would be taken instead, men, women and children all included. So one way the French population rebelled against the German occupation was by using fashion. Some women wore rabbit fur coats because rations were so low that domesticated rabbits became a meat source. Others wore “deep-necked seductive dresses” to go against the calls for Catholic modesty. Also the fashion went along with the youth movement of jazz music, which has always been something I have found interesting about WWII since I learned about it a long time ago in a college music course I took in high school. I remember watching the movie the Swing Kids on my own after learning that and it really has stuck with me all this time.
Some other honorable mentions are how women, unsurprisingly again, have to pick up the slack from men who had already been in these positions and this war for a while. One being how “men shied away from the responsibility of doing anything new” so women were given some of those jobs and tasks. Such as women had started to be used more as couriers rather than men because they “did not talk as much as men”, as in they won’t spill as many secrets and will do it faster, I found this one particularily hilarious given that men often complain that women talk too much. Then we have men realizing that being empathetic was a useful ‘woman skill’ and that “caretaking would become a substantial core of resistance work”. Dumbfounding how obvious that is honestly and it just flew over their heads. And the best of the best, the dirty cipher poem. Women coders were asked to write original poems to use as ciphers for agents and I love the sense of humor that still existed in these circumstances. The poem Rose chose to share in this book was:
“Is de Gaulle’s prick
Twelve inches thick
Can it rise
To the size
Of a proud flag-pole
And does the sun shine
From his arse-hole?” (pg 129)
It really just fills me with joy along with all these other facts. Women are just amazing and beautiful and tough and smart and badass.
Jacilyn: The dirty cypher poem was fantastic. It actually made me giggle a bit. It’s so annoying to me that women were treated as delicate flowers that are inherently below men when we can totally hold our own against them in any way they’d like - including colorful language and committing acts of violent resistance against Nazis.
That’s all for this week, friends. I imagine D-Day will be arriving in the near future in our reading, and I’m looking forward to learning the roles the resistance fighters have when the day comes. We’ll see you next time!
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