Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent
By Pearl Witherington Cornioley, edited by Kathryn J. Atwood. 208 pp. Chicago Review Press, 2013. $19.95.
This is aimed at young adults, but that shouldn’t stop everyone else from reading it. Adapted from Pearl Witherington Cornioley’s finely wrought 1997 memoir, Behind Enemy Lines, this version retells one of the outstanding behind-the-lines stories of World War II. Witherington, a Brit born and raised in Paris and trained by the Special Operations Executive, parachuted into France in September 1943—one of 39 women (out of 400 agents) sent to help the Resistance. Her stories are so good they almost seem fictional—which they most definitely aren’t. Cornioley led a network of 3,500 men that killed 1,000 Germans; before and after D-Day, her forces did such a splendid job of disrupting troop movements to Normandy that the Germans put a huge bounty on her head. When the war ended she was recommended for the Military Cross, but as a woman she was ineligible and never received it. Maybe that’s one reason she decided at age 80 to finally tell her story.
Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb
By Jonathan Fetter-Vorm. 153 pp. Hill and Wang, 2013. $14.95.
A splendid graphic history for kids of all ages that doubles as a well-researched, dramatically executed, and thought-provoking primer.
Worrals of the Waaf
By Captain W. E. Johns. 208 pp. Indie Books, 2013. $19.99.
Self-promoted to captain with his pen name (he was actually a lieutenant in the World War I Royal Flying Corps), William Earl Johns was the prolific author of 160-plus books, nearly 100 of them devoted to Biggles of the Royal Air Force, a gentlemanly professional air ace and occasional spy. The series was so successful that in 1940, Britain’s Air Ministry asked Johns to create a female counterpart who would inspire girls to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, whose jobs included ferrying planes, working in operations rooms and on codes, crewing barrage balloons, maintaining aircraft, and packing parachutes. The result was a series of rattling-good action-adventure yarns, now available again—complete with the original illustrations.
In this first installment, Flight Officer Joan “Worrals” Worralson and her best friend uncover a German spy ring passing info about English targets to the Luftwaffe. She also flies a fighter plane— something that, in real life, no WAAF was allowed to do. Yet the Air Ministry credited the book with a rush of WAAF enlistees who wanted to fly planes; it was reprinted three times in 1942 alone. Picture an older aviator Nancy Drew and you’ve got the gist.
Originally published in the December 2013 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
