 American Red Cross Club, London, Thanksgiving 1942 (National Archives, public domain) Though the screen time of the Red Cross Girls was brief in Episode 2, several things about the dance hall scene struck me as worthy of discussion. Red Cross Girls worked grueling hours that often began at dawn and were then expected to plan and/or attend all evening social events on base. At a dance such as the one in Episode 2, the women would have been dancing non-stop and wouldn't have had even a moment to gather among themselves. The dances were also often hosted in the base's Red Cross Club (sometimes called the AeroClub). This dance seems to have been hosted at the officer's club, so the Red Cross Girls would have been invited guests (most of the women you see dancing with the servicemen in this scene would be local village women, along with a mix of Red Cross Girls and base nurses).
When Rosie Rosenthal gestures to a group of Red Cross Girls and says he plans to go chat up one of them, Captain Murphy asks him if he's got his eye on General Spaatz's daughter or the other one. General Carl "Tooey" Spaatz did have a daughter who served as a Red Cross Girl in the European Theater, Katherine "Tatty" Spaatz. She served in England and then crossed the Channel with her Clubmobile Crew after D-Day.
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I would love to include screenshots from the Masters of the Air official trailer of the snippet that included the interaction of a Red Cross Girl character with one of the bomber crewmen (but I'm afraid that is probably not a good idea from a intellectual property perspective!). My next thought was that I would share a photo of a Red Cross girl that is in the public domain that might convey the emotional import conveyed so poignantly in that trailer snippet.
But the vast majority of the public domain Red Cross Girl images were, in essence, publicity photos -- the entire point of those photos was to convey a sense of normalcy, even a note of joie de vivre, for the folks back home. Smiling Red Cross Girls and laughing soldiers, those were the images the government photographers were directed to capture.  American Red Cross Clubmobile "Phyllis" at Alconbury base of USAAF 92nd Bomb Group (1943). Credit: United States Army Air Forces, National Archives (public domain). Given the long hiatus since I blogged (or vlogged), I thought a good starting point to rejuvenate this space would be to revisit how I learned about the Red Cross Girls, who they are, and why I chose to feature them as heroines in my WW2 novels.
I have always been drawn to WWII novels, and shortly after I attended a writing conference, I decided to write a historical romance set during the WWII years. I read Emily Yellin’s excellent book Our Mother’s War: American Women at Home and at the Front During World War II, which describes the many roles that women played beyond the iconic defense plant work of Rosie the Riveter. I discovered that the Red Cross deployed thousands of women overseas (all over the world, not just Europe) and that the work of these women often took them closer to the front lines than even combat nurses. These women were also ahead of their time on so many levels in that they all had a college degree, some career experience, and possessed a mix of intangible attributes such as charisma, resilience, and resourcefulness. Further, the contributions of these daring and courageous women had largely been lost to history, and I knew I wanted to tell their stories. |
AuthorI'm the author of historical romances set during WWII. Archives
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