On August 31, 1944, near the town of Archingny, France, I was the loader in a Sherman tank called 'Wolverine.' We had been pushing through France for three weeks straight without resupply — eating K-rations, sleeping in the mud, smelling like diesel and gunpowder. On that day, we crossed a small bridge and found ourselves facing four German Panthers that had been abandoned — out of fuel. The crews had stripped them and walked east. Our driver, a kid from Detroit named Tommy Kowalski, got out and examined the Panthers. He found a German soldier's lunch pail in one of them — still had actual bre...

I was a bicycle mechanic in Lille when the Germans came. In 1942, the Resistance recruited me because I could repair anything — including a German Enigma component that had been salvaged from a crashed plane. My job was to courier messages between the Pas-de-Calais network and the British intelligence station in London. I bicycled 80 kilometers a week carrying microfilm messages sewn into the linings of my coat. The Gestapo had a photograph of me — taken by a collaborator — that circulated through every police station in northern France. I disguised myself: grew a mustache, changed my posture,...

They told us at boot camp: 'You're here because we need you, but nobody is going to admit it.' That was 1943. I was a radar operator at a station on Cape Cod — 14-hour shifts, seven days a week, watching a green screen for blips. We tracked German U-boats in the shipping lanes off Cape Cod. Yes, U-boats. In American waters. In 1944. Most people don't know that. I saw blips every week. We coordinated with the Coast Guard. On two occasions, the blips disappeared — probably because the subs heard our radio chatter and dove deep. We never sank a submarine. But I like to think we deterred them, jus...

For two winters, my unit of 340 partisans lived in the Bryansk forests — the largest forest in Europe. We had no formal supply line. We ate what we could hunt, forage, and steal. We cut German railway lines an average of twice a week. The Germans called it 'the Bandenland' — bandit country — and sent 30,000 troops specifically to pacify us. They never did. What the history books don't tell you: we had families with us. Forty-two children lived in those forests. We had a school — two hours a day, under the trees. We had a newspaper. A theater troupe performed for us. We even had a small printin...

I worked in the same building where the Room 40 codebreakers had worked during World War I — the Old Building of the Admiralty in London. In WWII, we were a combined British-American operation working on German and Italian naval codes. I had a degree in mathematics from Cambridge — rare for women in 1940 — and I used it to break a cipher system that the Italians thought was unbreakable. We called it 'the Admiral's system.' In 1941, my work contributed to the intelligence that helped sink the Italian fleet at Taranto. That raid was the model for Pearl Harbor. Sometimes I think about that — the ...

I was 19 when I volunteered for the U-boat fleet in 1942. I thought it was my duty. I went through basic training in Bordeaux — the U-boat pens there were massive, underground, concrete cathedrals. I made four patrols. On my fourth, in April 1944, a British frigate dropped a pattern of depth charges that shook us so hard that three of our crew urinated involuntarily. We could hear the steel hull screaming. The order came: 'Dive to 280 meters.' Our maximum rated depth was 200. We went to 280. The boat held. We escaped. I later learned that 75% of U-boat crews were killed during the war — the hi...