Women in World War II Movies

When most people picture a World War II movie, the central characters are probably soldiers. Infantrymen storming beaches. Bomber crews flying over Germany. Submarine crews beneath the Atlantic. Prisoners attempting to escape. Generals planning battles.

But millions of women also found their lives transformed by the war, and movies have gradually explored a much wider range of their experiences.

Women in WWII films have been spies, Resistance fighters, codebreakers, factory workers, nurses, journalists and civilians struggling to survive occupation. Some of these characters are based on real women. Others are fictional characters created to represent experiences shared by thousands.

Looking across those movies reveals just how many different kinds of women's stories World War II has given filmmakers.

What Are the Best WWII Movies About Female Spies?

Espionage has provided filmmakers with some of the most naturally dramatic roles for women in World War II.

In CHARLOTTE GRAY (2001), Cate Blanchett plays a fictional Scottish woman recruited by Britain's Special Operations Executive and sent into occupied France. The character originated in Sebastian Faulks' novel and draws upon the experiences of real female SOE agents rather than representing one particular woman.

A CALL TO SPY (2019) takes the opposite approach. Its principal characters include real-life SOE figures Virginia Hall, Noor Inayat Khan and Vera Atkins. The film explores Britain's decision to recruit women for dangerous clandestine work in occupied Europe.

The appeal to filmmakers is easy to understand. A female agent could exploit precisely the assumptions that restricted women elsewhere. An occupying soldier might pay less attention to a woman travelling by bicycle or carrying a shopping bag than to a military-age man. But discovery could mean imprisonment, torture or execution.

Espionage therefore gave women something WWII movies traditionally gave their male protagonists: a mission whose success might affect the war itself.

Which WWII Movies Are About Women in the Resistance?

Not every woman fighting Nazi occupation belonged to an intelligence service.

Resistance movements throughout occupied Europe depended upon civilians who carried messages, hid fugitives, distributed information, transported weapons, sabotaged German operations or helped Allied personnel escape.

BLACK BOOK (2006) approaches that world through fiction. Rachel Stein, a Jewish woman hiding in the occupied Netherlands, becomes involved with the Dutch Resistance and infiltrates German headquarters.

FEMALE AGENTS (2008) similarly uses a fictionalized group of women operating for the SOE and French Resistance, although its story was inspired partly by real female agents.

These stories broaden the conventional image of the WWII fighter.

A character doesn't need a uniform, a rifle or a place in an army unit to be actively fighting the enemy. For women living under occupation, an ordinary civilian identity could itself become useful camouflage.

Which WWII Movies Show Women Working on the Home Front?

World War II also transformed women's lives far from occupied territory and conventional battlefields.

As millions of men entered military service, women filled jobs in factories, transport, agriculture, civil defence and other industries essential to keeping nations at war.

British cinema was depicting that change while the war was still happening.

MILLIONS LIKE US (1943) follows a young British woman who leaves home to work in an aircraft-parts factory. The film treats wartime industry not simply as background but as a social transformation, bringing women from different classes and circumstances together in work previously associated largely with men.

The British government itself encouraged films that presented women's participation in factories and the services as part of the national war effort. Wartime cinema created new visibility for women's work, even if female characters were sometimes reduced to recognizable social types.

The factory therefore became another kind of WWII movie setting. No bullets needed to be flying for the war to change a character's life.

Which WWII Movies Are About Female Codebreakers and Intelligence Workers?

Some of the most consequential wartime work took place behind desks.

THE IMITATION GAME (2014) includes Joan Clarke, played by Keira Knightley, among the cryptanalysts working at Bletchley Park to break German codes.

OPERATION MINCEMEAT (2021) gives women a more central place within another extraordinary British intelligence operation. Jean Leslie and Hester Leggett were among the real women involved in the deception plan designed to persuade Germany that the Allies intended to invade Greece rather than Sicily. The film also creates and combines elements for dramatic purposes, illustrating again how WWII cinema frequently mixes documented history with fictionalization.

The attraction of these stories is different from espionage behind enemy lines. The characters may be physically safe in Britain, but information becomes their battlefield.

A photograph, decoded message or convincing piece of false intelligence can potentially influence events hundreds of miles away.

And these films have helped expand the screen image of wartime service beyond the people physically carrying weapons.

Which WWII Movies Show Women Living Under Nazi Occupation?

Some women's WWII stories aren't about joining the war effort at all. They're about surviving it.

LORE (2012) follows the teenage daughter of Nazi parents as Germany collapses around her in 1945. The character is fictional, adapted from Rachel Seiffert's novel The Dark Room, but her journey explores the consequences of defeat through a perspective rarely placed at the centre of a WWII movie.

THE ZOOKEEPER'S WIFE (2017), by contrast, dramatizes the true story of Antonina and Jan Żabiński, who used the Warsaw Zoo to shelter Jews escaping Nazi persecution.

Films about occupation can put women in an especially complicated dramatic position.

The front line may be nowhere nearby, yet danger can enter the home, workplace or street at any moment.

Survival itself becomes the story.

Which WWII Movies Are About Women Journalists and War Correspondents?

Women didn't only participate in World War II. They documented it.

LEE (2023) dramatizes the life of American photographer Lee Miller, who became a war correspondent for Vogue and photographed Europe during the final stages of the war, including the liberation of concentration camps.

That places the female protagonist in yet another relationship with history. She isn't primarily fighting the war. She's witnessing it.

The camera becomes the means by which events reach people who weren't there and, eventually, subsequent generations.

Stories about women journalists also challenge the idea that women experienced WWII primarily from the home front. Some deliberately moved toward the war rather than away from it.

Are There WWII Movies About Female Pilots?

Yes, although female pilots remain far less common as central characters in WWII movies than spies, Resistance fighters or women living under occupation.

One notable example is the 1981 Soviet film NIGHT WITCHES OF THE SKY (V nebe 'Nochnye vedmy'), about the Soviet women who flew night-bombing missions against German forces.

The film has an unusual connection to the history it depicts. Its director and co-writer, Yevgeniya Zhigulenko, had herself served with the famous all-female Soviet night bomber regiment during World War II.

The Soviet Union used women in combat aviation, including as fighter and bomber pilots. The women of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment became particularly famous. Flying small, slow Po-2 biplanes on nighttime bombing missions, they acquired the German nickname that followed them into history: the “Night Witches.”

But combat flying was only one part of the story of female pilots in World War II.

The United States employed more than 1,000 Women Airforce Service Pilots, or WASP, who ferried military aircraft, tested planes and performed other flying duties within the United States.

Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary used women to ferry military aircraft between factories, maintenance units and operational airfields. They flew Spitfires, Hurricanes, transport aircraft and bombers.

Yet despite the range of jobs performed by women pilots during the war, their experiences have generated comparatively few fictional feature films.

That's surprising because the ingredients of a movie were already there: young women operating powerful military aircraft, unpredictable weather, unfamiliar machines, wartime airfields, and a generation pushing into a profession that had barely admitted women at all a few decades earlier.

FLY GIRLS and the Women Pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary

That comparatively unexplored cinematic world provides the historical setting for Phil Parker's feature screenplay FLY GIRLS.

Its principal characters are fictional, but the job they perform was real.

The screenplay follows women serving as pilots with Britain's Air Transport Auxiliary during 1944, using their remarkable wartime occupation as the foundation for an original action-adventure story.

For all the spies, Resistance fighters, codebreakers, factory workers and civilians whose experiences have inspired WWII movies about women, the skies still contain stories of their own.

Learn more about FLY GIRLS.