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The First Lady of World War II: Eleanor Roosevelt's Daring Journey to the Frontlines and Back Spiral-Bound | May 2, 2023

Shannon McKenna Schmidt

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An untold story from one of America's favorite First Ladies

On August 27, 1943, news broke in the United States that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was on the other side of the world. A closely guarded secret, she had left San Francisco aboard a military transport plane headed for the South Pacific to support and report back on the troops on the front lines during World War II.

Meanwhile, for the previous ten days, Americans had believed she was secluded at home.

As Allied forces battled the Japanese for control of the region, Eleanor was there, spending five weeks traveling to islands in the area, including Hawaii, New Zealand, and Australia. She was on a mission as the First Lady of the United States to experience what our servicemen were experiencing... and to bring secret information back home. Only five of the 600 pages in her most popular biography focus on this trip. Now, veteran journalist, Shannon McKenna Schmidt, brings that trip to life in intimate detail for the first time.

Publisher: Sourcebooks
Original Binding: Hardcover
Pages: 336 pages
ISBN-10: 1728256615
Item Weight: 1.71 lbs
Dimensions: 6.0 x 1.1 x 9.0 inches
"This action-packed and suspenseful wartime drama vividly captures the selfless grit and tenderness of Eleanor Roosevelt’s battle-zone leadership. By revealing as never before the tensions of our gutsiest First Lady’s perilous transpacific odyssey, Shannon McKenna Schmidt shows why for the first time in her career Eleanor came home exhausted---thirty pounds lighter---from comforting the wounded and energizing ravaged teenage combat veterans to bring back from bomb-blasted islands, New Zealand, and Australia, the hardest truths of the bloodiest world war." — David Michaelis, author of ELEANOR

SHANNON MCKENNA SCHMIDT is an author and journalist who has written for National Geographic Traveler, Shelf Awareness, DailyBeast.com, NPR.org, and other websites and publications.