In “Good Night, Irene,” prize-winning author Luis Alberto Urrea breaks from his usual focus on Mexico-U.S. border stories. Inspired by his Staten Island-born mother Phyllis McLaughlin’s experiences in the American Red Cross’ Clubmobile Corps, familiarly known as the Donut Dollies, Urrea has produced an eye-opening tale about these overlooked war heroes.
On its face, the women’s assignment was simple: to provide a morale-boosting taste of home to American troops in the form of donuts, hot coffee, music, and sympathetic ears. Their job was to deliver hope to soldiers caught in a global war. (The program was later expanded to Vietnam.)
In a recent New York Times essay, Urrea writes that after D-Day, his mother was among the Donut Dollies who, assigned to Gen. George Patton’s Third Army, accompanied the push through France, Belgium, and Germany. Trailing the soldiers in trucks outfitted with electric coffee urns, doughnut machines, and record players, the women set up mobile battlefront social clubs.
Urrea notes: “These women were not recognized as veterans. But make no mistake, they were unarmed witnesses to every bit of horror in the battle zone” – including, in his mother’s case, the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of the concentration camp Buchenwald. Her war experiences haunted her for the rest of her life.
More than 30 years after her death, Urrea gives his mother and the Donut Dollies their due in this stirring novel. To tell their story, he has created two wonderfully appealing women who join the Red Cross in 1943 to escape unhappiness at home.
Petite, 25-year-old Irene Woodward flees from her privileged New York City background and an abusive fiancé without telling a soul. Dorothy Dunford, a farmer’s daughter, is seeking “a valve to release her helpless anger” after losing her parents, her brother – a midshipman killed at Pearl Harbor – and the family’s Indiana farm.
The two women, who meet during training in Washington, couldn’t be more different. Dorothy grew up in boots, Irene in heels. Dorothy drove trucks, Irene rode in taxis. Dorothy is no-nonsense, Irene is “a glorious flirt.” Yet both are determined to contribute to the war effort and start their lives afresh.
They have no idea what they’re in for.
To say that “Good Night, Irene” is action-packed is putting it mildly. The women are endangered from the get-go. But their resilience is extraordinary. During their crossing to Liverpool, a nearby ship is torpedoed, and they are traumatized by the sight of sailors left to drown as their own ship speeds ahead, under orders not to stop and risk being hit. Weeks later, their train to London is dive-bombed by the Luftwaffe.
Urrea conveys his characters’ long, exhausting days – and deepening friendship and budding romances – with pounding intensity. He writes, “They went wherever they were ordered … rushing from duty to duty,” feeling “like war brides to a few thousand husbands.”
Despite the hardships, they enjoyed their instant popularity. He adds: “They did their duty while maintaining strict hilarity.”
The first section of “Good Night, Irene,” which covers the months before the women are sent to Normandy, is evocative of old war movies. In Washington, “Irene felt like she’d escaped into a Jean Harlow movie.” Overseas, the “ruins and constant reconstruction of London” are likened to movie sets, “Not entirely real. Incomprehensible, really.” Snappy repartee and a diverse cast of characters – including Irene’s eventual great love, a cowboy fighter pilot from Oregon who looks like Gary Cooper – heighten the cinematic associations.
But the harsh realities of combat darken the picture, and Urrea’s prose rises to the occasion. Somehow, he manages to find uplifting glimmers of beauty and valor even amid the ugliness. When the women miraculously emerge, battered and blinking, into a flattened, smoking French village after a horrific night trapped in the cellar of a collapsed building, they find the silence “strangely meditative” and observe: “The great artists of chaos had left them masterpieces.” After reaching Germany, they comment, “You look out at this beautiful land and wonder where the evil came from.”
As in his earlier novels, including “The Devil’s Highway” and “The House of Broken Angels,” Urrea demonstrates his ability to locate the heartening in the harrowing and heartbreaking. “Good Night, Irene” hails the camaraderie and deep bonds formed between people thrown together in dire circumstances – though it certainly does not sugarcoat war. What it does do is join a welcome flurry of new books that expand our understanding of women’s important roles in World War II.