Here’s something that still surprises us, even after a hundred episodes: women’s WW2 stories are genuinely fascinating, but there aren’t nearly enough of them that make it to the screen. Thankfully, we’ve made it somewhat of a mission to highlight as many as possinble. SOE agents, army nurses, war correspondents, factory workers, civilians hiding Jews in their guesthouses…the range is wider than the genre’s reputation suggests, and some of these films are excellent.
The catch – and there is one – is that the gap between the real history and what ends up on screen is often frustrating. We’re not interested in congratulating films for having a female character who does something interesting only to have the plot return to its male leads. We’re interested in whether the story actually sees the women it claims to be about – their agency, their complexity, their specific historical circumstances. More often than not, it doesn’t quite manage it. A war correspondent becomes a love interest. A spy’s tradecraft gets less screen time than her relationship with a man. A battalion of Black servicewomen gets a white character inserted to anchor the story. We notice. We say so.
What we’ve found, across thirteen episodes on this theme, is that the most honest portrayals tend to come from unexpected places: Canadian television, a Dutch film about a woman who never held a weapon. That pattern tells you something about whose wartime experiences we’ve decided are worth the money. But this page also has some films we genuinely loved – and that’s worth saying upfront too.
Women in WW2: Spies, Agents, and Resistance
Ep 5 – Carve Her Name with Pride – Violette Szabo's Heroic Legacy as a SOE Agent1958 · SOE Agent Biopic
The 1958 film about SOE agent Violette Szabo – recruited by British intelligence after her husband’s death at El Alamein, trained as a field operative, captured, tortured, and executed at Ravensbrück – is genuinely moving and genuinely compromised. We looked at whether a film made in the 1950s can do justice to a woman this extraordinary, and how period-typical romantic framing stands in the way of the very heroism it’s trying to celebrate. The answer is: it honours her, but it doesn’t quite see her.
Our angle: Does a classic film made 13 years after the war still do justice to Szabo’s story, or does the era in which it was made get in the way?
2019 · SOE Ensemble Biopic
Virginia Hall, Noor Inayat Khan, and Vera Atkins – three SOE women with three completely different stories, crammed into one feature film that does none of them justice. A Call to Spy (2019) is a film that genuinely wants to honour these women, yet spreads itself so thin that the viewer comes away with impressions rather than understanding. We talked about what the real stories actually contain, which is a lot more than what made the screen.
Our angle: When does celebrating women’s history become doing it a disservice, and why do female spy stories keep getting bundled together when male ones get individual treatments?
Further reading
A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell – a biography of Virginia Hall, the “limping lady” who became one of the most dangerous Allied spies in occupied France.
Historian Interview
Historian Clare Mulley – author of The Spy Who Loved, The Women Who Flew for Hitler, and Agent Zo – joined us to talk about three women whose stories have been largely absent from the mainstream WW2 record: Elżbieta Zawacka, the only woman to complete a parachute mission for the Polish Home Army; Melitta von Stauffenberg, a half-Jewish German test pilot who flew hundreds test flights while helping her brother-in-law plot the July 1944 assassination attempt; and Christine Granville, possibly the most effective SOE agent of the war. The central argument, made by Clare and echoed by us, is that this erasure is not accidental.
Our angle: The erasure of women from WW2 history is structural rather than accidental, and Clare Mulley’s work makes the case for why recovering these stories takes real work – and why it’s worth doing.
Further reading
Clare Mulley’s books: Agent Zo, The Spy Who Loved, and The Women Who Flew for Hitler – find them via her website.
Dutch Resistance Drama
Sonny Boy is the only non-English-language film in this collection, and Rika van der Lans is the only subject here who wasn’t a spy, a soldier, a nurse, or a journalist. She ran a guesthouse in occupied Netherlands, kept her family alive, and hid Jewish people at enormous personal risk – without a handler, a mission, or a network. That’s a different kind of resistance story, and it matters that it’s here: not every woman who took a stand did so in uniform. Maartje’s personal connection to Dutch wartime history makes this one feel different from the rest.
Our angle: The most important resistance stories are often the ones that look, from the outside, like just getting on with things – and Rika van der Lans is exactly the kind of woman who gets left out of the official record.
Further reading
Sonny Boy by Annejet van der Zijl, in English as The Boy Between Worlds – the meticulously researched book the film is based on.
Women in WW2: Journalists, Correspondents, and Storytellers
2023 · War Photographer Biopic
Lee Miller was a Vogue model turned war photographer who documented the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald, shot some of the most searing images of the entire war, and spent the rest of her life not talking about it. The 2023 biopic starring Kate Winslet had everything it needed to be extraordinary and consistently settled for less. We broke down exactly how a film can fail its subject while technically celebrating her – specifically, how reducing a sexually liberated, visually brilliant woman to a more palatable version of herself is its own kind of erasure.
Our angle: What does it mean when a film about a rule-breaking woman ends up being conventional, and whose failure is that?
Further reading
The Lives of Lee Miller by Anthony Penrose (her son) – a vivid account of her many chapters, from model to war photographer to gourmet chef.
2012 · War Correspondent Biopic
Martha Gellhorn reported from the Spanish Civil War, D-Day, the liberation of Dachau, and multiple post-war conflicts across half a century. The 2012 HBO film about her relationship with Ernest Hemingway manages to be about Hemingway anyway. We spent significant time on whether Gellhorn’s own difficult personality partly explains the film’s failures (yes), whether that excuses those failures (no), and what it means that the most significant female war correspondent in history is still being told through her marriage.
Our angle: What happens to a film’s feminist credentials when its central female figure is genuinely abrasive, and the film can’t decide whether to celebrate or contain her?
Further reading
Gellhorn: A Twentieth Century Life by Caroline Moorehead, plus Gellhorn’s own Point of No Return and Travels with Myself and Another.
2016 · Wartime Propaganda Comedy-Drama
Joined by Winnie and Gabby from the Donut Dollies podcast, we discussed Their Finest (2016) – Lone Scherfig’s adaptation of Lissa Evans’ novel about a woman hired by the British Ministry of Information to write “the slop” (female dialogue) for propaganda films. It’s funny, it’s sad, it has Bill Nighy, and it’s one of the more honest films about how women’s creative contributions were simultaneously relied on and dismissed. The film’s tonal gear-shift caught us off guard in the best way.
Our angle: Their Finest understands that women didn’t just participate in wartime propaganda – they shaped it. Almost no WW2 film bothers to say that.
Further reading
Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans – Sure to make you cry, but read it anyway, for it lets you hope, at least for a little while.
Women in WW2: Home Front, Civilians and Service
2024 · Wartime Service Drama
The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion – the only all-Black, all-female unit deployed overseas during WWII – cleared a three-year backlog of undelivered mail in three months, working in freezing warehouses with minimal support. Tyler Perry’s 2024 Netflix film tells their story. Unfortunately, it also inserts white characters to anchor a narrative that has no need of them. We were not kind about this, and we stand by that too.
Our angle: How does a film about a doubly marginalised group of women manage to re-marginalise them, and what does that tell us about who still gets to be the main character?
Further reading
One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC by Charity Adams Earley – her own account of commanding the 6888th.
1943 · Army Nurses Drama
For our 100th episode, we returned to 1943: to the real Army nurses who survived the fall of Bataan and the evacuation of Corregidor, and to the Hollywood film made the same year that claimed to honour them while quietly transforming their experience into romance. The real women – working in jungle hospitals, under bombardment, with almost no supplies, and eventually as prisoners of war – had a story that needed no embellishment. The film embellished it anyway.
Our angle: Hollywood’s instinct in 1943 was to honour these women by softening them – and that instinct hasn’t entirely disappeared eight decades later.
Further reading
On the real Bataan and Corregidor nurses: I Served on Bataan and We Band of Angels.
1998 · Women’s Land Army Drama
David Leland’s adaptation of Angela Huth’s novel follows three women posted to a Dorset farm as part of the Women’s Land Army in 1941. The WLA employed over 200,000 women during the war, replacing farm labour lost to conscription and keeping Britain fed during the Battle of the Atlantic, yet its members were excluded from post-war veterans’ benefits and went largely unrecognised until 2008. The film is a pleasantly 1990s period piece that doesn’t quite match the complexity of the real history, but we enjoyed the Spitfire Funds rabbit hole.
Our angle: The women of the WLA kept Britain fed during the war’s most dangerous years and spent decades being refused recognition for it. The film gestures at this history without quite committing to it.
Further reading
Land Girls by Angela Huth – the source novel, which gives far more depth to the characters and their inner lives than the film manages, and whose prose descriptions of the English countryside are genuinely lovely.
Keep Listening
Women show up in more episodes, though not often as main characters. These are the ones most worth pairing with this list:
- Ep 80 – Battle of Britain – one of the few mainstream WW2 films to give the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force a meaningful on-screen presence
- Ep 83 – Enemy at the Gates – includes a female Soviet soldier character; we had thoughts about how she’s used
- Ep 91 – Ice Cold in Alex – two nurses in the desert, some genuine agency, but also notably perfect hair throughout a harrowing ordeal
Frequently Asked Questions About Women in WW2 Films
What are the best films about women in WW2?
Some of the strongest films and series covering women’s WW2 history include Carve Her Name with Pride (SOE agent Violette Szabo), A Call to Spy (Virginia Hall, Noor Inayat Khan, and Vera Atkins), Sonny Boy (Dutch resistance), Lee (war photographer Lee Miller), Their Finest (wartime propaganda writers), the Canadian series Bomb Girls (munitions factory workers), and The Six Triple Eight (the all-Black, all-female 6888th Battalion). We break down what each one gets right and where it falls short.
Why don’t more WW2 films focus on women’s roles?
Women worked as spies, codebreakers, nurses, war correspondents, and factory workers throughout the Second World War, yet mainstream WW2 media has largely treated their contributions as background detail rather than the main story. But it’s not all on purpose, Women’s records were less meticulously kept, their actions were often smaller (though no less important) and undocumented, and in some cases, records were sealed for a long time.
Were there real female spies in WW2?
Yes – the Special Operations Executive (SOE) recruited and trained women as field agents, couriers, and wireless operators, including Violette Szabo, Virginia Hall, Noor Inayat Khan, Vera Atkins, and Christine Granville. Many operated undercover in occupied Europe at extraordinary personal risk. We cover several of their stories in the episodes above.
Where can I hear more about women’s history in WW2?
Every episode linked on this page is available on the Rosie the Reviewer podcast, where we review WW2 films and TV against the real history behind them. Get in touch if there’s a story you think we should cover next.