The turning point in the war. Refinery 29 called the book a thriller in the form of a Nonfiction Book and another review said the book is comprehensive and compelling. Readers get to know these amazing women as individuals as their duties unfold against the backdrop of the war. Rose smoothly integrates developing events with biographical details calling it a satisfying mix of social history and biography. She is the author for all the tea in china how england stole the worlds famous drink and changed history. She is written for many journals. In 2014 he was awarded a prize in travel writing. Sarah, were so glad to have you here tonight. Thank you. [applause] so thank you all for coming. Before i start, i want you to know that you have a responsibility here. And that is i need you to ask questions. Im going to give a little and short reading and then the responsibility is in your hands to get me talking. With that in mind, i want you to picture a war that is being lost, three years into a losing war, and you have nothing to celebrate. There isnt a battle that you have succeeded in. Your city has been practically levelled in many respects by a foreign bombing. All of europe is gone. Europe belongs to hitler. There isnt a democracy left on the continent. And you get a call from the government, and they say we need your help. You have three children, three little girls under the age of 6. The youngest still in diapers. And the government says we need your help. We cant quiteel need you to do. Will you come work for us . It will be very dangerous, and you may not come home. This was a mother with three little girls, french born living in london, married an englishman. And the government called. She was a single mother alone and she was given this choice, help england, help europe, help democracy, leave your kids behind. I found this a challenging choice, who leaves three little girls potentially motherless, their father was at the front, so potentially perilous. And she said what happens to my little girls if englands gone too . If its not just europe that hitler has, but the last democracy left, england is also taken over. Then where do they go . What kind of a world are they growing up in then . Shouldnt i as a mother do everything i can to make it safe for them even if it means leaving them . So she did. She joined the war. She was in the very first class of women in combat. The first women in combat was 39 women, like this woman. They were mothers, they were divorcees. Some were about to be grandmothers. They aged from 22 to 55. They were recruited by a secret Government Agency to parachute into france, to arm and train the French Resistance so that when some day, and at that moment it was many years hence, when dday arrived, dday was just this word for the day that everybody came back and the fight went back to continent, when dday arrived, there were arms in the hands of the occupied nations. There was training that when hitler went to the beaches to defend against the invading allies, there was someone at the rear, preventing his reinforcements from getting to the beaches too. So this 30yearold single mother with three small kids, trained in parachuting, in secret writing, in encryption in hand to hand combat. She learned 100 ways to kill a man silently with her bare hands. Shes one of 38 women who did the same thing. We dont know about it. We dont know about it because men write war histories and women dont, until now. So dday girls is the story of the very first class of the 38 women who were recruited. They were recruited over two years from 1942 to 44. I wanted to focus on the pioneers, on the very first women to do a mans job. They werent just doing a mans job. They were doing a job that women were forbidden from; right . There is no more masculine space on earth than war. I mean, theres not a culture on the planet that doesnt have a combat taboo for women and children. So they are swimming upstream in every single respect. And its not as if the allies wanted to be like magnanimous towards women. They had run out of men. They are three years into hitlers war, and every single man is at the front and theres a very specific need. Whoever goes to france has to speak french. They have to be look like they have to blend in. Not just to fool the germans. Because they are easily fooled. Their french isnt that good. They have to fool the french. Three years into the war, every abled body man was already there. Winston churchill gave his personal approval to send women into combat, in part because he loved warfare, he just thought it was cool, and in part because he didnt have a choice, there were no soldiers on the continent, but also in part because it made good battle sense. You could save 40,000, 50,000 men in combat if you were to put women in soldiers roles, if you were to allow them to shoot a gun, at an airplane over london. Like what general wouldnt try to make use of every available asset, if there were women in england who spoke french well enough to teach a teenager in france how to use a gun, and they wanted to go, they should go. So with churchills blessing, they went. They were the very first women in combat. This woman is not alone. She was among the first. In her class was another woman who was in every respect different than odette. Odette was very dramatic. For her war was an adventure, sort of romantic thing that she could do to help. This other woman was very common sense, she was aristocrat. She came from an island off the coast of africa. It had been french, captured in the napoleon wars. England used it as a calling stop on the way to its far east empire. She spoke french growing up, but she had a british passport. She had lived in paris most of her adult life. The day hitler marches in, she becomes an enemy alien. If she stays in france, she will end up in a concentration camp. So she flees, via spain, gibraltar, she gets to london where her brother is already working with the secret agency, hence her name to the recruiter. For her it is a very common sense decision. Why wouldnt i do everything to save france . I mean, duh, like, theres no balance to it for her. She parachutes in, and she is the very second female paratrooper ever in history, but and this is the thing that kind of captured imagination about this story. She was commanding troops in normandy on dday and we dont know about her. There were soldiers under her command answering to her orders, when the allies arrived. She was second in command in the French Resistance behind enemy lines on the most important day of the 20th century and you havent heard her name. She was second female paratrooper ever. Very first female paratrooper has an even more interesting story. She was 22. She was the very first female combat paratrooper. She was completely different. She left school at 14. She was a counter girl at a bakery. But when hitler marched into paris, she marched out, with 6 million other frenchmen. She walked south into the demarcation line into unoccupied france and volunteered to become a member of the red cross. She trained as a nurse. While working as a nurse, she joined the underground. She became part of an underground railroad where she helped get 65 allied airmen out of france and back to england so they can continue bombing hitler. 65 is a high number. The entire underground railroad over the course of the war liberated about 600 airmen. She was responsible for 1 10. She was so good at it and so successful, there was a price on her head. At a moment somebody betrayed her and her partner, she had to leave france, via the underground railroad. She hikes, gets to spain, and from spain she could stay, but she says no, i have to get back in the fight. She goes to london, where she trains as a secret agent and parachutes back to france, goes to paris, where she becomes a member of the resistance that raises up the entire battery of circuits along the channel coast ahead of the dday landing. So from basically the moment of this idea of guerrilla warfare in france takes root as a systemized governmental strategy for taking on hitler on the day of an attack that nobody has yet named, women were part of the battle plan. And women were there leading troops, making a difference, and its not like oh, these were first and it matters because they were first, i mean, like pioneers. They made a difference. On june 5, 1944, a signal goes out on the bbc to all of france. It is an encoded signal. It says guys, we have been dropping weapons, we have been dropping explosives to you for two years. We have been training you and been teaching you how to use these. This is the night we need you to put all of that into action. They get the signal on bbc, night of june 5th, hours yet before the allies arrive and they go to work. They blow up bridges. They blow up train lines. They drop trees across roads. They take down power lines and phone lines. When the allies arrive, at 6 00 a. M. , june 6th, 1944, normandy is isolated. You cant get there from anywhere else in france. There have been 950 cuts across roads and main bridges all over fran france. When hitler wants to get his reinforcements to the beaches, he cant. Dday wasnt a given. It wasnt an obvious that it was going to work. Having time for the allied to get their back ups, get their supplies on the ground, every moment, every hour, changed the equation of that victory. It took hitler three weeks for his tank divisions to reinforce the beaches. Those were a critical three weeks and it all happened because of the French Resistance and it all happened because the allies armed the French Resistance and the allies were able to arm the French Resistance because women were a part of that plan. You dont know about it because men write war history. [laughter] until now. With that in mind, this was a very fun book to write because not only it was a great meaty story. Theres nobody worse on earth than a nazi. And theres no better story than heroism that you dont know. It was fun to research because these women were my age and every day ordinary women. I thought okay, if they can do it, shouldnt i at least try . So i jumped out of an airplane. I learned to shoot a gun. I went to a boot camp because they had to go to a boot camp. I tried to learn morse code. I built a radio. I tried to go through much of the training that they went through. Only to discover i would make a very bad spy. [laughter] but it is not something everybody can do. Not only was i not fluent in french, i had never spoken any french. The first thing i had to do was move to france and learn french. It was a very fun to write because it was a very fun book to research. It was fun to interview the veterans and their families, but it was also fun to write because you get to blow stuff up, which as a writer, thats just fun. The bit im going to read you is about one of my characters, somebody who worked with these three women, actually. She was 45. She was the very first female sabotage agent. And they didnt want to send her in. She was about to become a grandmother. And they thought oh my goodness are french teenagers going to respect her at all, or are they going to think the allies are sending some joke . They must be in such a bad way to be spending grandmas to train troops. But in fact, she was the very first, and she was incredibly successful at her job, as were about to see. Full moon, with a parachute reception, new moons, when the whole sky went dark but for the stars along the sabotage as autumn turned to winter, they traveled to a Little Village on the river. Petite, barely 5 feet 2 on her toes, she was a student of yoga, a vegetarian whose weight hovered at only 80 pounds. She was the only person who could do the job the allies needed done that night. She sung suspended in a parachute harness. Dangling over railroad tracks, while searching for the ground. Her flashlight beams sliced through a cloud of breath. Beyond her light there was nothing. An ink black railway tunnel in france at night. No hints of light bled in from the openings on either end of the underpass. There were no noises either but for the steady drip of water somewhere. Her hands were cold and sticky and smelled like almonds from the chemical res due of plastic explosives. Her clothing was tattered, a pair of underwear she washed every night. She looked bedraggled, but also somehow much younger than the year before, in the best possible sense. War took years off her life, said her commanding officer. She looks 15 years younger and has definitely found her nearby. Her torchlight flooded the tracks below revealing a shadowy zipper running across the seams of france. There was a straight drop down. No obstacle would impede a package of explosives if it was lowered from the air shaft above. The path to the tracks was one of empty, and long gaited space. Elongated space. She signalled to her man that she had what she needed, a view of the center of the tunnel, the depth and grade of the tracks under the sloping hill. She was hoisted aloft with swift precision, by virtue of her delicate stature and flexibility, she was the only person who could go up through the ventilation shaft of the railway passage. She was also the only one who could perform the reconnaissance by education and authority, who might lead the mission of french partisans to blow up the railway tunnel. After all, she said, i am the only one who has been specially trained. The sabotage party was far from the underground explosion when it began. There was a small flash of light, like a bolt of lightning. The sparks blossomed into a blaze. And black smoke filled the tunnel. There was an alternate between the bright light of a star and the warm yellow of a bonfire, the flames grew until they consumed the oxygen. Boulders, bricks and debris tumbled down, littering the tracks. She didnt need to be near the village to follow the choreography of the explosion. The blazes, the concussions, the familiar symphony of elemental chaos roared, like a thousand tin cans crashed at once and lingered long after in hisses and pops. She knew it all too well. She had been home on the night of april 16th, 1941, in london, when Herman Goring had one of his best nights of the blitz. In that one night of precision bombing, the damage of st. Pauls cathedral, the houses of parliament, the law courts and the national gallery. Nazi command called it a bombing, declaring we shall go out and bomb every building in britain, marked with three stars in the guide. They also destroyed her home in her town. Near victoria station, two parachute mines and three high explosive bombs went off at once and the blast took out an entire terrace of houses. The top floor of her home was levelled. It was a house where she had raised a daughter to adulthood and watched a marriage crumble. Where she had studied philosophy and practiced medication. Where she had played boarding house mom. It was essentially gone. Chimneys stood alone severed. The fires burned through the morning. At day break, the neighborhood smelled of charred wood, masonry dust and decay. Her large house was declared uninhabitable. Everyone survived, except the family cat, bones. It was this yvonne said of her cats untimely demise, more than anything else, which made me somehow determined to fight back. And she did. So with that background, im hoping you will all have questions for me, and if not, i will prompt you to have questions for me. [laughter] yes, please. [inaudible]. Of the 38 women in the book, only one is still alive. Shes 98. She lives in new zealand and shes extremely unwell and private. Shes in the book, however. I got to the story almost at the very edge of living memory. There were 436 agents par suited into the parachuted into france, when i started writing, there was two. There was a sense of sadness, but there was also incredible sense of discovery. We dont get access to their files until they are dead. I get to be the first historian in some respects to witness the back story, what the commanders thought, what was going on around them. There are pluses and minuses. They are extremely interesting people. I got to know their families, many of them. But when you have that kind of personal connection, you also feel the personal connection. You feel the pull and desire to tell the story they want to tell and that they think is important to tell, and while that matters, it can bend in a direction. I wanted to tell a story as i saw it from a journalist and historian and storyteller point of view and without feeling obligated. I wanted to honor them but i also wanted to be able to judge them and believe that i do. So i did get a chance to talk to people who had lived through there, but i didnt get a chance to talk to my people. Yes, maria . Were the women spies better than the men . This is a very important question. The important diplomatic answer is everybody who did this was amazing. They went into Enemy Territory, behind the lines, without the protections of soldiers, they were incredibly brave and human. Many of them made mistakes. The women didnt make more mistakes or different mistakes than men did. They had a higher success rate. Third of the women were captured and killed and half of the men were captured and killed, but there were so many more men. There were ten times that it is not a very good sample comparison. But they had assets that men didnt have and that the allies didnt realize, at first. I think the allies would have hired women sooner, had they understood how much they were sort of giving up by not hiring women. At war, always, there are more women in occupied territories than there are men. Men get captured. Men get killed. The demographics of war that it is in fact an incredibly female place. Women on the home front are whats left of the home. And in france, in particular, the armistice wasnt a peace treaty; right . In a peace treaty, everybody exchanges their soldiers and you have negotiated settlement. The armistice was just kind of a pause, and hitler kept the french army in jail throughout the war. They were in germany for four, five years, which meant that like the entire french army was in prison. There were many many more women in france than there were men. There was also forced labor, slavery, slave work, and so men were shipped off to germany to build weapons for the war, which meant that sending a man into Enemy Territory was a pretty obvious move. You could see them. What were they doing . Heres a 30yearold ablebodied man who is not at war, isnt in prison, and is in a factory. Thats kind of an obvious tell. Send a woman in and they look like every other person in france. There was kind of a natural demographic advantage. Also because the work they were doing was clandestine and because the work they were doing was recruitment, they discovered that women were significantly better than men at or i will say that women had an advantage by virtue of being women which is it requires a lot of care taking to say to a disaffected frenchman, some teenager who is about to be shipped off to germany dont go. Live in the woods. We will send guns to you and train you for the day the allies come back. It takes a lot of coaxing