This Austrian born actor was discovered by Louis B. Mayer and given a contract in Hollywood. She became a star and performed in several films, including Cecil B. De Mille’s, Samson and Delilah. She is lesser known as an inventor.

To help in the war effort she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology. Unfortunately, the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960’s. Nonetheless, she went on to raise $25 million in war bonds in 10 days by selling kisses. 

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An Indian princess, Noor Inayat Khan’s father, Inayat Khan brought the wisdom of Sufism to the West starting in 1910. She was a dedicated Sufi, and a musician from a family of classical musicians. Noor was also a poet and an author of children’s books. She was a pacifist and lived her truth. She became the first wireless operator sent from London to France. It was one of the most dangerous jobs of the Resistance and radio operators usually lasted only about 6 weeks before they were captured and killed. After 6 months and a capture and escape, Noor was betrayed, for money, by her landlady and was sent to the Dachau concentration camp where she was executed at age 30. She never gave up any information to her torturers.

Discontent with a highly successful career as a fashion model, Lee Miller left New York for Paris, to become a student of the famous Surrealist photographer Man Ray. Her social circle included Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Ernst, Paul Eluard and others. She could have easily sat out the war with her avant-garde friends, but instead she became a war correspondent and photographer. Her gritty photos of war, and the concentration camps are some of the most powerful visual documents of the horrors of her day. Perhaps the most famous of her war photographs is her self-portrait in Hitler’s bathtub taken just a couple of hours after his suicide.

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Hailing from Baltimore, educated and brought up to become a proper lady, Virginia seems to have been, to her mother’s dismay, a born adventurer. In 1933 while hunting in Smyrna (now Turkey) she tripped on a barbed wire fence and shot herself in the leg, which had to be amputated at the knee. She studied several languages, and possessed an uncanny intuition to know who could be trusted. As the first woman SOE officer into Vichy, France she created a network that organized resistance movements, supplied agents with money, weapons and supplies and helped downed airmen escape. Later, she worked for the OSS as a radio operator, and more. At one point she escaped the Gestapo by trekking over a 7,500 ft pass in the Pyrenees, covering 50 miles in the snow in two days.