Mar 31, 2026
March is Women’s History Month. It is a time to recognize the female trailblazers who set the course for those who followed. Women veterans are no exception. The women serving in the early wars were true pioneers paving the way for the following generations of women veterans.
World War II vet Phyllis Michaux was one such individual. At 20 years old, Michaux was a war widow living in Buffalo, New York. At 21, she decided to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps in 1943.
Following her basic training in Des Moines, Iowa, Michaux was stationed at Camp Upton, New York, where she worked as a clerk typist. In a 2003 interview for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, Michaux said she grew bored at Camp Upton and wanted to be transferred.
She was eventually transferred from her unit to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1944, Michaux traveled across the Atlantic Ocean aboard the Queen Elizabeth with 15 other OSS women and thousands of male service members. They arrived in Scotland on D-Day, June 6, 1944.
From there, Michaux was stationed in London from June-November, where she experienced continual bombings from the Germans.
“Those things were landing all day and all night,” Michaux said in her Veterans History Project interview. “There were never any alerts like what you see in the movies, you know, sirens ringing and that sort of thing, because they never stopped. It just never stopped.”
While the bombings continued, life went on in London. Michaux recalled being able to find restaurants that remained open through it all.
When she was assigned to Paris in November, that all changed. While the city was liberated just months earlier, living conditions were paltry.
Michaux and her fellow OSS members lived with no heat and next-to-no hot water. One of them purchased a kettle to warm water for washing. Most businesses and restaurants in Paris were closed.
When the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945, Michaux was still in Paris and recalled the celebrations on the Camps Elysees, though she did not attend. She went north to La Havre, where she boarded a ship headed for home.
After demobilizing in New York, she took the train to Buffalo, where her parents picked her up.
“My parents met me and that was that,” she said. “There was no flag waving, no bugles, no big congratulations, no medals, no nothing. But that was the way it was in those days.”
She tried to go back to college using her G.I. Bill benefits but was refused. She was told colleges had to “save places for the boys.”
Michaux married Frenchman Raoul Michaux, whom she met in New York and lived the majority of her life in France. She maintained her U.S. citizenship.
AUDIENCE WAS ‘FASCINATED’
When Michaux died in 2015, she was a member of VFW Post 605 in Paris, France. Also a member of that Post is VFW Legislative Director Kristina Keenan, who was living in Paris at the time and was invited to speak at Michaux’s memorial service.
Keenan recounted Michaux’s military career, which was met with fascination by those in attendance. They knew Michaux as a great advocate for American’s living in Europe, but not about her time in the Women’s Army Corps.
“The audience at her memorial at the American Church in Paris was fascinated by my telling of her military years,” Keenan later said. “Most Americans in Paris knew her as having founded several women’s expat associations and her legislative advocacy to secure overseas voting rights. They had never heard about her time during the war.”
Before conducting the military honors at Michaux’s memorial service, Keenan added a personal statement: “As a veteran myself, I would like to personally commend Phyllis Michaux, wherever she may be, for her distinguished military service, for her willingness to volunteer during wartime and for her bravery. She is a true American hero.”
This article is featured in the 2026 March/April issue of VFW magazine, and was written by Janie Dyhouse, senior editor of VFW magazine.