Guest Post & New Release – Massawa by Pam Webber
Synopsis
For fans of novels featuring strong, smart female protagonists, the first in a series about the novice female American spies in North Africa and the Mediterranean that changed the tide of World War II.
In 1942, during the height of World War II, Wild Bill Donovan, the director of the United States’ first spy agency, believes women are the key to winning the intelligence battle with the Nazis. To that end, he partners fledgling agent Kit Thomas with British MI6 agent Mark Williams and sends them to one of the most perilous places in the world—Massawa, Eritrea—to investigate the theft of millions of military payroll dollars.
In Massawa, Kit and Mark discover a conspiracy by Nazi sympathizers, known as the Vichy, to shut down the only Allied naval base on the Red Sea—which is an essential resource in stopping the Nazi invasion of North Africa. As they work to reveal the conspirators, Kit and Mark engage in a dangerous and tempestuous dance of trust versus mistrust.
Amazon
Guest Post
I was able to ask Pam a couple of questions about her new book. I hope you find the answers as interesting as I did.
Why were women spies being recruited for the war effort?
Women have spied for their causes for centuries. However, they didn’t become a force in the world of espionage until World War II, when the United States, in concert with the British spy agency MI6, started the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. The first director of the OSS was William Donovan (aka Wild Bill). A brilliant man and a notorious womanizer, Donovan knew that women were not viewed as a significant threat by most military personnel, including our own. He also realized that women who knew how to leverage their gender were a natural emetic for men’s secrets. Consequently, he hired over 4,000 women,1,500 of whom were embedded as operatives in Nazi-occupied countries. These women not only spied on the Nazis, their supporters (the French Vichy), and the fascist Italians, but they also set up covert communication systems, established safe-houses, and developed escape networks for Jews and other endangered minorities, as well as Allied military personnel trapped behind enemy lines. These women even played a role in the D-Day invasion by helping to organize resistance networks and training resistance fighters to launch concurrent attacks against the Nazis from within France at the same time the Allies were coming ashore at Normandy. These covert operatives attacked Nazi communication and transportation systems and their supply lines, thus diluting their ability to respond to the Allied invasion. In essence, these women and their networks became an invisible force that helped turn the tide of the war in Europe.
American, Virginia Hall, epitomized the best of these women. At age 35, and with a prosthetic leg, she served in occupied France from 1941 to 1944. With a constant bounty on her head, she escaped multiple times using disguises and hiking across the French Alps in the dead of winter.
Despite her invaluable wartime service, she initially faced significant gender-based discrimination in her post-war career. Donovan was gone, and the new male leadership at the CIA did not share his esteem for her or women in general. Ultimately, the CIA acknowledged her legacy by naming a building at its headquarters in Langley, Virginia in her honor.
How did she create her protagonist Kit Thomas based on the many US women who worked as spies
In preparing to write Massawa, I read multiple books on the OSS, MI6, and female spies in World War II. The two books that impacted me the most were A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell, which highlighted the incredible espionage work of Virginia Hall, America’s most famous spy, and Wild Bill Donovan by Douglas Waller, which highlighted Donovan’s seminal role as the father of American espionage and sexpionage. I could hardly believe the courage and effectiveness of Hall and the skill and audacity of Donovan. These traits helped sculpt the character and persona of Kit Thomas as a young, fearless, and naive spy who didn’t hesitate to use her gender as tradecraft.
About the Author
PAM WEBBER is a second career, bestselling author of historical fiction. Her novels, “The Wiregrass,” “Moon Water,” and “Life Dust” have garnered multiple regional and national awards from organizations such as the Historical Novel Society, the Southern Literary Review, and the Military Writers Society of America.
In her personal life, Pam is an internal medicine nurse practitioner, an avid traveler, and nature lover. She and the love of her life, Jeff, live and work in Northern Virginia.
