No women were on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri on September 2, 1945 to witness the Japanese surrender at Tokyo Bay, but they should have been. Women built the battleship Missouri, as they built much of the structure of the Allied victory. In shipyards, factories, offices and farms across America, the work of women during the war was the vital element that sustained community and country. Women did this work while rearing their children, growing victory gardens, selling war bonds, donating blood, and holding together households without their husbands. Donning the uniforms of military and service organizations, many women also supported Allied forces as Army WACs, Navy WAVES, Marines, Coast Guard SPARs, Women Airforce Service Pilots, and Red Cross volunteers.

Overseas, from camps and bomb-ravaged cities, female correspondents reported firsthand news of the battles. In hospital ships, air evacuation planes, field hospitals, and internment camps while they themselves were prisoners of war, army and navy nurses treated the ill and the wounded. USO performers went “on with the show” in spite of frostbite and plane crashes to entertain GIs in the war zones, while Red Cross clubmobile women traversed muddy, rutted roads to bring food to fighting men.

This is the story of many women: of housewives who saved tin cans and bacon grease, and of mothers with small children who trekked through the Philippine jungles, one step ahead of the Japanese. It is the tale of flight nurses shot down behind enemy lines, and of women gathered in family parlors to assemble care packages for their boyfriends, husbands, and sisters overseas. The Allies could not have triumphed in World War II without the participation of women. Guided by hope, patriotism, a sense of adventure, or the stark need for survival, women set their will to a common goal: a swift end to the world’s most devastating war.