Military entertainment in the Second World War was not a peripheral activity. The specific function that entertainers performed for military personnel — the provision of contact with normalcy, with humor, with beauty, with the culture of the world they were fighting for — was understood by military commanders on all sides to have genuine effect on morale and therefore on operational capacity. The U.S. government established the United Service Organizations in 1941 specifically to organize entertainment for American military personnel; the British, French, and other Allied military forces had comparable programs.
Baker worked within this framework with the same professionalism she brought to all her performance work. She was not simply a celebrity making goodwill appearances; she was a working performer who gave full performances in conditions that ranged from uncomfortable to genuinely dangerous. The jeep travel across North Africa — sleeping beside the vehicle to avoid land mines — was not metaphor or exaggeration; North Africa in the years following the Allied invasion contained an extensive minefield problem, and the operational landscape of military travel in that environment was dangerous in ways that domestic concert tours were not.
She performed in Algiers, in Tunisia, in Libya, in Egypt, in Lebanon, in Palestine. She performed for French colonial troops, for American GIs, for British soldiers. She performed for audiences who spoke multiple languages, who came from different cultural backgrounds, and who shared the common situation of being far from home in conditions of mortal danger. The performances she gave in these conditions were not the same performances she had given at the Folies Bergère; they were adapted to the audience and the context, drawing on the full range of her professional skills to give people something worth having in circumstances that offered little comfort.