by Mary Anna Evans
Images of the WWII home front have entered the popular imagination. In our minds’ eyes, ordinary citizens, most of them women, rationed their food, led scrap metal drives, and worked in factories like the biceps-flexing Rosie-the-Riveter in her red-and-white polka dot kerchief. Meanwhile, people they loved, mostly men, fought in the most destructive war ever known. Much, perhaps most, fiction set in the time focuses on the war, since it stands to reason that bombs and bullets would offer more dramatic possibilities than, say, tending a victory garden, but since military organizations of the time consisted almost exclusively of men, this presumption risks ignoring the wartime experiences of women. Fortunately, a little looking around will turn up WWII home front stories, ensuring that those women won’t be forgotten.
A recent example is Julia Bryan Thomas’s For Those Who Are Lost, inspired by true events. On the eve of the Nazi invasion of the island of Guernsey, parents were forced to choose whether to send their children alone to England or to keep the family together and put the children at risk from an invading army. Tense and heartbreaking, the story follows children and parents who live through the consequences of this choice, putting a human face on global disaster.
In Rhys Bowen’s Where the Sky Begins, Josie Banks’s world crumbles around her as bombs kill her friend, injure her, and reduce her home to rubble. Evacuated to the English countryside, she must start again, with her new future overshadowed by the coming return of her overbearing husband.
In Farleigh Park, also by Rhys Bowen, centers on the death of a soldier whose parachute failed over a country estate in England during WWII. Fear that he had been a spy brings an MI5 operative to the ancestral home of Lord Westerham and his five daughters, but one of the daughters has a secret of her own, a position at the British code-breaking facility, Bletchley Park.
One of the most famous authors working during WWII, Agatha Christie, had an intimate experience of war. She sent two husbands to fight, one in WWI and the other in WWII, working on the home front in medical roles such as a nurse and an apothecary’s assistant while she waited for them to come home. Her son-in-law died in action during WWII. One of her homes, Greenway, was requisitioned by the American Coast Guard to house their personnel for several months in 1944, and another of her properties was bombed.
Published during the war in 1941, Christie’s N or M? can be seen as a response to these difficulties, particularly to the feeling of being left behind when others who are participating in important war efforts. N or M? features both a man and a woman who are shut out of WWII but find their own way to serve. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, middle-aged intelligence operatives, feel that they have been sidelined from WWII in favor of younger agents until Tommy is called into service for a job that will benefit from the fact that his face is no longer well-known. Not to be shunted aside, Tuppence uses her detective skills to find him, joining Tommy as an uninvited fellow spy.
In an interesting case of fact meeting fiction, MI5 investigated Christie herself as a result of N or M. One of the characters is named Major Bletchley, so there was concern that Christie knew more than she should about Britain’s code breaking center, Bletchley Park. This concern was relieved when Christie revealed that the character was simply named after the town of Bletchley, where she had once been stuck during a train journey.
Speaking of code breaking and home fronts, the American government operated multiple decryption units during WWII, many of which were staffed by women. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II, by Liza Mundy, is a work of nonfiction that details the lives, struggles, and victories of those women. Many of them were in their later years and had never told their story when she interviewed them, as their work was highly classified at the time. Thus, Mundy’s book has preserved an oral history of the important work of women on the home front during WWII before it was gone forever.
As WWII recedes from living memory, its stories remain popular as current generations try to understand the political and economic forces that brought the whole world to the brink. There is a natural curiosity about the lives of people living in a very different place and time, but WWII stories carry an implicit question that is just as important: How can we avoid letting something like it ever happen again?
For Those Who Are Lost
https://www.amazon.com/Those-Who-Are-Lost-Novel/dp/172824854X/
Where the Sky Begins
https://www.amazon.com/Where-Sky-Begins-Rhys-Bowen/dp/1542028841/
In Farleigh Park
https://www.amazon.com/Farleigh-Field-Novel-World-War/dp/1503941353/
N or M
https://www.amazon.com/Tommy-Tuppence-Mystery-Mysteries/dp/0062074326/
Code Girls
https://www.amazon.com/Code-Girls-Untold-American-Breakers/dp/0316352543/
Mary Anna Evans is the author of The Traitor Beside Her (June 6, 2023) and the Oklahoma Book Award winning The Physicists’ Daughter (2022), two stories of women on the American home front during World War II. The Physicists’ Daughter features Justine Byrne, who works at a Rosie-the-Riveter-style job in a factory where she suspects sabotage, and The Traitor Beside Her follows Justine to Washington, DC, where her goal is to find the traitor endangering a critical code breaking operation. Evans’ Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries have won the Will Rogers Medallion Award Gold Medal, the Mississippi Book Award, and the Benjamin Franklin Award. Her co-edited book The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie, was an Edgar nominee and an Agatha finalist, and it was shortlisted for the HRF Keating Award. She is an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches fiction and nonfiction writing, including mystery and thriller writing.
The Traitor Beside Her
https://www.amazon.com/Traitor-Beside-Her-Novel/dp/1464215588/
The Physicists’ Daughter
https://www.amazon.com/Physicists-Daughter-Mary-Anna-Evans-ebook/dp/B09TGB4BVK?
Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie
https://www.amazon.com/Bloomsbury-Handbook-Agatha-Christie-Handbooks-ebook/dp/B0B6QY9T3Z
Faye Longchamp Archaeological Mysteries