Many correspondents did not believe the concentration camps existed until after they came upon them, which Jess alludes to. General Collins did make the civilians in the town of Nordhausen bury the dead as punishment for turning a blind eye to the horror that existed right on their doorstep, and the practice of taking German civilians from nearby towns to the concentration camps to see what they had ignored is also noted in The Women Who Wrote the War: The Compelling Story of the Path-breaking Women Correspondents of World War II by Nancy Caldwell Sorel. Jess’s experience of coming upon the camp and having machine guns trained on her is based on what happened to Marguerite Higgins, correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, when she reached Dachau.

The view attributed to General Patton about “fornication without fraternization” is detailed in Oldfield’s memoir.

The description of Hitler’s apartment is based on Lee Miller’s piece “Hitleriana,” published in Vogue in 1945. I have appropriated the infamous photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub and given this to Jess.

Iris Carpenter was the reporter who came upon a U.S. Army soldier raping a German girl in 1945. She never reported on this incident for the Boston Globe but wrote about it in her later memoir, published in 1946. She records the reaction of the officer to whom she reported the incident—that the main problem with war was that there were women near it. Jess’s report, “I’ve Got a Pistol and There Ain’t Nobody Going to Stop Me Having Her” is based on Iris’s recollections in her memoir.

The story about the 371st Fighter Group and Yvette, the injured girl who became their mascot and good-luck charm, is true. At a field hospital in Italy, an orphaned Italian boy stayed for several weeks and he also became a kind of mascot for both the nurses and the nearby battalion. Fiction is all about what is possible and both of these examples made me believe that it was possible for Victorine to have been accommodated in a field hospital for a few months.

Many other sources provided useful information to help me write this novel. For information about female correspondents during the war, as well as the sources listed above, I also used Women War Correspondents of World War II by Lilya Wagner, Women of the World by Julia Edwards, and Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II by Penny Colman.

To understand Lee Miller’s life, I read Lee Miller’s War, edited by Antony Penrose; Lee Miller: A Life by Carolyn Burke; and Lee Miller: A Woman’s War by Hilary Roberts. My description of the area around Carentan is based on “Unarmed Warriors” by Lee Miller. Martha Gellhorn is another extraordinary woman and for details about her life, I referred to her collection of reportage published as The Face of War and Caroline Moorehead’s biography, Martha Gellhorn: A Life. I also read Gellhorn’s fiction to understand more about her turn of phrase.