The Dangerous Book of Heroes (22 page)

Rolfe contracted a disease of the lungs from her forced labor and had great difficulty breathing. Toward the end she could barely stand. On February 5, 1945, she had to be carried by stretcher to her execution with Szabó. She was awarded the posthumous MBE.

 

Denise Bloch was French, a Jewess, and worked with the Resistance from 1942. She escaped to Gibraltar and in Britain was trained by SOE as a wireless operator at the same time as Szabó and Rolfe.

The SOE organized, armed, supplied, trained, and directed the French Resistance; reliable communications both ways were critical. Although all SOE work was dangerous, wireless operators were particularly vulnerable, since dedicated German radio units monitored frequencies to track the operator agents.

With the code name Ambroise, Bloch was returned to France in March 1944 to join the Resistance circuit at Nantes. In the immediate aftermath of D-day, this circuit sabotaged the railway and high-power lines at the Nantes port, disrupting German efforts to send supplies, soldiers, and equipment to the Normandy invasion area.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

On June 18, Bloch was captured during a Gestapo raid and taken the usual route to Ravensbrück via Avenue Foch. On February 5, with Violette Szabó and Lilian Rolfe, she was shot in the back of the head. Their bodies were burned in the crematorium along with those of one hundred thousand Gypsies, Russians, Poles, Slavs, Jews, and other “undesirable” women between 1938 and 1945. Bloch was awarded the King's Commendation for Brave Conduct.

Ravensbrück saw many SOE agents. Yvonne Baseden was captured and also met the three friends in the concentration camp. The Gestapo did not realize that Baseden was an SOE agent—they thought she was simply another Resistance worker—and no execution was ordered. She was included in the last Red Cross transport to Sweden and survived the war.

Eileen Nearne, an SOE field agent along with her two older sisters, Jacqueline and Francis, was captured in July 1944 in Paris. She'd just finished transmitting a signal to London when German soldiers broke in. By that time the head of SOE codes, Leo Marks, had introduced the simple but brilliant “one-time pad,” a pad of unique codes written on silk. As soon as a code was used, the agent burned that piece of silk. The only copies were in London for decoding, and every agent had a different pad so, if a pad was captured by the Germans, they were unable to retrieve any messages at all. The one-time pad is still used today.

Nearne had burned her pad and dismantled the radio, but the German soldiers found her pistol. She was interrogated and tortured at Avenue Foch and sent to Ravensbrück in September 1944. There she was reunited with Szabó, Rolfe, and Bloch. At first Nearne refused to work, so her head was shaved in preparation for her execution. She changed her mind—a decision that both saved her life and led to her freedom. In December she was sent to a labor camp near Leipzig, but when she was moved to another camp she escaped into a forest. All three Nearne siblings survived the war, and the eldest, Jacqueline, played agent Cat in the film about the SOE,
Now It Can Be Told
.

 

Of the agents who were captured, most were intercepted in the second half of 1944, after D-day, when they were most active supporting the American, British, and Canadian invasion forces. Odette Hallowes, though, was one like Khan, captured earlier in 1943.

Born as Odette Brailly and brought up in Amiens, France, Brailly married Roy Sansom, son of a British officer billeted with her family during World War I. With Roy she moved to London, had three
daughters, and volunteered for SOE service. She trained as a liaison officer. Code-named Lise, she was lifted into southern France by fishing vessel from Gibraltar in the autumn of 1942. With her field organizer, Peter Churchill, she was captured by a German double agent in 1943 and sent to Fresnes Prison. From there she was taken daily to the Gestapo headquarters on rue de Saussaies and tortured.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

All ten toenails were pulled out until her feet were so mutilated she couldn't wear shoes. A red-hot poker was pressed against her spine, and she endured other tortures. She gave no information. She was sent to Ravensbrück and kept in solitary confinement for ten months, fourteen weeks of it in darkness, ten of those days without food.

She hung on to her sanity by designing clothes for her daughters in her imagination, redecorating the houses of her friends room by room, and maintaining a strict regimen of smartness. Every day she rotated her skirt one inch so that it would wear uniformly, while every night, curls being the fashion in the 1940s, she curled her hair using strands from her ruined stockings. She also created the fantasy that her organizer, Peter Churchill, was the nephew of Winston Churchill and that they were married. This she told the commandant of Ravensbrück.

He believed her, and with the Allied armies closing in from north, south, east, and west, he took her with him when he surrendered. She denounced him immediately, and he was tried and executed as a war criminal. Meanwhile, Odette Sansom's real husband had died in Britain, and she and Peter Churchill did marry after the war.

Odette Sansom (later Hallowes) was awarded the George Cross and the MBE and spent the remainder of her life helping ex-SOE agents and keeping the memory of those who died. She wrote that
war taught her two great truths: “that suffering is an ineluctable part of the human lot, and that the battle against evil is never over.”

 

American Virginia Hall, Radcliffe College graduate and traveler, was in Paris when war broke out in September 1939. She joined the French army ambulance service as a private and, with many other “neutrals,” fled to Britain when France surrendered in June 1940. During the battle of Britain and the Blitz she worked as a code clerk in the U.S. embassy.

As the fighting and bombing raged above, she saw that on the British side of the English Channel were forty million fighting in the cause of freedom, while on the other side were some two hundred million hoping for freedom. She resigned from the embassy in February 1941, stating she was seeking other employment. In fact, she'd been recruited by SOE.

Hall's recruitment by SOE was remarkable because she had a wooden leg. In a 1933 hunting accident in Turkey, her shotgun had discharged into her left foot. By the time she reached the hospital, gangrene had set in, and her leg had to be amputated below the knee. She'd christened the wooden replacement “Cuthbert.”

After completing her initial training in April 1941, Hall openly entered collaborating Vichy France that August. Her SOE cover was as a journalist for the
New York Post,
reporting the war to America. Her code name was Germaine, but the people of the Resistance networks she set up nicknamed her “la Dame qui Boit”—the lady who limps.

She was transferred to the Lyons area in early 1942. Hall was forced to work underground when the United States entered the war, using thick French peasant stockings to hide her wooden leg. She helped create and operate escape networks for aircrew and escaped prisoners of war. Through French informers she became known to the French police and the Gestapo. They thought she was Canadian and knew her nickname but not her identity. When Klaus Barbie—“the Butcher of Lyons”—took command of the Gestapo in southern France he launched a wide hunt for her, circulated wanted posters,
and offered money for her betrayal. He's reputed to have said: “I would give a lot to lay my hands on that Canadian bitch.”

In the winter of 1942, after she'd spent fifteen months in France, SOE withdrew Hall. Her route out of Nazi Europe was over the Pyrenees and via neutral Spain. Her last message to London was “I hope Cuthbert won't be troublesome.” SOE responded dryly: “If Cuthbert troublesome eliminate him.”

In May 1943, London posted her to Madrid to set up safe houses, her cover this time being a journalist for the
Chicago Times
. After four months she returned to Britain for training as a wireless operator. Hall was awarded the MBE. She didn't want to accept it publicly at the time, so the presentation was postponed.

The following year she transferred to the new U.S. Office of Strategic Services, now working alongside SOE. OSS needed some experienced agents, and Virginia Hall was an obvious choice. Another American agent trained by SOE was William Colby, future director of the CIA.

At her own request Hall returned to France in April 1944; a Royal Navy fast patrol boat landed her in Brittany. From the central Haute-Loire region she reported German troop movements and liaised with Resistance groups in support of the D-day landings. Like Noor Khan earlier, Hall at one period sent and received messages from the attic of the local police chief. After D-day her Resistance networks were involved in blowing bridges, sabotaging communications, and harassing and reporting the German retreat.

She returned to the United States in 1945 and was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Once again, she didn't want to accept the award publicly so it was presented privately. After the war she joined the Central Intelligence Group, which President Truman formed after dissolving the OSS and which evolved into the Central Intelligence Agency. She worked for the CIA until her retirement in 1966. She died in 1982 at age seventy-six.

 

Nancy Wake was also living in France when the war began in 1939. Born in Wellington, New Zealand, and brought up in Sydney, Aus
tralia, she was working as a journalist in Paris when she met and married Henri Fiocca and moved to Marseilles.

With the creation of Vichy France in 1940, France extended the war against Britain from its colonies abroad, while at home it began the arrests and deportation to death camps of seventy-five thousand Jews. Nancy and Henri became an integral part of a successful Marseilles escape route out of Vichy France. The route through Spain and Portugal took out Royal Air Force aircrew, escaped prisoners of war, and refugees from the French. The couple was soon high on the police list of suspects. Wake's exploits were attributed to an agent the French police named “the White Mouse” by 1943 there was a reward of one million francs for her capture. Inevitably, Wake was betrayed, but she fled to Gibraltar using her escape route. Henri continued operating in Marseilles; later he was betrayed, interrogated, tortured, and executed.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

In Britain, SOE recruited and trained Wake, commissioned her captain, and gave her the code name Hélène. She was parachuted back into France, to the Auvergne region, in April 1944. There she led the Resistance in months of increasing combat action before and after D-day, action that included sabotage, guerrilla war against German units, and even an attack on a Gestapo center. Wake developed into a ferocious soldier—“like five men,” a Frenchman described her.

In 1945 in London, Nancy Wake was awarded the British George Medal and the U.S. Medal of Freedom; later she received many French medals. She is the most decorated servicewoman of World War II. “I hate wars and violence,” she said, “but if they come, I don't see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaklavas.” France had just granted women suffrage the previous year.