The Undaunted

The Blacklisted Bombshell

Author's Note: This story is dedicated with much love and gratitude to my brave, heroic father-in-law, William F. Casey Jr., a paratrooper with the infamous "Screaming Eagles" and on whom my protagonist, LTC Jack Delaney is loosely based. Like Jack, Grandfather Casey was a big, stoic Irish-American who, with his band of brothers, parachuted into enemy territory and helped clear the way for the storming of Normandy on June 6, 1944. He also helped liberate a concentration camp and much of what happens in this story describes his harrowing experience. 

This is also dedicated with much thanks to Adam Driver who portrays Jack, and his wife, Joanne Tucker for their important ongoing work with veterans and their charity, Arts in the Armed Forces. 

Last but not least, this story is dedicated to the often-forgotten women of that war who fought for the preservation of the free world and their place in history alongside the men: the nurses, WACs, WAVEs, codebreakers, spies, and war correspondents. Women like my heroine, Jenny, portrayed by Nikki Reed, whose efforts brought to light the humanity alongside the heroism of war and were no less important than the men who carried guns. 

 "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few"
- Winston Churchill

***

September, upstate New York, 1942

Jennifer Snow, known as "Jenny" to her friends and colleagues, turned on her famous megawatt smile and raised her arm aloft, her movements as repetitive as those of the riveters and welders and all the other jobs women were doing these days. Except that she wasn't in a factory.

Instead, she stood on a platform, with a brilliant blue autumn sky behind her, wearing a white silk dress, bridal in length. It was designed to cling to her curves created by the artificial breeze of the enormous studio fans blowing over her and then billow behind her, goddess like. A white cape tied at her neck rippled in the breeze too, adding to the celestial effect. Two large American flags fluttered proudly beside her, and her outstretched arm made it appear as if she might be about to declare something important or momentous.

But that was also part of the make believe; since when did a model have anything momentous to say about patriotism and war?

Five years ago she had marched passionately in the streets of Paris protesting against fascism, first as its vile ideology swept through Spain, then as it turned Italy and Germany into grotesque killing fields. Jenny's parents had been progressive, both of them paleontologists who had taught and explored extensively throughout Europe and Asia, their daughter in tow the whole time. When they finally returned to their native American shores after it became clear that war was breaking out in Europe, Jenny was startled by the stark contrast an attitudes towards women stateside.

While women in Russia her age and younger, were trained in flying missions over the Russian border dropping bombs on Nazi targets, their American counterparts were relegated to the canteens, factories, and rolling bandages for the Red Cross and handing out donuts and coffee to the GIs at the USO. Not that that wasn't terribly important to work, Jenny realized. But journaling about her misadventures across Europe with her parents and photographing those adventures had been Jenny's lifeblood from her early teens on. And now that worldwide changing events were happening, it was frustrating to her that the only war correspondents out there were men. As if women couldn't possibly have anything to say about this conflict that was stealing their husbands, fathers, brothers, and boyfriends away.

Jenny tried to dismiss the thoughts going through her head and concentrate on the task at hand: becoming the figurehead of a ship of Hope to a country at war. Or at least that's what she would become once Tony Martinelli, the photographer, had cropped and manipulated her in just the right way for the cover of Vogue. It was to be a cover that would be as galvanizing as everyone needed it to be in the autumn of 1942.