Martha Gellhorn did stow away in a hospital ship to become the first woman correspondent to land at Normandy. I used her piece “The Battle of the Bulge,” published in The Face of War, as the basis of the scenes set in Bastogne and the Ardennes. I have tried as much as possible to only put Martha in places that accord with her actual movements during the war, but obviously her relationship with Jess is a fiction.

Many female correspondents wrote letters to SHAEF protesting the restrictions placed on them during the war, and thus the scene in which Jess writes a letter, supported by the other correspondents, is based on an amalgamation of those letters.

Iris Carpenter’s visit to Omaha Beach and her subsequent court-martial is recorded in Carpenter’s memoir, No Woman’s World: From D-Day to Berlin, a Female Correspondent Covers World War II. I have also used Ernie Pyle’s June 1944 wire copy (he was correspondent for the Scripps-Howard newspaper business) titled “Omaha Beach after D-Day,” published in Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938–1946, as the basis for Jess’s descriptions of how Omaha Beach looked after D-Day.

Lee Carson’s ability to avoid court-martial through the employment of her eyelashes is recorded in Oldfield’s memoir. Catherine Coyne, Lee Carson and Iris Carpenter were all real people, and I have tried to, once again, have their appearance in Jess’s life accord with their actual movements during the war. Both Iris Carpenter and Lee Carson were given permission to access all areas at around the same time as Jess is granted this permission in my book.

The scene where a singer is brought into the Hotel Scribe to entertain the correspondents as well as the sign propped on the piano and the attempts at misogynist humor the following morning are all detailed in Oldfield’s memoir, which is, quite accidentally, an awful chronicle of the widespread sexual harassment of women throughout the war. Also recorded in this book is the incident about the German girl bearing a note from a U.S. soldier, which she thought was a special pass, but which is in fact anything but. Oldfield notes, seemingly without censure, that the writer of the note must have “enjoyed himself and…had a sense of humor as well as generosity of spirit.” I have tried not to exaggerate the way women were treated during the war, but I know many of the incidents I’ve written about must seem unbelievable.

I wanted to write about Ravensbrück concentration camp, the only concentration camp exclusively used to imprison women during the war, but this camp, because of its location, was liberated by the Russians, not the Americans. So the concentration camp that I have used in this book is an amalgamation of Ravensbrück and other camps like Buchenwald and Dachau, and I have drawn on Lee Miller’s and Iris Carpenter’s reporting of those camps. After Lee Miller photographed Dachau, because the photographs were among the first taken of any of the camps and the sights were so shocking, she sent a cable to her editor at Vogue that read: “I implore you to believe this is true.” I have borrowed this wording for Jess.