Description

In Episode 6, “She Fought the Machine, Part 2,” Chelsey and Jenn reveal the untold stories of World War II’s home-front and battlefield heroines: the Navajo Code Talkers—boarding-school survivors whose language was weaponized to save lives; Betty Masket, an aeronautical engineer who inspected SB2C Helldivers then became a NIH lab chief; Betty McIntosh, an OSS propaganda operative who wielded black-leaflet campaigns and clandestine radio as weapons; the over-looked valor of Black units from the Tuskegee Airmen to the 6888th Postal Battalion; and the ongoing erasure of these legacies through modern policy moves—from federal website purges and trans-military bans to the end of affirmative action at service academies. Through these stories, they draw a straight line from cultural genocide and segregation to today’s systematic silencing of marginalized voices—and call on listeners to reclaim memory as resistance.

Sources to Check

• Linn, Brian McAllister. The Navajo Code Talkers. Bison Books, 2002.
• Adams, David W. Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928. Univ. Press of Kansas, 1995.
• Haulman, Daniel L. “The Tuskegee Airmen’s Combat Record,” Air Force Historical Research Agency, 2019.
• Stanton, Shelby L. The Forgotten Six Triple Eight: The Incredible Story of the First All-Black Women’s Battalion in WWII. Sterling, 2020.
• Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “Curtiss SB2C Helldiver,” si.edu.
• NPR, “Federal Agencies Scrub Websites of Women and BIPOC Service Member Profiles,” March 2025.

Supreme Court, Trump v. Pennsylvania (trans military ban), May 2025.

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