On the moonless night of March 21, 1944, a small advance guard for the forthcoming Allied invasion of northern France was deposited on Beg-an-Fry beach in Brittany. The handpicked duo had dashed across the English Channel in a Royal Navy motor gun boat after spending the previous night in a hotel near the seaside resort of Torquay. One was an elderly peasant woman, bundled up in shawls like a Russian babushka and carrying a heavy suitcase. She was the first to land, silently maneuvering herself out of the camouflaged dinghy onto the rocks and away from the rising tide. A male figure followed but twisted his knee in the dark and barely suppressed a loud yelp as the woman helped him to his feet. He complained all the way up a narrow path onto the headland and on through the gorse bushes to the road for the long walk to the nearest railway station. Yet talking was supposedly forbidden for fear of alerting the Germans in the nearby pillbox, who could turn on their searchlights at any moment and start firing.
Gray-haired Henri Lassot had a pale face, thin moustache, and round glasses, and was a painter by profession and a grumbler by nature—although prized by his OSS commanders who considered his air of aged fatigue a brilliant cover. Code-named Aramis, the American was at sixty-two old enough to be his companion’s father, for she was actually coming up to her thirty-eighth birthday. Virginia—or Diane as she was known in OSS—looked as if she were in her late sixties because she had gone to extraordinary lengths to change her appearance. In her youth, she had preferred dressing up as a dashing pirate, but for this mission she had opted for something dowdier. She had dyed her hair a dirty gray and secured it with a wooden hairpin in a severe upstyle that sharpened her features; Hollywood makeup artists had taught her how to pencil in authentic-looking wrinkles round her eyes; baggy woolen blouses and several floor-length skirts with peplums bulked out her silhouette and concealed her Colt .32; and she had had her fine, white American teeth ground down by a much-feared female London dentist to resemble those of a French countrywoman. At five foot eight, she was tall for a peasant but her clothes had been made, distressed, and rigorously checked by Jewish refugees in a secret atelier behind London’s Oxford Circus to ensure they looked real—right down to the way the buttons were sewn on, as the French favored parallel threading while the British and Americans preferred a crisscross pattern. She had even altered her famous gait by learning to shuffle.
The effect was startling, but OSS judged that Virginia’s disguise alone was not enough and that “radical alteration of her features was indicated for her own safety.” She refused, however, to go under the surgeon’s knife, perhaps because of the memories it brought back of the aftermath of her accident in Turkey. It was nevertheless a brave stance—and an unusual one. George Langelaan, one of the Mauzac escapees, was one of a handful of other compromised agents who all agreed to, or even requested, surgery before returning to the field. Two major operations had involved breaking Langelaan’s pointed chin and making it smoother and rounder with a bone graft from his pelvis, a painful procedure he topped up with glasses, a different part in his hair, and a new moustache. After all that, even his closest relatives did not recognize him.
Virginia’s refusal is all the more remarkable given that German officers across France were still on maximum alert for the Limping Lady sixteen months after her escape from Lyon. The Gestapo had given her the code name of Artemis, the Greek goddess of hunting, and for them tracking her down for the kill still represented a particularly gripping if sinister sport. Her pursuers knew she had returned to Britain via Portugal. Now they must be prevented at all costs from finding out she was back in France.
Even so, it was an unusual way to dress for the role she intended to take once in the field, one that went well beyond the orders given to her new circuit, code-named Saint, which were surprisingly modest. Her official brief was to find safe houses for other agents and wireless operators on the run in central France south of Paris—crossing over the perilous area where the Germans had decimated the SOE Prosper circuit and that had become an almost no-go territory for Allied agents. OSS headquarters were clear that Aramis would be her chief (and had given him a million francs to take with him as expenses), while Diane was his assistant and wireless operator (with five hundred thousand francs).1 It was still felt in America to be controversial to send a woman on a paramilitary operation and inconceivable to put her in charge. In the U.S. military, which had been hurriedly expanded after Pearl Harbor, female recruits (who never got near the front line let alone behind it) were branded by some male colleagues as prostitutes or the so-called “lesbian threat.” Women were known to fly fighter aircraft but only to and from the factories and never into combat; normally the closest women got to the shooting was as nurses. Taking orders in the field from the untested Aramis was hardly a situation, however, that Virginia was likely to tolerate for long. Nor was she likely to stick to her restrictive support-role brief. From the get-go she had greater ambitions now that she was finally back in France, and scores to settle.
The country had suffered a great deal since her last mission and the mood had dramatically changed. Virginia had kept her eye on the big picture and had seen well before she arrived that the time had come to form guerrilla armies to attack, rather than set up circuits as before to observe or prepare. As one SOE officer put it, “We had sown the wind for two and a half weary years. We were about to reap the whirlwind.”2 Indeed, it was already obvious what could be done with the right leadership and equipment—but both were seriously lacking. Churchill had ordered the RAF to drop more than three thousand tons of weapons and supplies (including concentrated foods and vitamins) to French fighters over the first four months of 1944. Even so, the majority remained unarmed, untrained, badly led, and often starving. Some, tired of waiting for rescue, were simply giving up on hopes of the Allies ever coming at all, no longer believing claims that help was on its way. The best-led and equipped groups had, however, already used their new riches to blow up munitions dumps and gas tanks, derail trains, and even attack individual Germans or small military units, demonstrating just what could be done. Most occupying Nazis now consequently feared the Resistance as a genuine military threat rather than a mere subversive one. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander in chief in France, was describing some regions as fomenting into a state of “general revolt,” and the lives of German troops as “seriously menaced through shootings and bombings.”3 The threat became more organized when the Resistance as a whole began to take orders from de Gaulle’s Free French government. Hitler was thereby forced to deploy some Gestapo and Waffen-SS divisions away from the front line to mount a counterattack of the utmost brutality in the Germans’ own backyard. Anxious to rid themselves of insurgents before the expected Allied invasion, they rounded up thousands of members of the Resistance over the early months of 1944. Many of them were executed by firing squad, some crying “Vive la France” before they fell.
In March, a Resistance stronghold on the Glières plateau in the Savoy Alps was the first to fight a pitched battle with regular Nazi forces. But dive-bombed by Stuka aircraft and encircled by a crack German mountain division more than twenty times its size—and without the desperately hoped-for Allied backup—the result was a bloodbath. The Glières tragedy sent out a resounding message that the Resistance was actively engaged in the war, but also accelerated France’s descent into a furnace of bloody retribution. The SOE agent Francis Cammaerts had warned London before Virginia left about a “reign of terror” in her target area of central France with “farms burnt, shootings, and hangings.” “These are very difficult days,” he added. “The Germans are attacking everybody, even those who are only slightly suspected.” Virginia was well aware of the risks, but the thought of the fate of her friends in Lyon drove her on. She believed that this was finally the ideal environment in which to gather a mighty force to fight back, to create a nation in arms. One way or another she too would have her revenge.
The first test of Virginia’s disguise took place early the following evening as she and Aramis arrived at Gare Montparnasse in Paris. The ticket barriers were surrounded by Gestapo officers scrutinizing passengers with aggressive glares, and she knew if she were stopped she would be finished. Her suitcase was dragging painfully on her left arm but she had to make light of it and not arouse suspicion as it contained her wireless transmitter, and this particular new version still weighed in at nearly thirty pounds. Fortunately the Gestapo took no interest in the shuffling old woman coming up from the country, just one in a teeming crowd in the station. But now that she was acting under cover, every such occasion would be a question of life or death.
Virginia was traveling under the new cover name of Marcelle Montagne only a few days after signing on with the Special Operations section of OSS. She was one of only a few field officers to cross over from SOE during the entire war—yet another barrier Virginia had broken down. She had hardly been forthcoming, however, about why she wanted to do so. “I feel confident that the main reason she wishes to transfer . . . is one of national loyalty,” suggested one of her recruiters, who seemed unaware of SOE’s ban on her returning to France. “This lady . . . comes from American parentage.”4 In reality, the sideways move was, of course, her way of circumventing Buckmaster’s refusal to send her on another mission. She had probably been looking to join the fledgling American service ever since her frustrating time in a desk job in Madrid, as she knew OSS was woefully short of operatives with experience. She figured that the extreme exigencies of war meant that even a one-legged woman stood a chance of breaking in—just as she had done at SOE. As luck would have it, another old friend had come in useful: William Grell, former manager of the opulent St. Regis hotel in New York, now worked as a captain for OSS in London, and she had met up with him several times on those mysterious weekend trips from the radio school at Thame Park. At first Virginia did not reveal that she was already working for SOE, but Captain Grell saw that her fluency in French and credentials as a reporter in France might be of use and arranged for her to come in for an interview. Virginia wanted the job so badly she quickly made it clear that she was no intelligence novice. She had probably spent more time in enemy territory than the rest of them put together and could also now operate a radio. Furthermore, she could continue to operate closely with her old SOE colleagues, as the two agencies had agreed in January 1944 to operate jointly at a new Special Forces Headquarters (SFHQ) in London. Little was therefore changing except her paycheck and the freedom to return to France. Virginia had got her way once again, but it was not long before part of her wished she hadn’t.
The first that Mrs. Hall knew about Virginia’s latest exploit was from her neighbors. OSS security officers arrived in town, knocking on doors and questioning as many people as they could find who knew her, as part of her security clearance. Her mother was set on edge: Barbara had known she had been doing something dangerous before, though she had never been privy to what, exactly. The family waited for occasional clues in rare letters from Europe, following the war’s progress on a world map in the living room and guessing where Virginia might be. They knew she had been “resting” in London for a while, but now it was obvious from these visits from brusque government officials (who did not even properly identify themselves) that she was going back somewhere dangerous.5 Perhaps it was in part guilt for her mother’s anxiety that led to Virginia arranging for almost all her OSS pay to be sent to Mrs. Hall at Boxhorn Farm (or perhaps it was Barbara’s notable skills at playing the stock market). Money was in any case not the real motivation. OSS was struck that she never even asked how much she was to be paid, which at $336 a month comprised the salary and allowances of an unmarried army second lieutenant with no parachute pay (for obvious reasons). This was still a welcome 35 percent increase on her SOE rate, but now that she had had her way in returning to the field, her pay rate had ceased to be of such importance. Her life was supposed to have been insured for $10,000, but she never signed the policy because of the rush to infiltrate her into France.6 More significant was that although she would remain a civilian she was finally to be granted an equivalent military rank. That said, considering her record of command in the field, becoming a second lieutenant, or most junior officer, was no doubt a disappointment. Would it give her the status she needed for the job she wanted to do?
The arrival of Virginia and Aramis brought the number of OSS agents in France to a mere five, but after such a slow start the Americans were determined to make up for lost time in the clandestine war. The SFHQ objective was for OSS and SOE to play a crucial part in D-Day by forming companies of résistants and training and arming them to execute strategically selected sabotage operations and, once the time came, hit-and-run attacks on German convoys. Above all, the plan was to direct these guerrilla bands to follow orders from Allied High Command rather than local chieftains who could do more harm than good by pursuing their own politically motivated objectives. Such a task—never attempted before on this epic scale—would require military smarts, diplomacy, and sheer force of character from the agents. Such qualities were presumed to be exclusively found in men; it was up to Virginia to prove that she had them too.
So it was she rather than her male chief who immediately took charge on arrival in Paris, and led the way to one of her own contacts. Aramis slowed her down, complaining constantly about his knee. Virginia became exasperated, as now was not the time to attract attention. Paris had grown even more tense and downtrodden than on her last visit and everywhere was under surveillance. Schools had become barracks; cinemas, theaters, and cafés had been taken over exclusively for Germans; the old dance halls and jazz clubs she had loved as a student had all been forcibly closed down; streets bearing Jewish names had been renamed after anti-Semites. And following years of anti-Allied propaganda on the radio and posted up on billboards there was hostility in the air, particularly to Americans. When a USAAF plane was shot down after an Allied bombing raid, there had reportedly been dancing in the streets.
Finally, they reached the home of Madame Long, recommended by one of Virginia’s old student friends, who lived at 57 rue de Babylone, near Napoleon’s last resting place at Les Invalides. Madame Long had provided a roof for Virginia before without asking questions, but she took an instant dislike to Aramis. Not only did he break the basics of security by recounting how he had hurt his leg clambering out of a boat, but she found his absurd use of long words insufferably pompous. Quickly tiring of her guest, Long insisted on driving him straight to a pension run by a Gaullist friend before he said any more. Virginia was welcome to use the entire apartment, but Long refused to allow the worryingly loquacious Aramis ever to come back.7
Everyone knew the Allied invasion was imminent, but OSS agents—Virginia included—did not know the precise date or location to avoid potential leaks under duress. Another landing was due to take place some time afterward on the Riviera, to form a two-pronged attack on the Germans. From the knowledge of France gleaned from her first mission, Virginia had already identified an area in La Creuse in central France, roughly equidistant from the Channel and Mediterranean coasts, as a strategically important battleground for the Resistance. Her instincts were well-founded. The country between Châteauroux and Limoges had been cited by Allied Supreme Command as a priority target for arming guerrilla groups so that they could attack enemy forces on the move, disrupt their supply lines, and sap their morale. It was already familiar territory to her as she had operated there on her first mission. This fact also increased the risk of being recognized in an area thick with Germans and their informants, but such concerns did not stop Virginia from setting off to La Creuse by train the next day with Aramis in tow. They alighted at a little town called Saint-Sébastien, two hundred miles southwest of Paris, where she took note of the possibilities for sabotaging the train sheds and tracks for future reference.
Her local contacts immediately came into use, one of them driving the pair to meet a farmer named Eugène Lopinat at Maidou-sur-Crozant, a hamlet near the steep granite gorges of the Creuse river. Lopinat asked few questions but offered the use of a one-roomed hut by the side of the road without running water or electricity. It was perfect, as was Lopinat’s rustic farmhouse at the other end of the hamlet, where Virginia (known here as Madame Marcelle) could transmit from the attic using the intermittent power supply, running her aerial over the back of the roof. She felt safer than in a Paris overrun with Gestapo. Most important, she felt more useful. With the clock fast running down to D-Day, the area might be operationally vital but was also largely unconquered by the Resistance. The local Maquis, such as it was, was small and disorganized and almost entirely without guns or ammunition. Her priorities were to recruit, train, and bring in weapons by air from Britain to form a functioning guerrilla unit. It had taken Virginia only a couple of days to move on from her original orders—with her admiring controllers’ blessing—to conduct the sort of mission she had wanted.
Virginia’s mother used to say that everything she learned in childhood would one day come in useful, and indeed those long summers with the farm animals in Maryland helped her establish her cover as a milkmaid. “I cooked for the farmer, his old mother, and the hired hand over an open fire as there was no stove in the house,” she reported. “I drove his cows to pasture, and in the process found several good fields for parachute drops.”8 Such primitive conditions made for excellent intelligence gathering but did not appeal to Aramis. He hastened back to Paris, where he found more salubrious quarters with an old family friend named Madame Rabut. Effectively now operating solo as she had hoped, Virginia saw her supposed chief only once a week, when he came to Maidou with updates on his progress in finding safe houses for her to transmit to London. Not one to complain about her own trials with Cuthbert or the fact she had to lug around a radio set, she was annoyed by Aramis’s grumbling about the traveling and his bizarre refusal to pick up anything heavy. “In spite of his robust appearance he is not very strong,” she reported later. “[He] was ill for a few days after each strenuous trip.”
She also bridled at Aramis’s thin achievements in Paris and continued talkative habits. Infuriatingly, he refused to listen to her seasoned advice on security despite the fact that his regular visits could well invite unwanted attention to them both. “Aramis came . . . with nothing to report except having found Madame Rabut,” she complained. “He did not seem to understand using couriers or the advisability of so doing and fiercely resented any suggestions.” Her limited patience had now run out. Virginia decided she would find a way to cut him out of her life and run her own mission in the way she saw fit. She began recruiting new members for the Resistance while on her daily rounds delivering the milk. Within days, locals from the mayor’s secretary to the village postman had been signed up, and word spread that someone was finally taking charge in the area. She was delighted to find “farmers and farm hands willing and eager to help,”9 and set about transforming “peasant squads” into organized guerrilla units. This was exactly what she had for so long wanted to do. In pretending to be a (most unlikely) French peasant woman, Virginia had found her true self. Despite the dangers, she once again felt free.
A week later another familiar and decidedly more welcome face appeared at her door. Elisée Allard, one of the nephews, had just parachuted in on the Chat drop zone a few miles away after undertaking the formal SOE training in Britain that she had arranged for him and Marcel Leccia. Now here he was at his aunt’s rustic hut, having returned to France with Leccia and a third SOE agent she knew and liked, the Belgian Pierre Geelen. No doubt he gasped when he saw Madame Marcelle in peasant rags, but then he knew that Virginia would go to almost any length to do her job. When he had heard local talk of an old lady with a strange accent creating a small band of guerrilla fighters he had known it must be her.
The three nephews were tasked with preparing for D-Day by blowing up the German naval headquarters near Angers and a railway marshaling yard outside Tours. They were a small part of a much larger three-pronged Allied operation known as Plan Vert (destroying railway communications), Plan Tortue (organizing roadblocks and ambushes), and Plan Violet (cutting telephone wires, forcing the Germans to use wireless signals that could, unlike phone calls, be intercepted). Allard asked if Virginia could message London that the three agents had arrived safely and were starting work. Leccia himself was on a trip to the Nièvre département but would return shortly to see her too. It was all as if she had never left SOE, which was joyful but also, it would turn out, a serious problem.
Virginia stepped up her efforts to gather intelligence on German troops in the area. She offered to help the farmer’s mother make more cheese so that she could sell the surplus to the occupiers. Finding a small German convoy, she shuffled up to them to offer her produce, speaking in a feigned old lady’s voice to try to conceal her accent. German officers across France had been issued with those WANTED posters bearing her likeness and warnings about the threat she posed to the Reich, yet no one at that point seemed to find Madame Marcelle remotely suspicious. They innocently bought her cheeses, allowing her the chance to listen in to their conversations (using the German she had learned at the Konsular Akademie in Vienna), all to be radioed back to Britain that evening. In this way, she began to draw a picture of German military plans that was to have a significant effect on the progress of the war.
A few days later, she was folding up the aerial at the Lopinat farm after transmitting her messages back to London when she heard a truck pull up outside. She thought it might be Aramis, but she closed the radio’s suitcase and slid it under the crates and old furniture stored up in the loft just in case. She climbed down the ladder and walked normally to the door. Outside it was not her American colleague but, to her horror, a group of German soldiers, fronted by an officer who demanded to know what she was doing alone in the cottage. Switching into character, Virginia replied in her practiced croak that she cooked for the farmer and tended his cows. Not satisfied with her response, he ordered three men to search inside. Virginia was desperately hoping she had hidden the radio sufficiently well. From within she could hear crashing sounds and what sounded like furniture being pulled apart. Then came the scrape of the ladder against the trapdoor into the loft, and she tried to calculate how far she could get away before being shot. A better idea would be to stay in character and claim that, as an old woman, she never climbed ladders or knew what was upstairs. What was certain was that if she were arrested, they would discover Cuthbert and deduce her identity. Her fate would be certain: torture and death.
Virginia’s heart was thumping as the soldiers continued to turn the cottage upside down. Then at last, they marched out to their officer and handed him something she could not see. Nor could she quite hear what they were saying. She tried not to look but the officer finally came over and peered right into her face, his breath on her skin. Would he see through her disguise—under such intense scrutiny would he realize that her wrinkles were fake? Instead the officer recognized her as the old cheese lady he had met out on the road, proclaimed her produce to be very good, and helped himself to more, chucking a few coins at her feet as they drove away. Virginia remained still for a few moments, leaning against the door for support, but her mind was racing as to what had brought the “wolves” to her door. Was it her accent? Had she been too brazen? A few days later she came across the severed heads of four friendly villagers; they had been spiked through the neck by the Nazis and left on display in the wildflowers beside the main road as a warning to others. Joining her in the Resistance carried a devastating price.10
Virginia suddenly felt very alone. She could not mention these horrifying incidents in her next message to London for fear of identifying herself if it were intercepted. Instead, she asked on April 18 for permission to move her base “due to daily cutting electric current and travelling conditions.”11 Before she left, however, Allard and Geelen returned with a “biscuit box”—the nickname for a new, smaller radio that weighed just fourteen pounds—that Virginia had been asking for and which had arrived with another batch of agents. They also brought more bad news. The nephews’ mission in the nearby Indre département was in trouble. Leccia had been able to find them hideouts thanks to his cousins—two doctors named Laurent and Joseph Leccia—but a wireless operator they had been using had been arrested. “The whole place was teeming with Gestapo,” an agitated Allard poured out to Virginia. “Everybody was scared stiff,” and now no one would work with them. Leccia had gone off to Paris “to try to arrange something else.”
Five days later, on May 1, came the disturbing news from London that Geelen was feared captured. His most recent radio transmission had not contained the proper security checks and since then there had been silence. If Geelen cracked—and the Gestapo would surely subject him to the basest forms of torture—the Germans would already know that Artemis was back in France. Virginia barely stopped to pack before she fled on the next train to Paris. “I left no address behind, of course,” she reported. Upset by the news on Geelen, she headed straight to Madame Long’s apartment to think through her next step.
Clearly, she had made mistakes. She had allowed too many people to know where she lived, and to gossip about the way she spoke. An impeccable command of French was almost as indispensable as ammunition for an undercover agent’s survival, a fact that in OSS’s haste to dispatch Virginia as one of their own they seem to have overlooked. It had not mattered on her first mission, when she was operating as the American journalist Virginia Hall, but several of the ill-fated SOE Prosper circuit had died, for instance, because they had voices that were detectably not French.
As ever, Virginia came up with a solution. She decided to take a gamble on Aramis’s landlady, Madame Rabut, whom she judged after just a couple of days to be discreet and reliable. She asked her to travel with her and do the talking in public whenever needed. Despite the obvious risks, Rabut jumped at the chance to serve and became, reported Virginia, a “very devoted and useful friend.”12 There was no time to waste. Within forty-eight hours of Virginia’s return to Paris the two women were on their way to another strategic crossing point in central France. She had proved her mettle to OSS in La Creuse, and with time running out before D-Day her controllers had granted her the roving brief that she had desperately wanted. Her new orders were far more to her taste, and were to “examine the capabilities of the Resistance, in particular their manpower, and [to] establish their requirements.” As she had already done in La Creuse, she was to locate suitable landing fields and parachute drop sites. But finally, and most important for Virginia, came her official call to arms: “Assist the Resistance and plan acts of sabotage.” Her guerrilla war was to begin—but where?
Marcel Leccia had previously briefed Virginia about his family’s Resistance contacts in Cosne-sur-Loire in the Nièvre, five hours southeast of Paris at the heart of France. She had heard that the Maquis there had been suffering from poor leadership and factional infighting—a common and infuriating problem, particularly since the loss of the unifying presence of Jean Moulin. Volunteers had also been starved of supplies. Although one of the most dangerous areas in the country, it was nevertheless clear that the Allied command would need a viable guerrilla force in the Nièvre to mount hit-and-run attacks on German forces heading north to reinforce the Channel defenses, and to sabotage their communication links before, during, and after the Allied invasion. When Virginia chose it for her next location, SFHQ readily agreed but reminded her that it was “very hot” with round after round of arrests, so “please be careful.”13
Virginia and Madame Rabut traveled together to the home of Colonel Vessereau, a retired gendarmerie chief and one-time assistant to the former prime minister of France Edouard Deladier. He had been forewarned by Leccia, the brother of his daughter-in-law Mimi, to expect an important visitor and was eagerly awaiting her. A divisive and overbearing Resistance leader had recently left the area—to the joy of many locals—and since then the colonel had worked flat out to recruit a hundred maquisards and the support of several serving gendarmes. Yet they had little more than pitchforks and broom handles to fight with, and were even short of food and clothes. So Virginia’s appearance at this point was cause for rejoicing, as Vessereau had felt that his area had hitherto been forgotten by the Allies. Through her transmitter, she had the ear of London—a place that by now had for many Frenchmen acquired an almost mythical status of hope and bounty. Finally he would be able to ask for arms, ammunition, money, and more agents to train the recruits.
Virginia set to work training up his men into a makeshift but effective guerrilla force, with Colonel Vessereau “doing his best as my second.” Together they decided to form a Maquis split into four groups of twenty-five to train, organize, and ultimately arm them. It was a solution straight out of SOE’s new Partisan Leader’s Handbook, considered the bible on ungentlemanly warfare. Small groups were best for moving quickly and avoiding detection—indeed, Virginia made clear to the men that their motto should be “shoot, burn, destroy,” followed by “leave.” Operations were best conducted at night, wearing rubber-soled shoes and darkening their faces with mud. She directed them to begin small-scale sabotage or “leech” missions—persistently attacking less protected spots—with such simple techniques as knocking a hole in the bottom of the gas tanks of German vehicles and setting fire to the escaping fuel. Telephone wires could be downed by throwing a weighted rope over them or by felling a nearby tree, and railway points could be jammed by hammering in a wooden wedge. These would all be useful harassing tactics, but for the real fight ahead Virginia would have to bring in supplies from Britain. She arranged a parachute drop of twelve containers of explosives, guns, and ammunition for the next full moon in ten days’ time, on May 15, and in the meantime she would continue the training in the basics.
Virginia asked Madame Rabut to be her courier but to tell no one where she was, including Aramis, who was still in Paris.14 If Virginia had learned anything on her last mission it was to cut free from weak agents quickly and cleanly, whether or not they were technically her superiors. At times now she could seem almost brutal. She informed London that Aramis had “made no progress with his mission” and simply cast him adrift without any means of communicating with base. “I said to myself ‘what the hell,’” she reported “and started to get on with it in my part of the country.”15 Fortunately, such insubordination was tolerated, even encouraged, by Wild Bill Donovan, who liked to say, “I’d rather have a young lieutenant with guts enough to disobey an order than a colonel too regimented to think and act for himself.”16 But it was an unusual move for a woman. That said, Aramis had failed to identify more than one hideout for incoming agents when three were required. It was evident, as Virginia herself pointed out, that he was not suited to the peculiar demands of special operations in a lawless and violent country. He rather feebly blamed the frustrations of his “undertakings,” as he called his mission, on the fact that it was “very hard for an outsider without references to break in.”17 This was not a problem that seemed to afflict Virginia; his failure highlighted her success.
Marcel Leccia—now considered a sabotage ace by his new bosses in London—was meanwhile still having difficulties of his own. The Gestapo was cutting swaths through the Resistance around Tours and he was struggling to find the supporters he needed for blowing up the railway hub. To his relief he was finally introduced to a medical student code-named Lilias who offered to help. He would pick up Leccia and Allard from their safe house in the Indre and drive them on to Paris to make useful contacts. Waving them good-bye was Leccia’s new fiancée, Odette Wilen, also on mission in France. The couple had fallen in love on the SOE training course in Britain and had got engaged a few days previously. Wilen and the instinctively more cautious Allard had not quite trusted Lilias—where did all his gasoline come from, for instance? But the headstrong Leccia—SOE would later call him “cocksure” and “perhaps a trifle careless”18—thought he could handle him and that he might prove to be the breakthrough they urgently needed.
Off they went, Allard and Leccia bidding an emotional farewell to all the honorable French people who had hidden and helped them thus far. But Odette’s fiancé and his closest friend never returned. Lilias, yet another double agent on the make, drove them straight to the Cherche-Midi, the former military prison in Paris that had once housed Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Here they were kept in solitary confinement to await interrogation by the Gestapo. News of their fate emerged only because Leccia had persuaded a guard to smuggle out a message. Soon after he was taken to the Gestapo building on avenue Foch (unaffectionately known during the war as avenue Boche), just a short stroll from the Arc de Triomphe. For the next fifty-two days he was subjected to the most degrading and horrific treatment on the notorious fifth floor. Passersby in the leafy side street below became accustomed to hearing the screams. Geelen (who had been arrested earlier) and Allard were interrogated separately, but all three were repeatedly tortured almost to the point of death, Geelen somehow managing to scratch his name and some dates onto one of the walls as a record.
Odette Wilen, code-named Sophie, had followed her fiancé to the capital but now raced down in floods of tears to tell Virginia what had happened. War had already caused such heartache, but this news just two days after her arrival in Cosne was truly devastating. Leccia was a real friend who had never deserted her on her first mission to Lyon, narrowly avoiding capture countless times on her behalf. Then after his spell in prison in Spain it was she who had urged him and the others to travel to Britain to train with SOE so as to return to the field. The nephews had shown courage in coming back, and because of her encouragement they had paid the price. It was not only their lives on the line, however, but Virginia’s: at least three imprisoned agents knew that she was in France, and two that she was in Cosne. It would not be long—thanks to the intelligence gleaned by Alesch in Germaine Guérin’s Lyon kitchen—before the interrogators linked them all with their beloved auntie.
Agents were trained to hold out for forty-eight hours before revealing anything important—allowing their circuit time to go into hiding. The first fifteen minutes were generally considered the worst and captives were advised to try to shut themselves down, mentally transporting themselves into another place if possible and coping with each minute at a time. They could let slip the odd grain of truth over the first two days so that they might be fed or given water as reward—but after that it was understood they might not be able to stay silent at all. Many local agents, perhaps after a twenty-four-hour bombardment of questioning, were put under the most intolerable psychological pressure to work for the Germans. As with Léon Guth, threats to their families were particularly effective. However brave the nephews, there could no longer be doubt that the Gestapo—and Klaus Barbie himself—knew by now that Virginia was back in France and that they would intensify their hunt for her. With military precision she had to shut down the risks one by one, no matter whose feelings she hurt.
Virginia first targeted Sophie, as it was conceivable that she had allowed herself to be followed back to the Vessereaus’ home. Stifling any trace of emotion, she banned her astonished messenger (who had already lost her first husband in an RAF flying accident) from doing anything to try to rescue the three agents. Sophie was “greatly excited and dramatic and in favor of going and shaking the gates” of the prison, Virginia reported, and “would get everybody else in trouble if she did not leave matters alone.” Virginia knew she was being “cold,” but also that the crisis required an effective plan rather than a panic reaction. Virginia ordered her to leave at once and stay away for good until she could be sent back to Britain. Her verdict was ruthless: “Sophie was too emotional and too noticeable to be useful to me as courier or in any other capacity.”19
The arrests forced Virginia to move even though her parachute drop had still to take place. She had already begun to transform the Cosne Resistance into a viable guerrilla unit, so it was frustrating not to be able once again to stay long enough to command major operations. Only Colonel Vessereau and his wife knew where she had gone, and Virginia asked them to tell “no one at all”—although she kept in constant touch with both of them via another courier with instructions on training. She also arranged for a new agent to parachute in to Cosne to replace her, and it was to her great satisfaction that the group she had formed proceeded to fight a bloody but ultimately victorious battle against their occupiers, helping to liberate the area in September.
Virginia had to make sense of a mission that had already placed her dearest friends in the greatest of danger. It was not her fault that Leccia had trusted Lilias, but the nephews’ connection with their aunt would always have made them more vulnerable. And so now she had to prove to herself that pushing so hard to come back had been both wise and worth it. Perhaps that was why she next chose to move into an area particularly overrun with Germans, fifteen miles away at Sury-en-Vaux in the Cher, considered one of the hardest areas in Central France to crack. She was testing herself to the extreme, but it would give her a valuable vantage point from which to observe enemy troop movements and take note of numbers, regiments, and armaments. Virginia remained in her peasant disguise and offered to tend goats for another farmer. Some of the roadsides and fields had been mined to prevent Resistance ambushes, but she worked out where to stand with her flock and leaned on a shepherd’s staff while again listening in to German conversations. The weather during the spring of 1944 was filthy, but she went out through the rain and wind almost every day, slipping in the mud in her wooden clogs. She took care not to talk. When she opened her radio case at night she had plenty of intelligence to report, opening her messages to London with the signal “QRV?” meaning “Are you ready?”
In the circumstances, she was lucky to find someone willing to risk certain death by helping her in an area riddled with Milice as well as Nazis. At least 10 percent of the locals in this conservative heart of France were believed to be directly working for the Germans, and many of the peasants were making a lucrative living from them. Too many took advantage of the offer of up to one hundred thousand francs—an enormous sum—for information on the location of Maquis camps, which the Germans would then attack with mortar and machine-gun fire. One agent calculated that only “two percent at most” of the Cher locals were “willing to risk their lives to liberate France.”20 But once again Virginia seems to have shown a remarkable insight into people and an equally powerful sway over them. Her new landlady, the widowed Estelle Bertrand, then in her fifties and no stranger to hardship, no doubt knew the risks she ran in taking in Madame Marcelle. Maybe it was flattery or the lure of excitement or simply Virginia’s obvious commitment to freeing France, but Estelle quickly became yet another devoted supporter prepared to put her life on the line for her guest and was in return taken into her confidence. A few days later, on May 15, Estelle was at Virginia’s side when she sneaked back under cover of darkness to receive the parachute drop of weapons she had arranged for the Cosne Maquis.
Estelle’s eighty-four-year-old father, Jules Juttry, was, by contrast, more of a problem, and wondered what the women were up to. Virginia found him suspicious of her and afraid that she herself might be German. She explained away her foreign accent by claiming to come from the extreme north of France and was able to assuage any further concerns with the gift of a barrique of wine. Now she was free to recruit and equip yet another band of partisans to harass the local Germans, informing London on May 20 that she needed urgent supplies of batteries, charges for explosives, tea, clothes, money, bandages, and soap.21
The thought of her three nephews in the hands of the Gestapo never left her, however. As soon as she was settled in her new quarters, Virginia braved the Nazi controls again by dashing back to Paris in disguise to hatch an escape plan and smuggle a message to them. She received the reply: “We are eight not three.” Five others had also been arrested, including the two doctor cousins recruited by Leccia, and he would on no account leave them behind. Virginia knew with bitter dismay that it would be virtually impossible to pull off such a mass breakout from one of France’s highest-security jails. It was not in her nature to give up altogether, though, and she repeatedly put herself in mortal danger by returning to the capital every week to try desperately to work out a new plan. She needed to move fast. At the beginning of June, Allard was transferred to Fresnes prison, a move suggesting that deportation or execution was imminent. Leccia and Geelen would not be far behind. She could not bear the thought that the nephews would have to pay the ultimate price for the qualities that she so admired in them: their nobility and valor.
Time was was running out on all fronts. Britain was in a state of alert for the D-Day landings. Camps in southern England holding Allied assault troops and the ports harboring their ships were already in lockdown. The tension was palpable on both sides of the Channel, now that it was clear that Operation Overlord was imminent. A week earlier London had signaled Virginia with: “Period of activity is commencing. Stop. Please communicate before next Friday [June 2] all information gathered since your arrival concerning large movements by train or road. Stop.” Since then she had been transmitting every detail she had observed on German convoys, their size, regiment, route, and supply lines—high-quality intelligence lapped up by Allied command. There was virtually no time for sleep, and she had become more reliant on her Benzedrine pills than ever. Every night she tuned in to the BBC French Service to listen for prearranged messages that the invasion was about to take place. Night after night she heard only dummy messages and the nervous waiting continued. The priests in their pulpits picked up on the agony and suspense, and started urgently praying to God for deliverance.22
The Germans stepped up their brutal repression of the Resistance. Anyone even suspected of links to the Maquis was likely to be summarily executed, and the Milice in Virginia’s area were offering rewards of two thousand francs for denunciations. Careless talk was more dangerous than ever, and with the influx of vast numbers of new recruits in the weeks leading up to D-Day came a similarly increased chance of infiltration by double agents. Some would-be warriors rejected as too unreliable sought their revenge and monetary gain by tipping off the Milice. In these cases, agents were expected to take the necessary action on the spot. “If members were inclined to talk, they were dropped from the organization,” Ben Cowburn explained, and “if they knew too much, and were inclined to talk, they were shot.”23 A salutatory note was duly pinned on the body, explaining that he or she had been executed for being an informer.
Virginia sensed that she was in imminent danger. She heard that gossip was going around about why the lights were on late into the night in the Juttrys’ attic. She had also spotted a number of German radio detector vans touring the lanes, obviously having picked up her signals. So to save her brave hosts, Virginia swapped houses once again. Just before D-Day she installed herself in a farm at Sury-ès-Bois.
While Virginia was playing cat and mouse with the Germans in France, Mrs. Hall was following progress of the war in Europe in the newspapers and agonizing about her daughter now that it was clear that the battle for France would soon begin. She had heard nothing from Virginia for months, but knew her younger child well enough to suspect she was in danger somewhere. In April, Mrs. Hall had written to Captain Grell in London—whose name and address Virginia had given her before she left—for reassurance. On June 2, a Charlotte Norris in New York finally responded on his behalf. She apologized for being imprecise for reasons of security but added that “your daughter is connected with the First Experimental Detachment of the United States Army” without revealing that this was a front for the OSS. Virginia was “doing important and time-consuming work” that had “necessitated a transfer from London” and had reduced “correspondence to a minimum.” She added: “Please feel free to write to me when you like, Mrs. Hall. We are in constant contact with your daughter and are immediately informed of any change in her status. I shall be happy to communicate whatever news I have of her.”24
Virginia was awaiting news of her own. There is some discrepancy over exactly where she was when she heard that D-Day was finally under way. One plausible version is that on the evening of June 5 she was with Estelle Bertrand and a few other supporters listening to the radio at her new farmhouse at Sury-ès-Bois. They were tuned in to the BBC’s French broadcast, which announced as it did every evening: “Ici Londres. Les Français parlent aux Français. Veuillez écouter quelques messages personnels.” (This is London. The French speaking to the French. Please listen to a few personal messages.) The rustic sitting room was stuffy and the radio reception poor so the little group drew closer to the set as the announcer began: “Blessez mon cœur d’une langueur monotone.” (Wound my heart with a monotone languor.)25 That message signaled the news that Virginia had waited for since her first days as an agent three years earlier. All she had been through, all she had done, the pain, the grief, and the fear she had endured had all been in preparation for this moment and the return at last of Allied armies to French soil. Here she was, waiting, courting danger, risking her life in a deadly part of France for one reason alone. And now D-Day, or Jour J, was finally happening. Huge convoys of ships were already moving through the darkness to their battle stations in the English Channel. The first wave of 150,000 men under General Eisenhower’s command would be preparing to step onto the long sandy beaches of the Normandy coast in the morning to face the steel and fury of the Wehrmacht.
There followed no fewer than three hundred coded “action messages”—each one instructing a circuit to carry out prearranged attacks on railways, bridges, and telephone lines. The call for action was sounded throughout virtually every town, city, and village. Now it was up to the Resistance to do its best to make the largest seaborne invasion in history a success. The orders from Allied Command were clear: harass the enemy to the maximum and sabotage communication links by any possible means. “A wave of elation spread” over France, an equally excited Maurice Buckmaster later recalled. “Arms were brought down from lofts and dug up from beneath cellar flagstones. Uniforms were brought out and buttons polished. France was ready to help in her own liberation.”26
News of the landings three hundred miles to the north galvanized Virginia’s entire region. Three years after she had struggled to recruit her first handful of helpers in Lyon, now thousands of volunteers poured out of nowhere, far exceeding anyone’s expectations. If her life was hectic in the lead-up to D-Day, now it was a whirlwind. She ordered the groups she had so recently armed and organized to swing into action—to “paralyze” enemy communications by cutting telephone wires, packing explosives on roads and railways, blowing up bridges, and even removing signposts to confuse the Germans rushing north to Normandy to help repel the invaders. New signs made by a local carpenter were installed directing them the wrong way around turns and where possible “preferably over a precipice.”27 Others laid SOE’s explosive horse dung on the main roads—taking pleasure in waiting for a German vehicle to approach and then watching it being thrown into the air. Soon entire German convoys screeched to a halt every time they saw droppings—genuine or not—until they had been investigated, causing hours of delays. Across France, the sabotage efforts of the Resistance were more successful than anyone had thought possible. The Germans could no longer rely on controlling any part of France or any line of communication. But the reprisals were to be barbaric, and too often French fighters were let down by lack of supplies.
For that reason, now that battle was finally joined, every Resistance chief in the region urgently wanted Virginia’s help to call in more guns and explosives. Barely eating or sleeping, she roamed over hundreds of miles of countryside to inspect Resistance groups for their reliability and needs and transmit her recommendations back to London. Cars or trucks and gas were rarely available; so, incredibly, Virginia made many of these trips by bicycle. She was well aware she made a conspicuous figure and that these were perilous days, particularly for a woman on her own. Any semblance of order was breaking down. Whole areas were patrolled by bandits on the make, with rape, robbery, and summary execution an ever-present danger just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now that the Allies were on French soil, the Nazis also felt themselves in mortal danger, taking out their anger through random but appalling violence on innocent civilians. And it was also still possible that D-Day would not succeed and the Allies would be repulsed. Eisenhower’s forces took six days simply to connect the five slender bridgeheads on the landing beaches, and efforts to penetrate the interior were meeting determined German resistance and getting bogged down in the hedgerows and ditches of the Norman bocage. Virginia knew not to expect the arrival of Allied troops in her area for quite some time yet.
Every day more convoys of German reinforcements were also driving north under Hitler’s orders to “throw the Allies back into the sea.” In the northern Cher, Colonel Colomb—in normal times the Count Arnaud de Voguë but currently the local Resistance chief—could only look on in agony without the arms to attack the convoys passing through his area. His men were also suffering constant incursions from the Milice, who were capturing and torturing supporters to find out the location of their camps. It was almost impossible for them to protect themselves without weapons, ammunition, or even food. In desperation, maquisards were turning on their own, raiding shops for bread, and banks or post offices for cash. They often left a bond signed in front of witnesses as security for the money they took, committing them to paying it back as soon as cash was parachuted in or liberation came. But in truth, no one knew when that would be.
The only hope for Colomb was word of a legendary “English” radio operator in the region named Diane, who spoke “atrocious” French but who seemed to have the ear of the powers in London. Yet time and again, due to her rigid security measures, he had failed to find a way to contact her. He did, however, hear that his old friend and SOE agent Philippe de Vomécourt—once Gauthier but now Antoine or Major Saint-Paul—was operating nearby, having broken out of prison. He had returned to France in April after a stint of formal SOE training in London that seems to have recast some of his views. The two Frenchmen met for a council of war a few days after the landings, when Colomb asked whether he knew how to contact the elusive Diane as he was in urgent need of her help. Antoine immediately guessed her true identity—how many other women could possibly fit the bill? He found a way of sending her a cryptic note: “I salute you—from one of the three brothers—which one?” The answer came straight back, confirming it was Virginia by using her old Lyon field name and identifying which of the three de Vomécourt brothers he must be (Constantin and Sylvain both having been deported). “I salute you also” she replied, “from Marie to Gauthier.”
Virginia agreed to a rendezvous with her old colleague and Colomb deep in the twilight of a thick local wood. In Lyon, Antoine had gone out of his way to make Virginia’s life more difficult, and she needed to reset their relationship and exude all the authority she could muster. She shed her peasant disguise for the occasion to look and sound like the hard-bitten guerrilla leader she had become. As she approached him through the trees he saw that she was “the same extraordinary woman who I had known, hiding brilliantly her artifical leg with big strides.” Still alive, still eager, still courageous to the last, even de Vomécourt now appreciated that “Virginia Hall was not to be measured by normal standards.” She was an agent, he conceded, who had already done “many things considered improbable, if not impossible”28 and was to do many more. It was high praise indeed from a fiercely patriotic man who, like many of his compatriots, suspected les anglo-saxons—particularly now that hundreds of thousands of Allied troops were on French soil—of wanting to dominate his country after the war. Particularly when he had also taken a low view of women’s achievements outside the home and was still playing antagonistic games with most other American operatives whom he repeatedly dismissed as “absolutely worthless.”29 In turn, Virginia was no doubt pleased to see her old colleague back in the field—and delighted to note the due respect he now showed her.
Yet she remained cautious. She would not agree to intervene on Colomb’s behalf until she satisfied herself as to his integrity. There were too many chancers and impostors. She questioned him in detail and inspected his men before finally deciding that his “group was good” and signaling London to send him supplies. Virginia was now a power in the land; it was she who was effectively deciding whether Resistance groups would be backed by the Allies or left to wither without support. Her rigor and military manner left the grand but grateful Count de Voguë in a state of awe. After months of waiting in vain, Sten guns, ammunition, explosives, and detonators poured in from the skies just five days later, and were expertly distributed by Diane. She also brought in 435,000 francs so that he could honor his debts and avoid incurring more. Shortly after the first drop came another, bringing a dedicated radio operator for Colomb’s group so he could contact London himself. Colomb did not know it then, but Virginia was secretly planning ahead and he did not see her again. For the rest of his life, he remained struck by “her courage, her authority, her decisive spirit. . . . Those of us who had the chance of meeting her ‘in action’ . . . could never forget this very remarkable figure of the Resistance army.”30
Given her constant traveling to inspect groups of guerrilla fighters, Virginia had not had the time to return to Paris to work on the escape plan. She had, however, been pressing her contacts for news, and not long after her meeting in the wood heard that Geelen and Leccia had, like Allard, been sent on to Fresnes for deportation to Germany. Her hope was that with Eisenhower’s armies gradually advancing toward Paris, she would be able to spring the nephews and friends in the ensuing chaos or, failing that, they would be liberated by the Allies. In the meantime, the best she could do was to exfiltrate Odette Wilen (the distraught Sophie) via the Vic Line to Spain.
Right now, though, Virginia was overstretched. She was transmitting for several different groups of Maquis in at least three départements in a vitally important part of France. Thanks to her days by the sides of the roads, she was providing what would later be ranked as vital intelligence on troop movements, notably on the progress northward of the German Seventh Army (on which the Nazi High Command was relying to shore up its defenses against the Allied invaders). She was also involved in training, directing attacks and sabotage, and ordering and receiving parachute drops. With the Maquis’s success, however, came the most appalling retribution. In response to her Cosne group’s ambushes on German convoys coming up from the southwest to the fighting in Normandy, the Gestapo looted and torched three local villages with flamethrowers. In one they massacred twenty-seven residents, including the local priest, whom they reportedly hanged, partially clothed, in the belfry.
By the end of June, London realized the situation was untenable, so during the full moon night of July 8, OSS parachuted in another organizer-cum-wireless operator, Léon, to take over from her in Cosne. He was to be followed a month later by Lieutenant René Défourneaux, who would serve as an instructor. Any idea of Virginia being someone else’s assistant had mercifully been dropped; she was now held up as an exemplary chief. In fact, it was made clear to Léon before he left that he could utterly rely on Diane’s favorable reports of the group he was to join as she was an “experienced organizer . . . and we have the very greatest confidence in her judgment.” She was proved right. After receiving several more deliveries the men pulled off “a most efficient demolition of the Saint-Thibaud bridge across the Loire on the direct orders of [the American Third Army commander] General Patton,” and cut sixteen railway lines, derailed eight trains, blew up four railway bridges, cut all telephone wires in the area, and killed eighty Germans while suffering just twelve casualties themselves.31 It was judged that Virginia’s efforts had enabled the Cosne Maquis to become “a most powerful factor in the harassing of enemy troops.”32 Her other groups performed similarly effective attacks—including a spectacular one on the Saint-Sébastian station she had sized up on that first day of her mission.
The exclusively male OSS agents now joining her in the field quickly became “quite as astounded by her as were her French associates.” Arguing to his commanders that this “outstanding” woman deserved “high honor,” one Lieutenant Paul Martineau watched her direct many successful “guerrilla activities with the assurance and good humor of a Sunday school teacher arranging a picnic.”33 Yet as soon as she had formed an effective fighting unit and started to wage a campaign, Virginia was to her frustration inevitably called elsewhere and obliged to hand it over to someone else without her experience in the field. She had brought in fifteen parachute drops supplying arms, ammunition, wireless operators, organizers, food, medicines, and much else besides. She had gathered and armed eight hundred fighters to form the nucleus of what rapidly became “significant” forces of around twelve thousand men “ready for combat.”34 Yet still Virginia had not been given command of her own band of guerrillas for any length of time. That was about to change. She sent a final message to the still struggling Aramis to tell him she was “leaving for parts unknown following orders.” She said “good-bye” and added nonchalantly that he would “surely hear from somebody somehow,” although he claimed he never did.35 Then she vanished.