New Delphi Study Club officers elected at the March meeting hosted by Linda Brown are Carolyn Ott, president; Ann Cales, vice president; and Marjilea Smithheisler, secretary-treasurer. They will be installed during the April luncheon meeting at the Baptist Fellowship Hall April 12.Beverly Frazier reviewed the career of Betty Peet McIntosh, one of the women featured in The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line: Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II by Retired U.S. Army Major General Mari K. Eder.Betty Peet McIntosh grew up in Hawaii where she and her first husband lived with a Japanese family to learn the Japanese language and culture. A sports reporter for Hawaiian newspapers, she viewed the carnage after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and wrote such a graphic story that it wasn’t printed until 2012 by the Washington Post.In Washington, D.C., she was covering Eleanor Roosevelt and government activities when she was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA. Because she was fluent in Japanese, she was assigned to Morale Operations and worked in the Far East to spread false information to demoralize the Japanese. Among her projects was writing false messages on postcards found in the belongings of a Japanese soldier to describe how Japan was losing the war; handing an explosive disguised as a lump of coal to an operative who used it to blow up a train carrying Japanese soldiers, and finally, telling a Chinese member of her team to broadcast over the radio that something dreadful would happen to eradicate a whole area of Japan. The next day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, something the team had not known about in advance.After the war, McIntosh worked for various government offices before joining the Central Intelligence Agency in 1958, retiring from that office in 1973. She died in 2015, aged 100.
