Very little is known about Martha Selvik. She served as a captain in the Women's Army Corps (W.A.C.) during World War II and for sometime afterwards. She was of Norwegian descent, spoke Norwegian, and apparently had roots in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was commissioned a lieutenant and was stationed in the Washington, D.C. area from 1941 through at least the end of 1943. Later she was stationed to the United States Mission to Norway in Bergen, after Norway was liberated from the Germans, at which point she had been commissioned as a captain in the W.A.C. While there, she made contact with Torstein Selvik, who was a reporter and later editor of Bergens Arbeiderblad, the official newspaper of the Norwegian Labor Party in Bergen. He may have been a relative of Selvik, and is apparently the source of at least some of the Norwegian poetry. Later Selvik was assigned to co-write an official report on the W.A.C. in the European Theater of Operations during World War II, which was completed in 1946. As part of this writing project she attended a conference for military historians in Wiesbaden, Germany. Some part of the writing assignment may have been concurrent with her assignment to Bergen, but in any event she apparently went back to Bergen after the writing project was completed.
