Good Night, Irene

World War II lasted from 1939 to 1945. During this tumultuous era, the world powers split into two opposing forces: the Axis powers, which mainly consisted of Germany, Japan, and Italy; and the Allies, which included the United Kingdom, China, the United States of America, and the Soviet Union. The cause of the war stemmed from a growth in fascism in Nazi Germany as Adolf Hitler took power. The war began in 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland. As Hitler grew in power, his antisemitism fueled the cruel initiative that ultimately led to the imprisonment and murder of millions of Jewish people who were forced into concentration camps. This genocide, known as the Holocaust, took the lives of almost 6 million Jews. The United States did not join the war until 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbor. US troops then aided the Allied forces in the historic invasion of D-Day on June 6, 1944, when the Allies launched an assault on the beaches of Normandy to liberate France from Nazi occupation. After D-Day, the Allies pushed through Europe, finally winning the Battle of the Bulge in Germany; this was Germany’s last major military stand against the Allied powers in 1945.

During the war, there were several services that civilians could join to aid in the war effort. The American Red Cross, which supplied medical aid to soldiers, also initiated a new branch in 1942 and dubbed it the Clubmobile Service. This service, which operated a number of buses that provided soldiers with fresh doughnuts and coffee on the front lines, employed female volunteers whose job was to give the soldiers a sense of home. The Clubmobile women, commonly referred to as “Donut Dollies,” drove fully equipped buses and made doughnuts and coffee from scratch as they followed the military units. The purpose of the Donut Dollies was to improve morale among the soldiers and provide a familiar sense of home amidst a war-torn terrain, and although these women were volunteers, their duties compelled them to risk their own lives and safety in order to provide the troops with much-needed support and amenities. By the end of the war, 205 Red Cross volunteers had served 4,659,728 doughnuts to the soldiers. Eighty-six Red Cross volunteers, 52 of whom were women, lost their lives in World War II.

Good Night, Irene is designed to honor the untold stories and myriad traumas that such women endured throughout the course of their duties. However, upon researching the history of the Clubmobiles, Luis Alberto Urrea learned that hardly any physical records of this service remain because of a fire in the Red Cross storage facility in the 1970s. Now, the most relevant surviving information about the Clubmobile service comes from the personal records of these women and the stories they have passed down to their relatives. These highly incomplete records nonetheless reveal that the Red Cross encouraged the Donut Dollies to listen, engage, and flirt with the troops as much as possible in order to boost morale. Although these women supplied a key service to the soldiers by bolstering their hopes, the structure of the Clubmobile Service promoted an image of gendered domesticity on the front lines, for even in the midst of battle, the soldiers had a dismissive tendency to view these women as homemakers. Although gender roles in the United States would shift considerably in the coming years, societal perceptions during World War II portrayed women as nurturing, supportive people whose natural talents lay in domesticity, while men were encouraged men to act as the sole providers for their households. In many ways, the Donut Dollies simultaneously upheld and challenged these stereotypes, for although these women embodied support roles and did not fight in the war, they nonetheless experienced PTSD symptoms and trauma alongside the soldiers they served, and they were expected to put on a brave face and comfort the troops even while facing the possibility of their own deaths. Thus, the story of Irene and Dorothy’s many challenges on the front lines, while fictional, is meant to stand as a testimony to the bravery of these women, whose real stories of tragedy and triumph have been lost to time and obscurity.