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 possible. 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 the 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.
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Women in WW2: Spies, Agents, and Resistance
1958 · 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: A 1958 film gives a woman agent the lead, then hands her a romance she never had. As we put it, “you can’t have a movie starring a lady without romance in it.”
What we thought: No score: our rating system arrived an episode later. It beat our expectations, especially the second half, and the ending made one of us cry.
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: Three extraordinary SOE women squeezed into one film, when each deserves her own series. And Vera Atkins was held back for being foreign, Jewish and a woman.
What we thought: We give it 7 and 6.5 out of ten (Cuthberts, after Virginia Hall’s prosthetic leg). Fine but average, and Noor’s story gets sidelined.
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 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: Women resisters get remembered for being brave and beautiful. Clare Mulley wants them remembered for being effective, and she does the archive work to prove it.
What we thought: No score for interviews. Our takeaway: the women are there if you go into the archives, and “if we are feminists, we tell the truth. We tell the whole story.”
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
Rika van der Lans wasn’t a spy, a soldier, a nurse, or a journalist. She ran a guesthouse in the 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: Resistance without a code name: Rika hid people in her guesthouse. We dig into Suriname’s colonial history and colourism, and why the book beats the film.
What we thought: We give the film 6 and 6.5 out of ten (Nazis in the guest house), and the book 9 and 9.5. Read the book.
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.
2006 · Dutch Resistance Thriller
Paul Verhoeven came home after two decades in Hollywood to make this one. Rachel Stein, a Jewish singer, joins the Dutch resistance in the last year of the occupation and ends up undercover with an SD officer. The film is built from several real events rather than one true story, and Rachel owes something to the Frisian resistance fighter Esmee van Eeghen. We get into its moral greyness, its ending, and what Verhoeven borrowed from history.
Our angle: Verhoeven refuses clean heroes, and Rachel is nobody’s saint. His thriller keeps asking who counts as victim and who as perpetrator, right up to that ending in Israel.
What we thought: We give it 7.2 and 6.5 out of ten (dyed pubes), the higher score with a touch of Dutch pride.
2023 · Drama Series · Part One
Anne Frank’s story, told through Miep Gies: the Viennese-born office worker who helped hide the Frank family and the others in the Secret Annex. Bel Powley plays Miep in the National Geographic series, and in Part One we cover its first three episodes, with Maartje checking it against Miep’s own memoir. Along the way we meet the queer resistance fighter Willem Arondeus.
Our angle: The Anne Frank story from the woman who kept the annex fed. Funny where it can be, never tragedy porn, and the Jewish characters get to act, not just suffer.
What we thought: No score yet: we rate the series at the end of Part Three. So far Sam calls it well paced, and Maartje liked it even more on a rewatch.
Further reading
Anne Frank Remembered by Miep Gies with Alison Leslie Gold – Miep’s own account of the hiding years, and the book Maartje measures the series against.
2023 · Drama Series · Part Two
Part Two takes in episodes 4 to 6, The Butterfly, Scheissfeld and Boiling Point, where Miep slowly comes apart under a strain she is never allowed to show. Across the road from the Hollandsche Schouwburg, the theatre used as the assembly point for deportations, Henriette Pimentel ran a childcare centre that worked with the theatre’s manager Walter Suskind to get hundreds of children out.
Our angle: The women carry the weight here: Mrs Frank has the hardest time of the adults, and the Jewish nurses at the creche got children out and often went with them.
What we thought: No score yet: we rate the series at the end of Part Three. Maartje still has no favourite episode: “what this show does with tension and storytelling, I wanna talk to the writers.”
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: Lee Miller was reckless, funny and glamorous. A film largely made by women turns her grey and safe: they “sucked all the fun out of her.”
What we thought: Maartje gives it 5 and Sam 5.5 out of ten (splish splashes in Hitler’s bathtub). Not a bad film, just a lifeless one. Read her son Antony Penrose’s book instead.
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: Hemingway was the better novelist, Martha the better journalist. Pity the film makes them both so hard to like.
What we thought: We both give it 5 out of ten (cats in a Cuban house). Too long, with sex scenes that made us squirm. Read Caroline Moorehead’s biography and give this one a miss.
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: Women wrote wartime propaganda too, “the slop” included. Their Finest is one of the few films to show it, and it turns far darker than its feel-good start.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 8.5, and Sam and our guests Winnie and Gabby land on 8 or 8.5 out of ten (thrown away bags of fish and chips). A comfort rewatch in the making.
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
Canadian TV Series · Home Front Drama
The Canadian TV series Bomb Girls does something almost no WW2 production bothers to do: it puts working-class women on a munitions factory floor in Toronto and treats their labour, their friendships, and their entirely separate wartime experience as the actual story. We came for the Canadian content and stayed for the drama – while noting that the soap opera tendencies and the men (all trash, we stand by this) occasionally get in the way of what’s genuinely interesting here. We covered the full run across two episodes, including the film that followed.
Our angle: Canada, finally! Working-class women on a Toronto munitions floor, and Sam’s great aunt was one of them. It is pure soap, and far darker than the premise lets on.
What we thought: Rated after Part Two: Maartje gives season one 7.5 and season two 6, Sam gives the show 7 out of ten (Gladys’s ill-advised romantic affairs). The TV film gets 3 and 4; Maartje kept falling asleep.
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: A film about Black women that keeps handing the story to white characters. The women of the 6888th faced racism at every turn, and they deserved a better script.
What we thought: We both give it 6 out of ten (terrible Abraham hallucinations). “It’s not bad. It’s not great.” Kerry Washington does her best with a Hallmark-y script.
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 honours the Bataan nurses by making it about their boyfriends. As Sam says, men get to be traumatised by combat; women only by what happens to their love interests.
What we thought: We both give it 6 out of ten (impractical nightgowns). Fun to watch, but the real nurses deserved better, and they hated it.
Further reading
On the real Bataan and Corregidor nurses: I Served on Bataan and We Band of Angels.
1993 · Wartime Romance Drama
Set in rural Manitoba in 1942, For the Moment follows a group of Canadian women and Commonwealth airmen brought together by the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. Written and directed by Aaron Kim Johnston based on his own parents’ wartime experiences, it is quiet, character-driven, and refreshingly honest about the temporary, emotionally charged connections formed far from the front lines. Russell Crowe, pre-stardom, is genuinely understated. The film understands that not every wartime romance has a neat ending, and it does not try to give one.
Our angle: A rare wartime romance where the Canadian women get to make messy choices, infidelity included. Unglamorous, honest, and the ending refuses the melodrama.
What we thought: We give it 6.8 and 7 out of ten (fair dinkums), and a proper slice of Canadian history.
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 land girls kept Britain fed, then waited until 2008 to be thanked. The film is forgettable. The women are not.
What we thought: We both give it 5 out of ten (carefully held mangolds). Meh, and very 1990s. Sam prefers Angela Huth’s novel, which gives the women far richer inner lives.
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.
Kabir Khan’s Hindi-language series follows the Indian National Army, the soldiers who broke from the British Indian Army and allied with Japan to fight for India’s independence. At its centre is the Rani of Jhansi Regiment: an all-female combat unit, 80 per cent of them teenage plantation workers from Malaya and Singapore with no prior military experience. We talk about a theatre most Western WW2 media never goes near, and about what it means that these women were fighting not against fascism but against empire.
Our angle: Women soldiers who fought the British rather than the Axis, and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment gets more screen time than women get in most Western war dramas.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 7 and Sam 7.5 out of ten (cave letters). Sam was hooked from the start; Maartje first had to “accept the vibe”, and watch it twice.
Historian Samuel Clowes Huneke joins us to talk about his book on queer women in Nazi Germany. Paragraph 175 only criminalised men, so the persecution of queer women ran through other laws and through denunciation by neighbours. He takes us from the balls of Weimar Berlin to the stories of Waltraud Hock, Ilse Totzke, and the dancers Margot Liu and Marta Halusa.
Our angle: WW2 media is very straight and very male. These women’s stories are about agency as well as suffering, and we want to hear more of them.
What we thought: No score for interviews. Sam read the book to prepare, and we came away with a long reading and watch list.
Further reading
I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany by Samuel Clowes Huneke – the book behind the interview, which Sam read to prepare.
1999 · German Drama
Recommended to us by Samuel Clowes Huneke, this German film follows Lilly Wust, a German soldier’s wife, and Felice Schragenheim, a Jewish woman living under a false name in Berlin, as they fall in love in 1943. Juliane Köhler and Maria Schrader shared the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 1999 Berlinale. Sam read Erica Fischer’s book, built from the women’s own letters and diaries, and fills in the history around the film.
Our angle: A lesbian love story in Nazi Berlin, where hiding in plain sight is the resistance. Bring tissues, and keep an eye on Lilly’s “white lady obliviousness”.
What we thought: Maartje gives it 6.5 and Sam 7 out of ten (lesbians in top hats). Maartje blames the lower score on her mood, not the film; Sam loved the women’s own letters in the book.
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
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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.
