Women didn't get much of a mention in the 75th anniversary commemorations of D-Day that focused largely on the fighting exploits of men, yet without them Adolf Hitler wouldn't have been defeated.
Legions of women built weapons of war that men fought and killed with. By ensuring production of planes, tanks and other material, they freed up the men sent into combat on all the fronts of World War II.
Women fought, and died, too. French resistance fighter Lucie Aubrac was pregnant when she sprang her husband, Raymond, from Nazi captivity in October 1943. Across France, many schools are named after Aubrac, who died in 2007, aged 94.
Women nursed the wounded and comforted the traumatized.
"If I had to do it over ... just like the boys, I'd serve again," war nurse Leila Morrison, now 96, said as she came back this week to Normandy, where she served in the 118th Evacuation Hospital after nearly 160,000 men landed in Nazi-occupied France on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
"It changed my life completely, my outlook in every direction, and I am so thankful for it," Morrison told The Associated Press in an interview. "I was just 22 years old, just out of school and never been through anything like this. And it was a real wakeup realization and it stayed with me ever since, every day."
In the aftermath of the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated the United States' entry into the war, US government fliers told women: "You are needed ... NOW."
"We must depend upon you upon womanpower," exhorted a recruitment flier distributed in Mobile, Alabama, in February 1942. "Every housewife should ask herself and answer this question: 'Can I be of greater service in my home or in a war plant?'"
"World War II was a righteous war. We were scared to death that Germany was going to win, take over Europe and then come after us," Harman, now 94, said in an AP phone interview from her home in California. "I don't know anybody who didn't try to do something patriotic during the war."
The toughest aspect of being a WASP was "being accepted," she said. "The men were not universally accepting of us flying."
"When we needed you, you came through," Air Force General Henry Arnold wrote. "But now the war situation has changed and the time has come when your volunteered services are no longer needed." "We were just dumped," Harman said. "One day we were employed, the next day we were not. We had to pay our own way to wherever we were going next. We had no severance pay. It was just, 'That's it girls.'"