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 bread and sausage in it. We sat on those German tanks and ate their lunch. I remember thinking: this is the strangest war in the world. Three hours later we liberated a village that had been occupied for four years. An old woman came out and kissed our tank. I still have the bread sack.

I enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor. I was 23, working as a typist in Sacramento, and I knew I had to do something. They sent me to Guadalcanal in February 1943 — the worst assignment of my life and the most important. We set up a field hospital in a coconut grove. The noise was the worst thing. You couldn't sleep because the fighting was twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. We treated burns from the USS New Orleans, shrapnel wounds, dysentery, and malaria. I had one boy — I won't say his name — who was seventeen and had both legs gone. He asked me if his girlfriend was going to write to him. I said yes. She didn't. He died three days later. I wrote her a letter anyway. I don't know if she ever received it. I kept nursing because someone had to. I married a doctor I met in Manila in 1945. We were married for fifty-two years. He used to say I was the bravest person he ever met. I told him he was wrong — the bravest people were the ones on the stretchers.

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, learned to walk differently. I kept a spare set of identity papers in a compartment under the seat of my bicycle. In March 1944, I was stopped at a checkpoint. They didn't recognize me. I had a note from a local mayor — forged — that said I was a tuberculosis carrier. They let me go immediately. I bicycled home and vomited for ten minutes. I was terrified. I kept doing it anyway.

I was at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I was a seventeen-year-old signalman aboard the USS Oklahoma. When the attack came, I was asleep in my bunk. The first thing I knew was the sound — this enormous roar, like the whole world was tearing apart. I ran topside and saw a Japanese plane so close I could see the pilot's face. He was young. He looked scared too. Then the torpedoes hit. The Oklahoma rolled over. I ended up in the water with oil all over me. I remember thinking: the water is warm. That's the thing I remember most — the water was warm. I got picked up by a destroyer that was itself on fire. I spent the next three years in the Pacific, at Midway, at Leyte, at Okinawa. Every time I went into battle, I'd think about that Japanese pilot's face. I never hated the Japanese people. I hated what the war did to everyone. I still have the oil-stained Bible I was reading the morning of December 7th. I can't bring myself to open it.

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, just by being there, watching. After the war, they gave us our records and told us not to talk about it. I didn't talk about it for sixty years. Then my grandson joined the Navy and I thought: why am I protecting a secret that nobody cares about anymore? So I told him. He cried.

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 printing press that produced leaflets we dropped on German soldiers. The leaflets were effective — about 200 German soldiers deserted directly to us after reading them. The hardest moment: January 1943, when the Gestapo captured my sister's family in Bryansk and sent me her ears in a package. I kept fighting. What else could I do?

I was born in Java, which was Dutch East Indies at the time. In 1942, the Japanese took me and 50,000 others and put us to work building the railway between Thailand and Burma. They called it 'the Railway of Death.' I was seventeen. I lasted 22 months. I survived because I was small and could fit into places where others couldn't — inside culverts, under railway cars. The Japanese engineers didn't bother with safety measures. If you fell, you were replaced. I watched men die from cholera, dysentery, malaria, tropical ulcers, and simple exhaustion. I saw men eaten by tigers at night. I worked with Australians, Brits, Dutch, Javanese, Malays. We communicated in a pidgin English that none of us spoke natively. When the railway was finished, I weighed 82 pounds. When the war ended and the Allies came, I was given a bowl of rice and a medical examination. The doctor said I was in the top 5% of survivors in terms of physical condition. I wept. I'm still alive. Most of them are not.

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 irony of British women codebreakers inadvertently inspiring the attack that brought America into the war. I worked 16-hour days, seven days a week. I couldn't tell my mother where I was. She thought I was a secretary in Bristol. I was reading German naval traffic, saving lives, and pretending to type memos. When the war ended, they said 'thank you' and gave us all a tea service. I'm still using the teapot.

I flew 35 missions over Ploiești, Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin. My closest call: over Vienna in February 1944, my B-24 took a direct 20mm shell through the cockpit, killing my co-pilot instantly. His blood covered my flight controls. I had to land the plane with my hands covered in it, trying not to look at his face. His name was Paul Hartman. He was 21. We made it back to Foggia, Italy. I delivered his body to the medics and went to get coffee. Then I threw up for twenty minutes. The squadron commander came and found me and said: 'You're flying again tomorrow.' I said 'yes sir.' What else was I going to say? I flew 20 more missions. I came home. Paul didn't. I looked for his family after the war and found his mother living alone in Ohio. She didn't know who I was. I didn't tell her. I sent flowers every year on the anniversary. I still do. She died in 1987. I still send them to his grave.

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 highest casualty rate of any branch of any army in the war. I survived 54 months of that. After the war, I couldn't be in enclosed spaces for years. I couldn't sleep without a window open. Even now, at 97, I can't sleep in a bed — I sleep on the floor. Something about being at floor level, away from the ceiling. I think it's about not wanting to be trapped above.