Book review: In “Good Night, Irene,” Luis Alberto Urrea brings women’s stories from World War II front and center

For too long we’ve had an image in America that the battlelines of World War II were manned by the likes of John Wayne, Lee Marvin and Tom Hanks storming beaches, planting traps and pushing through Nazi lines to make the world safe.

While we should not minimize the sacrifice and heroics made by young men barely out of high school who liberated concentration camps and indeed made the world safe again, our history and folklore are short on the women who also braved the dangers and showed tremendous courage.

We’ve only recently really started lionizing the likes of Rosie the Riveter and the women who built the planes and kept the homeland intact. But all those stories and movies give short shrift to the women alongside the men on those battlelines. Although they had limited roles in combat, they faced the same dangers and their valorous actions on the front lines should create its own heroes.

But except for alluring spies or stern-willed nurses, our war mythology in America has focused its war heroes on the men.

“Good Night, Irene,” the latest novel from Luis Alberto Urrea, finally gives us strong women braving the heart of the battle and showing the importance of their strength and tenacity.

Irene Woodward and her pal Dorothy Dunford would seem unlikely conquerors in their roles as “Doughnut Dollies,” a battalion of women with the Red Cross who followed the soldiers through the fiercest battles of World War II. They accompanied them in a two-ton GMC truck, serving up coffee, doughnuts and slices of home in what Gen. Dwight Eisenhower figured would strengthen the morale needed to push back the Axis forces.

Although Irene and Dorothy are fictional characters, the novel is also a homage to Urrea’s mother, a member of the Red Cross doughnut brigade. While his mother had never talked about her battle experience, she left memories of them in boxes of photographs and journals when she died in 1990.

Little is known about the 250 women who served in the Clubmobile Corps, mainly because a fire in the 1970s destroyed the records.

Urrea brings them back to life with “Good Night, Irene.”

Irene Woodward comes from a wealthy family in New York, having made their money through an antique store run by her mother. Her father is not much of one, and Irene ends up with an abusive fiancée, prompting her to run overseas to join the war efforts. The men, after all, were rushing to fight in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, and why should women stay home?

In Clubmobile, Irene meets up with Dorothy Dunford, a statuesque, tough-talking, boozy woman off the Indiana farm looking for battle action and denied by her sex and gender. Dorothy, however, does know how to handle the two-ton GMC truck that carries the mobile doughnut kitchen for what the men call the “Doughnut Dollies.”

“Don’t call us Dollies,” Dorothy yells at one point as she floors the truck and leaves the cheering troops in her tracks.

“We drive that (truck) right into combat and make coffee and doughnuts,” she explains to the soldiers in another moment.

They’re driving the truck and making coffee and doughnuts with Patton’s Army, in the aftermath of D-Day, through the Battle of the Bulge, and helping liberate Buchenwald, the first and largest Nazi concentration camp inside Germany. They follow the same tracks as Urrea’s mother.

Along the way there’s a love relationship reminiscent of “From Here to Eternity,” and I mean that in a good way. I love that movie. And it’s a Hollywood type of love story.

Irene falls in with a fighter pilot (of course) with movie star good looks (the women nickname him Gary Cooper). He’s the man who treats her with respect and compassion amid all the handsy soldiers who want to grab more than a doughnut.

He’s Hans, nickname “The Handyman.”

His presence would feel a little contrived if not for Urrea’s discovery that his mom did indeed have a boyfriend during the war. Urrea can be forgiven if he’s a little melodramatic writing these parts. He makes it the love affair we would all wish for our mothers.

“Good Night Irene” does for the women of World War II what Martha Hall Kelly’s “The Sunflower Sisters” did for women of the Civil War.

These are portraits of women who helped save a free society. Women like that were real, and the novel helps flesh out their fears and dreams and crawl inside their minds. That’s what historical fiction is supposed to do.

Urrea’s writing is vivid, luscious and gritty. Take, for example, a scene in which Irene is stuck in the bathtub of a London hotel that puts up the Red Cross women during an air raid. As she rushes out into the bloody streets to witness the blood and death, Urrea writes it almost like a dream without sparing details of the horror engulfing Irene.

It’s also fulfilling to read a novel, finally, that doesn’t resort to what’s become a formula of modern fiction, alternating the present with flashbacks.

Urrea has a story to tell and he’s going to tell it from start to finish. Bless him for that.

It’s easy to see why “Good Night, Irene” is on so many summer must-read lists.

Ron Sylvester has been a journalist for more than 40 years with publications including the Orange County Register, Las Vegas Sun, Wichita Eagle and USA Today. He lives in rural Kansas.