Secrets of Radar
1944
Written in 1944, while World War II still raged, this novel pulses with the desperate energy of a conflict yet to be decided. Gale Janes volunteers for the Women's Army Corps not to serve coffee, but to hunt Japanese bombers using radar technology so new that most soldiers don't understand it. Stationed in India and Burma, she and her unit face a twin mission: protect the secrets of this miraculous detection equipment from enemy spies, and use it themselves to bring down the planes closing in on Allied positions. The men around her expect her to fail. The enemy wants her dead. Gale intends to show them both what a woman with a radar scope and steady hands can do. This is juvenile fiction at its most historically fascinating: a wartime adventure composed in the very year it depicts, when the outcome was uncertain and every victory mattered. It offers both the propulsion of a WWII thriller and an invaluable window into how Americans, especially American women, imagined their role in the fight.
