The power of an airplane resting in my hand—
the mystery of the air that helps me soar and land—
Live out there.
Floating over mountains far, far away—
Flying close to heaven day by day—
Live out there.
Learning to use my compass to find my own way
To freedom, liberation, and a glad new day—
Live out there.
Fighting loud and brave to be a weapon of the war,
Never forgetting I’m just a down-home girl
Out there.
Walking for miles on that Freedom Line,
Life is beautiful, life is fine—
If you live out there.
Traveling in the dark with a star to light the way,
Brightening the path to a brand-new day
Out there.
I’ll sing myself awake from a deep dark sleep—
I’ll fill myself with hope from beyond the keep—
And when the war is over and peace has come
I’ll sing myself a pathway all the way home—
Living out there.
I’ll keep a seashell for luck,
And my compass in my hand,
And faith in my progress
Toward the promised land.
Like a pig spinning gold,
Like the magic of the heart,
Miles don’t matter ’cause
We’re never far apart—
Out there.
“Just remember,” Mama said,
“That’s where you belong—
Up above the clouds,
Lost inside a song—
Live out there.
“I am always with you
In the blood and the bone
Precious child of mine,
Person all your own—
Live out there.”
Now I’m making a new start,
And you’ll be with me all the way.
I’m not scared
’Cause I’ve got your heart—
And I’m growing closer to you day by day.
I’ll hold on to your memory
I’ll hold you in a prayer,
I will live out there.
I was lost for a while,
but now I’m back.
The Story Behind the Story
The best stories are rooted in truth. When I was thinking up Velva Jean’s next adventure, I looked—just as I did when writing Velva Jean Learns to Drive—at my own family history for inspiration. My father, Jack F. McJunkin Jr., was an Army Intelligence officer on Okinawa and in Vietnam, and received the Joint Service Commendation Medal and the Bronze Star. The first three years of my life were spent in Okinawa, and I remember vague, hazy explanations of where my father was and what he was doing during his long absences from my mother and me. His work in intelligence always fascinated me, even as a little girl, and I was convinced my dad was off somewhere being a superhero. Going further back, women spies run rampant in my family, although none of them, to my knowledge, spied in World War II. They spied in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. One of these women, Jane Black Thomas, was a Revolutionary War hero and South Carolina’s first feminist. She not only spied for the Patriots; she single-handedly fought off—with a sword—a battalion of Tories to protect a crucial supply of ammunition and the family home.
Those women have always fascinated me, as has World War II. Jack F. McJunkin Sr., my beloved grandfather—the one who helped inspire Johnny Clay—fought in the war. Unfortunately, I never knew much about his wartime experience, only what I was able to piece together here and there. He enlisted as a private on April 6, 1943, at Camp Croft, South Carolina. He was twenty-eight. He was married to my grandmother Cleo by then and their only child, my father, was eight months old.
When Granddaddy went to war, Grandmama went to work—the only time she ever worked outside the home—to support herself, her mother, my dad, and his cousin Paula, just a baby, whose own mama had died at seventeen. Granddaddy never talked about his experiences in the war, and after both he and Grandmama were gone, I inherited her jewelry box, where she kept a handful of newspaper clippings detailing the battle of Anzio, Italy, and the movement of the Fifth Army: “Anzio No Beachhead, Assert Men There, Dodging Shells”; “Anzio Vet Describes 84 Days Under Fire….” One of these clippings showed a map of the country and the campaign area. In Grandmama’s handwriting, there is just one word—Jack—with an arrow pointing to Anzio. And there is a letter she wrote to her sister-in-law on July 11, 1944:
Jack’s outfit was one of the first to go into Rome. He was awarded a combat badge for exemplary conduct in action against the enemy. All I do is write Jack and pray for his return to us soon. War is such a horrible experience even for the brave. I firmly believe this war will make a difference in everyone.
Jack and I have great plans for our future. If only God sees fit for him to return to us. I work all the time and try and save. Jack is the most important thing in my life—without him, I’d be lost. We are terribly in love—people say as you are married longer you grow out of it, but we seem to grow more in love with each passing day even though separated.
The rest of the story is lost. All I know is that after fighting at Anzio, Granddaddy, with the Fifth Army, went on to liberate Rome, and later to free the most prominent and highly guarded prisoners from Dachau concentration camp after they were transferred to Tyrol, Austria, where the SS planned to either keep them away from the Allies or kill them. By the time I knew him, Granddaddy was missing part of the middle finger on his left hand, from the middle knuckle up. The story of that finger changed each time I asked him about it, but some family members say it was hacked off by farm equipment when he was just a kid working in the fields, and others say it was shot off in battle. However he lost it, I remember it always itched and he often rubbed the end of it. For years, he kept a crude silver ring that was given to him by a prisoner from Dachau, one the prisoner had forged himself.
Of course, Velva Jean’s story doesn’t come only from family history. None of my ancestors were WASP or members of the OSS and SOE’s operational groups, but these two divisions of military history have always intrigued me most. Women pilots! Women spies! I knew from the beginning—when I was first conceiving the Velva Jean series—that I wanted to pay homage to the daring girls who appeared in their own adventure stories of the 1920s and 1930s, inspiring girls like Constance Kurridge and Flyin’ Jenny, who were comic book heroes, and who spied and flew and acted and sang and fought crime and did exactly what they wanted to do and were well ahead of their time.
The Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP, formed in 1942, training women to fly military aircraft so that male pilots could be released for combat duty overseas. Over twenty-five thousand women applied, but only 1,074 were accepted. As WASP, they flew almost every type of military aircraft—fighter planes and bombers, including the B-17 and the B-29. Before they were disbanded in 1944, thirty-eight WASP lost their lives flying for their country, some in accidents caused by the male pilots they worked with, who refused to accept them as equals.
The head of the WASP was Jacqueline Cochran, then the most famous and well-respected female flier in the world. In 1941, she was the first woman to pilot a bomber across the Atlantic Ocean. In this book, Velva Jean becomes the second woman to do so, but in reality no WASP flew overseas during the war. Because this is fiction, however, I did take the liberty of letting Velva Jean enjoy that particular adventure. After all, it seemed to me like something she would have done, had she been there, especially with her brother missing in Europe.
When she crash-lands in France, Velva Jean is thrown together with an operational group from the OSS, or Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the CIA, which was known as a real cloak-and-dagger army. General William Donovan envisioned soldiers organized in small groups and trained with guerrilla capabilities, who could be parachuted behind enemy lines to conduct sabotage,
covert operations, and guerrilla warfare, all of which would support the Allied advance. These groups operated in France, Italy, Greece, Norway, Yugoslavia, and China. Another OSS faction, the Jedburghs, dropped in groups of three and worked mainly to support, supply, and direct Resistance groups, while the operational groups were involved in commando-type action. The United States military thought of them as shadow warriors, but to the enemy they were terrorists. They were the forerunners of today’s U.S. Army Special Forces.
The operational groups took many forms—saboteurs, guerrillas, commandos, and agents. These soldiers were from all walks of life: dentists, chemists, psychiatrists, police detectives, bankers, safecrackers, journalists, doctors, international playboys—and women. Many of these women were wives and mothers. Odette Sansom, Violette Szabo, Virginia Hall, Nancy Wake, Princess Noor Inayat Khan, and Julia Child were just six of these, but some two hundred women worked in England or dropped into France or Africa or the Pacific. Many were captured and executed by the enemy.
Agents were not the only women to fight in World War II. I had to be careful, when researching, not to get too distracted by women like Suzanne Spaak, a mother of two who worked to save the lives of Jewish children being deported from Paris to the German death camps (and who was eventually executed at Fresnes prison), or Rose Valland, overseer of Paris’s Jeu De Paume museum, who kept track of the artwork stolen by the Germans. There were women like Lee Miller, who reported the war, often from the front lines, and the Russian female snipers, some two thousand in all, who fought alongside the men.
When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, there were 460,000 women in the military and over 6.5 million in civilian war work. In Nazi Germany, Hitler forbade women to work in German weapons factories because he felt that a woman’s place was at home. There is no doubt that without the contribution of women, the Allied war effort would not have been nearly as strong or as successful.
Sixty-seven years after the war’s end and the liberation of the prisoners in Tyrol, the ring given to my grandfather has been lost. But, thankfully, the stories of the men and women who fought in the war live on.
Resources
Two particular women did much to inspire and inform Velva Jean’s story—Hélène Deschamps, a member of the French Resistance who was later recruited by the OSS, and Virginia D’Albert-Lake, an American in Paris who worked for the Resistance while also helping to free Allied airmen on the Freedom Line. I was also fortunate to get to know Dr. Margaret Emanuelson—clinical forensic psychologist, author, and former agent of the OSS—who was generous in sharing her vast knowledge and the memories of her experiences.
Although this is a novel, I have examined numerous resources and conducted extensive research in an effort to make the events, the setting, and the period as authentic as possible. Perhaps the greatest resources were the members of the OSS Society and its president, Charles Pinck, and Roy Tebbutt and the Carpetbagger Aviation Museum (a.k.a. the Harrington Aviation Museum), in Harrington, England. Espionage expert Linda McCarthy, founding curator of the CIA Museum, was a terrific resource as well. I also owe much to the comprehensive (and recently declassified) National Archives and Records Administration OSS Collection, and the Churchill Archives Centre.
In addition, the following books were most helpful: Is Paris Burning, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre; An American Heroine in the French Resistance: The Diary and Memoir of Virginia D’Albert-Lake, edited by Judy Barrett Litoff; Americans in Paris: Life & Death Under Nazi Occupation, by Charles Glass; Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America’s First Shadow War, by Colin Beavan; The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944, by Will Irwin; Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS, by Elizabeth P. McIntosh; Spyglass: An Autobiography, by Hélène Deschamps; Cast No Shadow: The Life of the American Spy Who Changed the Course of World War II, by Mary S. Lovell; The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy, by Judith L. Pearson; The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Agents of the Special Operations Executive, by Marcus Binney; Women at War: The Women of World War II—At Home, at Work, on the Front Line, by Brenda Ralph Lewis; Undercover Tales of World War II, by William B. Breuer; France: The Dark Years 1940–1944, by Julian Jackson; And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris, by Alan Riding; Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs: The Unknown Story of the Men and Women of WWII’s OSS, by Patrick K. O’Donnell; The Women Who Wrote the War, by Nancy Caldwell Sorel; World War II Day by Day, by Sharon Lucas, Michael Armitage, Lord Lewin, and John Stanier; The Routledge Atlas of the Second World War, by Martin Gilbert; Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal, by Ben Macintyre; Secret Agent’s Handbook: The Top Secret Manual of Wartime Weapons, Gadgets, Disguises and Devices, by Roderick Bailey; OSS Special Weapons & Equipment: Spy Devices of WWII, by H. Keith Melton; Jane’s Fighting Aircraft of World War II, by Leonard Bridgman; Ghosts of the Skies: Aviation in the Second World War, by Philip Makanna; Normandy, by Clare Hargreaves (Cadogan Guides); Heinkel He 70/170: Blitz, by Refael A. Permuy López, Juan Arráez Cerdá, and Lucas Molina Franco; Berlitz French Phrase Book & Dictionary; World War II German Phrase Book; Letters Home: 1944–1945 Women Airforce Service Pilots, by Bernice “Bee” Falk Haydu; Warriors: Navajo Code Talkers, by Kenji Kawano, Carl Gorman, and Benis M. Frank, USMC; and As You Were: A Portable Library of American Prose and Poetry Assembled for Members of the Armed Forces and the Merchant Marine, edited by Alexander Woollcott.
I visited and revisited several films, videos, and radio programs as well. Among the best: Carve Her Name with Pride; O.S.S.; Wish Me Luck; War in Color: France is Free; War Zone: Air Wars; Secrets of War; OSS and SOE training films (courtesy of Real Military Videos); The Lady Was a Spy; School for Danger; The Train; Band of Brothers; The War; Fly Girls; The Rape of Europa; B-17: The Flying Fortress; The Great Escape; Honey West; and one I could watch again and again, The Dirty Dozen.
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