10

They Serve Alone

ON MARCH 21, 1944, a Royal Navy torpedo boat cautiously made its way along the coast of Brittany, near the port of Brest, and let down a dinghy. Within a few minutes a thirty-seven-year-old woman clambered up onto the dark beach. The papers in her pocket described her as a social worker named Marcelle Montegerie, but to her handlers in London she was code-named Diane. They had ensured anyone watching her making her way inland would not have noticed a distinct limp in her left leg. She was the “limping lady” the Gestapo had been hunting in Lyon. Virginia Hall was back in France.

During her first week in F Section working with Buckmaster, Virginia Hall had seen that the OSS was determined to take its place alongside the SOE. David Bruce had confirmed that to her when she met him. She told Buckmaster she was going to apply for an interview with the OSS. He gave her a name to contact. Army Major Paul van der Stricht was head of the OSS legal department.

She met him in his office in Grosvenor Square. A stocky man with piercing eyes, he carefully questioned her about her family background, her work in France, and her duties in F Section. He asked her why she wanted to transfer to the OSS, and her response was brusque: “I am an American. I want to go back into France as American.”

Nodding, he reached across his desk and handed her a document. “Agreement to Serve in OSS.” He told her to read it. Her salary would be $336 per month. She would serve for a year on signature, and in any place ordered. Any information she obtained would be secret. She would accept the personal risk to her life. She read carefully, then spoke. There was one clause she wanted to insert. Reaching for her fountain pen she wrote, “All I will earn will be transferred to my mother,” and signed the document. With Major Stricht’s signature on behalf of the OSS, Hall was accepted as a new member of the Special Operations group.

The rest of her day at OSS headquarters was spent meeting her new colleagues and visiting the tailoring department to be fitted with clothes that would turn her into a plump, elderly woman. Later she left the building with a suitcase filled with her wardrobe of disguises and a transceiver, which could transmit and receive.

The next morning she had two medical appointments. The first was with a dentist to check her teeth and fillings. If her dental work didn’t look like it had been done by a French dentist, the fillings had to be changed.

Her second appointment was with an orthopedic surgeon who would show her how she could turn her limp into a shuffle by learning to walk with an old-age stoop. By the afternoon she had managed to walk with her false leg, named Cuthbert, in a new way.

Having done so much formative work for the SOE, Hall’s new mission was to establish an OSS network, to be called Saint, and to prepare agents and local résistants for the invasion.

Hall’s handlers had hesitated to send her back. The Gestapo had her description from her activities in the South of France, and her leg made her more easily recognizable. But both the British and Americans desperately needed experienced agents in the field, especially since by late 1943 many of the Allied intelligence-gathering networks had been infiltrated, broken up, or were under threat of exposure. These gains by the Germans had increased pressure on agents at a time when more than ever top-class information was required from inside France. Plans for the landings on the northern coast were by then well advanced. The D-day invasion was imminent.

Hours after Motor Boat 503 left the Royal Navy base in Devon, Hall changed into her disguise. She dyed her hair and changed into a wide skirt and blouse to create an illusion of a heavier figure. She started walking with a swinging motion, like some older women did when their hips and knees were less agile and they had put on extra weight. The captain and MTB crew applauded before they helped her into the dinghy. The dawn was coming when two of the seamen rowed the dinghy up on the sand and helped her step down.

Carrying a suitcase, in which her radio set was tucked under her spare clothes, she made her way to Creuse, an area of rolling hills and steep valleys in central France, and set up home with a poor French farmer and his elderly mother. The cottage in which they lived on the edge of the village of Maidou had no water or electricity, but Hall quickly learned to adapt to the rustic lifestyle.

She worked as their cook and milkmaid, taking the cows to pasture and checking out which local fields might be suitable for drops or landing zones. She worked as her own organizer and wireless operator, and radioed London from a farmer’s hayloft. It was dangerous work. F Section radio operators typically survived only about eight weeks in the field, and they tended to favor big cities rather than peaceful rural areas where people were few and far between.

Hall’s mission was very much geared to the invasion, and she quickly found a way to increase the amount of information she could obtain about troop movements. The farmer’s mother made cheese, and so Hall offered to help her sell it to one of her main markets: the Germans. She was able to overhear information exchanged by soldiers, who had no idea she spoke German.

Hall’s messages were sent to the SOE to be relayed to the OSS. One day, she had just finished packing her radio away in the farmer’s cottage when she heard a car outside. Going downstairs, she opened the door to find a group of German soldiers. An officer asked her what she was doing, and she put on her best vulnerable old lady voice to explain she was the milkmaid to the farmer and his mother. The officer waved his arm and three soldiers swept by her into the cottage. They turned over the furniture and then made their way to the room from which she had been transmitting only minutes before. Hall knew that if they found her radio she would be arrested. She eyed the open fields behind the officer and wondered how far she could get if she ran. With her wooden left leg, she was not the best equipped for such an escape.

After a few moments a soldier returned and handed a large piece of cheese to the officer. He wanted to buy it for his men. He handed over some coins and the soldiers left.

Shaken but undeterred, Hall moved from one safe house to another. In one she transmitted from an eighty-four-year-old man’s attic. In another she took on a role as a goatherd and, from beneath the crinkled headscarf of a stooped peasant lady, counted the German trucks and tanks passing through the area. When London arranged a drop of arms and equipment onto one of her fields, she rode out to collect it on a hay cart with members of her Resistance team.

Hall used money sent in from London to finance a growing band of résistants. They already numbered in the hundreds, and urgently needed weapons. In her radio messages home, Hall kept up the pressure on London to provide more arms for them. She wanted the Resistance to be a private army by the time D-day came. She had already discussed with them an attack on the German garrison at Le Puy as part of a prelude to the invasion, which was continuing to gain momentum.

Meetings had already taken place in Algiers between Henri Frenay, a Resistance leader; John J. McCloy, the American assistant secretary of war; and Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, an opium-smoking former journalist who had formed one of the earliest Resistance networks. Winston Churchill had chaired discussions.

The prime minister saw the arming of the Resistance in southeastern France as essential to Allied landings on the Mediterranean coast, and he dreamed of creating an underground army like Tito’s in Yugoslavia. Caches of small arms that had been hidden after the French army’s surrender in June 1940 would be supported by arms dropped from England by the SOE and OSS.

During the spring of 1943, nearly 150 tons of supplies were dropped. In the lead-up to D-day this would rise to 938 tons, each drop by either the RAF or the USAAF consisting of containers of weaponry, explosives, and ammunition, as well as smaller packages. It was a substantial increase, although still far less than Tito received.

Virginia Hall’s activities were being repeated across France. Agents were preparing résistants for the coming battle and were pleading with London for more and more supplies.

Both the SOE and OSS knew they had to expand their networks through France. No one yet knew when the invasion would take place, but both Gubbins and Donovan recogized that, in the meantime, their operations in France had a special role: to prepare the path for invasion, particularly by uniting and arming the various Resistance networks.

In addition to Hall, a number of female agents were sent behind enemy lines. Their lives became increasingly dangerous. Invasion planning meant that they had to travel farther, carry more messages, meet with more contacts, and increase the number of radio messages to London.

The Prosper network had shown how damaging betrayal could be. While its tentacles had spread throughout northern France, it had been destroyed well before it could provide any meaningful help for invasion planners. Elsewhere, though, networks continued to grow, with more and more women arriving in France by moonlight to live in the shadows.

Away from the disaster unfolding in the north, Jacqueline Nearne and Maurice Southgate had been busy creating one of the most important réseaux in the unoccupied zone. Since January 1943, they had been working hard to unite various Resistance groups into a fighting force. This had been no easy task.

The area covered by their Stationer network stretched from the Massif Central, the high plateau at the heart of France, to the foothills of the Pyrenees. The pair had quickly developed a strong working relationship and, after three months when they received a wireless operator, Amédée Maingard, their ability to grow their network was enhanced further. Nearne even recruited her own brother, Francis, who lived near Grenoble with his wife and three-year-old son, as a courier. A bespectacled commercial traveler with dark brown hair and brown eyes, Francis was of a rather nervous disposition, but he desperately wanted to help his younger sister with the war effort.

The number of people joining the Resistance was increasing, a consequence of German and Vichy efforts to force young people to work for them. At the end of 1941 Hitler had decreed that fortifications should be built on the Atlantic coast to resist any invasion. The Todt organization created paid employment for local French people but also forced large numbers of Jews, North Africans, and Spanish Republicans to work for them. Increasingly, the Germans abandoned all pretense of seeking volunteers, and in September 1942 a French law allowed workers to be drafted into employment “in the national interest.”

Then in February 1943, Vichy instituted Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO) requiring Frenchmen of military service age to undertake two years of compulsory labor service. Several hundred thousand Frenchmen were already working in Germany, and it was widely understood that most young men affected would be sent to join them.

Throughout the spring of 1943, the Milice also increased its activities across southern France. It evicted restaurateurs suspected of dealing in black market food and harassed and arrested Jews, Communists, and Gaullists.

This, along with the presence of the recently arrived German forces and the anger at the STO, encouraged people to take sides. It is believed that as many as 260,000 young men took to the hills and woods to escape the STO, and many ended up joining or forming Resistance groups.

This increased the work of the agents of Stationer. Nearne spent hours on the overnight train from Clermont-Ferrand to Toulouse and the morning train on to Tarbes. She carried messages for Maingard to transmit to the SOE, written on paper small enough that she could swallow it if needed. Sometimes she used a briefcase to carry documents, wireless components, or supplies that could not be easily hidden.

Often leaving a railway station was the most dangerous moment for an agent carrying incriminating material. It was here the French police and Gestapo set up their checkpoints. Nearne developed a routine at stations where she feared her luggage would be searched. She would summon a porter and have her case put in left luggage. She would return to the station when the checkpoint had been dismantled.

Autumn came, and the invasion that agents and the growing Maquis had expected did not. Then, on the night of September 22, 1943, Southgate was told to attend the drop of an agent in fields near Châteauroux. He and the reception committee watched the parachute come down some distance away, and they rushed around a large pond to find the parachutist. They eventually found a figure crouching down behind a tree urinating. Pearl Witherington had arrived.

Witherington was a clear-thinking, resourceful twenty-nine-year-old who had grown up in Paris with an alcoholic English father. Her suitcases had sunk to a bottom of the pond when she jumped, but she was used to adversity and knew how to cope when things went wrong; from the age of twelve she had had to deal with creditors chasing after her father. She had had only four years of schooling before becoming first a typist and then personal assistant to the air attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. In June 1940 she had arrived at work to discover that everybody had left and that she was trapped in Paris. When she had finally escaped from France, she had left behind her fiancé, Henri Cornioley, who had joined the army and been captured during the German invasion.

On arrival in England she contacted the Air Ministry and was given a job as a personal assistant to the director of Allied Air Forces and Foreign Liaisons. As she took shorthand notes and typed, her mind was always on Henri and returning to France. In September 1941 she received a letter from Henri’s grandmother in Lausanne to say he had escaped from a prison camp and was now safe in France.

That November, having heard about the SOE through friends at the Air Ministry, Witherington met with Maurice Buckmaster. Recording the meeting in his private diary, Buckmaster later drew a circle around her name: he had found a new recruit.

Buckmaster’s order to Southgate to be at Witherington’s drop was a surprise for both agents. They had been in the same year at the British School of Paris. When they had met by accident later in London, it had been Witherington who had put Southgate in touch with Buckmaster. Both joined the SOE.

Now, in the darkness of occupied France, Witherington heard a low whistle. Two descending notes. She knew that Cornioley had received a message to tell him that she was coming. “Henri? Is that you?” The man’s voice that came back was one that she recognized, but it was Southgate, not her fiancé. “Pearl?” came the urgent whisper. “C’est toi?”

Witherington not only would take pressure off Nearne but also would become one of the SOE’s finest and most successful operatives.

Jacqueline Nearne’s sister, Eileen, had been kicking her heels back in England, hoping Buckmaster would pluck her out of her work in decoding and send her to France to join her sister. Eileen did not know that Jacqueline had requested that he spare her younger sister from danger, an appeal which he listened to . . . for a time, at least.

But then in the autumn of 1943 Eileen was told she was being sent to the Drokes, a house on the Beaulieu estate, to be trained as a wireless operator. Instructors felt Eileen’s immaturity might be a problem—Kim Philby called her “pale and wide-eyed”—and this worried Buckmaster, but he had seen her sister develop into one of his brightest agents. Who was to say the younger sister might not do the same? he had asked himself.

He decided to take a chance. With a cover story of a shop girl, the name Jacqueline du Tertre, and her SOE code name Rose, Eileen was trained to go to France.

Jacqueline Nearne and Pearl Witherington were constantly on the move. Both using the cover of traveling representatives—Witherington’s cover said she worked for a cosmetics firm—they took and received messages from Resistance groups across a wide area.

They often found themselves having to command and guide the new and restless breed of men who had joined the Resistance. Most of them were in their early twenties, could be lax about security, and had egos that made them surly at having to follow a woman. Like other female agents, Nearne and Witherington were bound to face entrenched male attitudes in a country in which women had not yet even the right to vote. (Frenchwomen only got this right in time for the first election after liberation in April 1945.)

Nearne helped Southgate coordinate two of the larger, more effective Resistance subcircuits, made up of Communists and escaped prisoners of war, into sabotage parties, destroying generators, electricity pylons and a substation, trucks, and railway lines and signals.

Nearne and Amédée Maingard took joint charge of Stationer when Southgate was temporarily recalled to London in October 1943, coordinating reception committees for the weaponry being dropped by London. Southgate told his officers in Baker Street, “I could not have done half of what I have without her.”

During Southgate’s absence, a Communist Resistance leader whom Nearne considered a friend, Auguste Chantraine, was arrested. The network went into a security clampdown, with Nearne working hard to save Stationer from further arrests. It put her under tremendous pressure, and when Southgate returned to France in early 1944 he was shocked by how much weight she had lost and how tired she looked. Both Buckmaster and Southgate were worried about her, but she did not want to leave France with the D-day invasion so close.

In February the SOE sent a Lysander to pick her up. She went to the landing zone but allowed a French politician to take her place. Buckmaster was angry with her, but only because she was one of his best people in the field and he knew tiredness could make even the most efficient agent careless.

The SOE was also taking steps to strengthen its presence along the eastern side of France. On August 14, 1943, a twenty-five-year-old agent jumped from a plane near Lons-le-Saunier in the Jura mountains. She carried a briefcase containing one million French francs. The money was for the small Monk network that was based in Marseille.

The agent was a dark-haired but fair-skinned Anglo-Spanish woman named Eliane Plewman. Her brother, Albert Browne-Bartroli, would soon follow her into France, also as an F Section agent.

As she descended she could not see the lights of her reception committee. Instead, the roof of a farmhouse appeared to be drifting up toward her. A farm dog began barking wildly. She cleared the building and the yard and came down in the fields beyond.

Plewman struggled to her feet, having badly twisted her ankle on landing, and realized she had been dropped in the wrong place. She took her bearings and hid the case of money in some thick bushes and set out for help. She found her contacts had been arrested by the Germans. It took her two months to reach Marseille and, when a résistant was sent back for the money, he found an empty case. An opportunist passerby had obviously gotten lucky.

Plewman began a punishing work schedule, carrying messages for the leader of Monk, an agent named Charles Skepper, from his home in Marseille on a sixty-mile journey to the base used by his radio operator, Arthur Steele, at a hilltop villa owned by a Madame Régis. The cool and reliable Régis would become a local Resistance legend for her quick thinking in the face of the enemy.

On one occasion she saw a German on the terrace outside her villa just as the twenty-year-old Steele was at work in the villa. Urging him to hide his set, she went out to meet the German, who said he was on a routine check. She invited him in for a glass of homemade schnapps and introduced Steele as her son. The German was so taken with her, he often returned to enjoy a conversation and another glass of her drink. Her courage and nerve paid dividends: sometime later, when a detector van picked up a radio signal in the area, the Germans did not check her villa as they believed its occupant to be friendly to the occupiers.

Steele took the close shave as a warning though, and from then on he and Plewman would head into the hills and transmit in the shadow of a Roman aqueduct.

Plewman traveled to Roquebrune-sur-Argens, the nearest village to the villa, either by train or in a battered old truck, which was also used by the local Resistance to carry supplies and explosives. The journeys could be tense as the area was flooded with tens of thousands of German troops preparing defenses for any possible invasion in the south.

The beginning of 1944 signaled a change in the activities of Plewman and her Monk team. Sabotage was now their main priority. She trained résistants in how to destroy railway tracks, enabling a series of attacks on trains, including the derailing of the mainline train to Toulon inside a tunnel, which caused a holdup of four days.

During the first two weeks of January, Plewman and her team of saboteurs damaged thirty trains. The number of operations put her under strain and forced her to take risks. When her brother visited her in Marseille he was horrified to discover that she was carrying a bag of plastic explosives and that she was on her way to lay a charge. He insisted on helping her, telling her she had to take care—the success of the Monk network would bring greater attention from the Germans. His warning was eerily prophetic.

At the other end of the eastern side of France was a plump, fair, and rather shy woman who had married an SOE instructor shortly before arriving in France by Lysander in September 1943.

Yolande Beekman, who came from an Anglo-Swiss family and spoke French perfectly, had been put down on the same landing ground near Angers that had received Noor Inayat Khan, Cecily Lefort, and Diana Rowden three months earlier. It was to be a terrible omen.

If the double agent Déricourt had ensured she was followed on arrival, as he had the others, Beekman either shook off her tail or they lost her during her long journey to Saint-Quentin in the northeast.

Beekman was to work as wireless operator for the Musician network led by Gustave Biéler, who had been using a Prosper radio until that réseau collapsed. Saint-Quentin was at the heart of a key area for the Resistance. It was the center for the industrial canal and railway networks for the region, and the rail link to Lille was essential for the Germans. It was also an area busy with Luftwaffe bases, housing bombers bound for England and fighters protecting the Reich.

Musician was already under strain. The area was filled with German troops, and Resistance attacks on the railway line had increased pressure on Biéler and his men.

Beekman was known during her training for her care, but for three months during the autumn and winter she had to use the same safe house from which to transmit. For each message she made her way into the freezing cold attic of a building. She sat on a velvet divan, reading, turning the pages of the book with mittened hands, while waiting for the time to transmit or receive.

Her messages organized large and urgently needed deliveries to the twelve Maquis groups in the Musician network. She radioed for drops of Sten guns, bazookas, arms, and explosives. She also reported the increasing number of successes achieved by Musician. Bridges, gasoline pumps, tracks, signal boxes, and locomotive sheds were blown up. Working with railway workers, they added abrasive grease to lubricants and damaged ten locomotives.

Buckmaster noted that Biéler had “an amused tolerance for the women engaged in our work,” but he developed a deep respect for Beekman, and she accompanied him and the others on several of the sabotage missions.

Despite the level of German activity in the area, Biéler’s ambitions were high. His next plan would prove a major success, but at a terrible cost.

A month after Yolande Beekman’s arrival, a Hudson from Tempsford, flown by Johnnie Affleck on his first such mission, circled over the village of Lons-le-Saunier searching out the same landing ground that had been used by Eliane Plewman.

Inside, the aircraft dispatcher stepped back through the fuselage and nodded at the four passengers. It was almost time. One of the passengers was a tall, athletically built woman with red-gold hair. A few hours earlier, Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester had been eating her two fried eggs at Gaynes Hall. Now she was preparing to step once more onto the soil of the country she had fled that spring.

Landing in the dark with only flashlights to guide him in, the pilot clipped a church belfry, sending cases stacked in the airplane crashing to the floor. By the time they touched down, Rochester was afraid the noise had alerted Germans in the area, and she scrambled quickly out of the plane. She fell on her face in the French mud.

One of the men with her was Richard Heslop. He was to be the organizer for a new network, Marksman, for which she would be courier. The other, Owen Johnson, was Heslop’s wireless operator.

They were headed to the Haute-Savoie, an area that Rochester knew well from her days as a courier taking messages across the Swiss border. It was also the rugged mountain country that Peter Churchill and Odette Sansom had shown could be productive for the Resistance, until their capture earlier that year. Despite the collapse of Churchill’s Spindle network, the Maquis had continued to grow in the area. Marksman agents would ensure they received the arms they needed.

Rochester moved into a chalet in Albigny, near Lake Annecy, and stashed a suitcase filled with plastic explosives in the cellar. Despite Heslop’s concerns about her appearance—her height, in particular, made her stand out, and she always felt uncomfortable taking messages to larger towns and cities, such as Lyon and Grenoble—he later admitted that she carried out all her work with “guts and imagination.” That Roedean girls’ school education made her sharp under pressure, and she could memorize long messages without needing to write them down.

Early on, a young résistant came to talk to her about a group of his comrades who were planning a sabotage operation. She was taken aback when he said, “I suppose you’ll want me to contact the boys so you can brief them?”

“You don’t really think I’m going to do it?” she said.

“Why not? That’s what you were trained for in England. If you can teach them how to do it, you can do it yourself.”

There was something in the young résistant’s manner—the smile, the way the Gauloises hung almost insolently from the side of his mouth—that made Rochester think that he found it amusing to have a woman prepare and then lead the mission.

A few days later Rochester stood in the cellar, laid out detonators, time pencils, and plastic explosives, and prepared the charges. Then, under the watchful eye of the maquisards, she took Sten guns from where they were concealed and handed them one each.

The next day the snow fell most of the morning. When it stopped and the sun baked the mountains, Rochester led her sabotage team down a hill toward the lake. They waited until dark at the home of a contact, and then separated to make their way alone into the town of Annecy.

The streets were quiet and thick with snow. Rochester turned down a dark alley and then stepped into an abandoned warehouse, where she was due to meet her team. Stepping carefully across the debris-strewn floor, she peered out through a broken window at the station yard. Passengers were already arriving for the night train to Lyon. Rochester knew there were three locomotives just inside the terminus. These, intelligence from a railwayman told her, were unguarded before the 11:00 curfew.

Rochester dispatched a small cover party to keep guard with their Stens. The final maquisard—her guard—came with her to watch over her as she laid the charges. Their boots sank in the soft snow as they made their way toward the tracks and then along to the locomotives. Rochester quickly attached charges to the first and second locomotives, and then walked around the third. Just as she had finished laying the final explosives, she slipped and stumbled against a steel girder. A loud clang broke through the silence. She and her guard held their breath.

There was a noise and a shaft of light. Someone had opened a door into a back room in the terminus and was peering toward them.

“Il y a quelqu’un?”

They could not see who it was. The maquisard stood in the shadows, his Sten raised.

Rochester shouted to the man at the door that she had lost her dog and that she had tripped and hurt herself.

The man came forward to see if he could help, and she could see by his overalls and the coal dust on his wrinkled face that he must be one of the engine drivers. Her guard stepped out and shoved the gun into the man’s back.

Rochester checked the third charge and all three left. Back in the warehouse the train driver explained that he wanted no part in the Resistance and had been in the back room sorting out cigarettes that he brought from Switzerland to sell locally.

One of the Resistance men took the driver under guard back to his home, while Rochester headed back up the hill toward her chalet. Leaning on the gate outside her lodgings, with her warm breath making clouds in the cold air, Rochester looked back at Annecy and waited for the charges to detonate.

As the detonation time arrived, and then passed without result, she feared she had made a mistake—perhaps she had forgotten to prime them? Or maybe they had been discovered?

She gripped her watch and stared at the dial. It was 11:00. She thought of England. It was closing time in the public houses, and she saw warm, laughing faces and beer in pewter mugs. Then the first explosion ripped through the night, and the tension disappeared from her body. Suddenly very tired, she turned, just as the second charge went off, followed immediately by the third.

Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester, who the Maquis had already honored with the nickname La Grande because of her height and bearing, was making herself known in the mountains of eastern France.

In Saint-Quentin, after a series of attacks on the railways, Gustave Biéler had bigger plans for Yolande Beekman and his sabotage team.

The Saint-Quentin canal was of great importance to the Germans and was used to transport submarine parts that left requisitioned factories in the north to be taken by barge to Bordeaux and the Mediterranean. The SOE saw cutting off this supply of parts as an efficient way of reducing the role U-boats could play in the harassment of ships supplying Allied armies in Italy. A plan was formed to attach limpet mines to the barges and the lock gates, and, under cover of darkness, Biéler led a team to lay the charges. When the gates next opened, the charges detonated and the canal was jammed with broken gates and the wreckage of barges. That section of the canal was out of operation for many months. The attack brought even greater attention on Musician. Beekman dyed her hair blonde and switched her identity papers and cover story but remained in her safe house.

The Gestapo realized that the Resistance must be receiving supplies from London and that a wireless operator was at work in the area. Teams of detector vans converged on the city. Beekman’s landlady even saw one pass by her front window. Beekman’s radio was pinpointed, and too late she decided to move. She found lodging at the Moulin Brulé, a small café by a canal bridge. The network’s regular members used it as a meeting place. But by now, she and the others were under surveillance.

The next day, a frosty morning in the middle of January, Beekman came down from her room for a meeting with Biéler and another man. Two dark cars screeched to a halt outside the café and Gestapo officers ran in, guns in their hands.

According to Buckmaster, Beekman reached for her revolver but it was too late. She and Biéler were dragged into the cars and taken to Gestapo headquarters.

It was the end of the Musician network.

The moonlit nights of March 1944 saw a number of women arrive in France to bolster networks and take part in sabotage attacks ahead of the proposed invasion.

Twenty-eight-year-old Parisian Denise Bloch had been transferred from her work in the Resistance to work for SOE wireless operator Brian Stonehouse almost two years earlier. Having narrowly escaped arrest more than once, she had fled to London and been trained as a wireless operator. On March 2 a Lysander from 161 Squadron dropped her to work in a developing réseau whose role was to sabotage electricity pylons linking the Pyrenees and Brittany, and to carry out sabotage on the railway system around Nantes.

Yvonne Baseden, a twenty-two-year-old radio operator, was dropped by parachute into southwest France. She spent four days traveling to her area in the Jura, where she was to help set up a new network, Scholar, and arrange arms drops.

Patricia “Paddy” O’Sullivan was the Dublin-born daughter of an Irish journalist who had been educated by a Belgian aunt at a number of schools in Europe. Strong-willed, with a tangle of ginger hair, O’Sullivan’s mission was to work a radio for the Fireman network, which was developing in the northern part of the Creuse. She almost lost her life in the drop when her parachute cords became tangled and she struggled with the lines trailing above her. Dangerously low, her parachute at last blossomed out above her, but she still hit the ground hard and was knocked unconscious.

When she came around she reckoned the two million francs packed into her backpack had saved her life. Her reception committee collected her belongings and radio, together with the containers dropped with her, and took her to a safe house where she slept for twenty hours.

O’Sullivan needed that sleep. Over the coming weeks, wireless operators were going to be busier and more important than ever.

The same night that Denise Bloch dropped into France, Eileen Nearne arrived onboard another black-painted Westland Lysander from Tempsford flown by Flight Lieutenant Murray Anderson.

Alongside Nearne was Jean Savy, who would lead a new circuit called Wizard to the southwest of Paris. Nearne would be his wireless operator, and they had already developed a great rapport. The thirty-seven-year-old Savy was intelligent and dependable but had two drawbacks that could affect security. As a former lawyer he was well known in Paris from his work before the war and could attract attention. The second was the reason for their arrival by Lysander rather than parachute: Savy had a withered right arm, something that made him distinctive and recognizable.

Nearne was heartened to hear their Resistance welcoming committee greet them in strong Parisian accents. They spent their first night asleep in a drafty and dirty barn. The next day at the railway station at Orléans, Nearne was so startled by her first sight of German soldiers that her companions had to tell her not to stare. In Paris, with the help of a local member of the Resistance she knew only as Louise, she found a room in Porte de Champerret and a house in the suburb of Bourg-la-Reine, from where she could transmit her messages.

The couple who owned the room, Monsieur and Madame Dubois, were taking a tremendous risk should their involvement be discovered. The Germans operated direction-finding equipment to try to capture “pianists,” a major prize for the Gestapo and Abwehr, and those sheltering them faced execution or a concentration camp.

Nearne’s fellow SOE radio operator Yvonne Cormeau said later, “Those who offered me a room and offered me food always knew that I had come from England. They were asked, ‘Would you take a radio operator?’ because that more than doubled the danger for them. And, I’ll give it to these people, not once was I refused accommodation.”

Cormeau, who had left her two-year-old daughter in the care of a convent when she flew from Tempsford to become the second female radio operator sent into France by the SOE, had her own remarkable escape. When her radio was uncovered by a German soldier at a roadblock, she managed to convince him that she was a district nurse and the wireless equipment in her case was an X-ray machine.

For the first few weeks there was little for Eileen Nearne to report to London, but then Jean Savy contacted her to say that he had a message for London that was too sensitive to relay by wireless. She was to request a plane for him at the earliest opportunity.

In Marseille, Eliane Plewman had tried to lie low after a series of successful sabotage attacks on the rail network of the southeast of France. Her fears that the Germans were actively pursuing the sabotage team had transmuted into a new concern: that there might be an informer at work in the réseau. It was not unusual for agents to feel a sense of foreboding, living in constant danger of discovery. She began to feel certain that something was happening to the group. One of her team suspected that the Germans had been inside his apartment, so he went to the barber’s shop beneath where he lived. The barber had just smothered his face in shaving soap when two German soldiers flung open the door and looked around.

Plewman refused a suggestion to leave Marseille, saying she had too much to do. When a friend left her one day, she said, “Au revoir,” to which an anxious-looking Plewman replied, “No, not au revoir—adieu.”

Her network’s fate was settled in a most unfortunate way. Plewman had to source some food for one of her team on the black market who had dietary issues. Her black market contact shared a mistress with an officer in the Gestapo. It was this woman who betrayed them.

Her leader, Charles Skepper, was arrested on March 23, 1944, and Plewman the next day. Within days, twelve members of the group were in cells at the Gestapo’s Marseille headquarters on the Rue Paradis. Throughout horrific torture, Plewman maintained she was simply Skepper’s lover and not an agent or résistant. At night she sang songs in her cell, to comfort herself and encourage her group not to give in.

Plewman was taken to Dachau concentration camp where, in September 1944, she was executed alongside Yolande Beekman, who had married just before leaving on her mission; Noor Inayat Khan; and Madeleine Damerment, whose capture resulted from the SOE’s refusal to believe that Khan had been captured.

Also executed were Madeleine Damerment’s male colleagues, France Antelme and Lionel Lee; Yolande Beekman’s leader, Gustave Biéler; Eliane Plewman’s leader in the Monk network, Charles Skepper; and her radio operator, Arthur Steele.

Throughout the winter and early spring, battles between the Resistance and the Milice in the Haute-Savoie region had become more intense.

Formed in 1941, the Milice was a paramilitary organization whose members swore an oath against “Jewish leprosy,” democracy, and opponents of Pétain’s Vichy France. It was a Fascist gang, hated by the Resistance but especially dangerous to résistants and agents because it was made up of French men and women. By 1944 its ranks had grown to thirty-five thousand members who included the dregs of French society, often former criminals and gangsters. They were divided into gangs where they lived, making them far more efficient than the Gestapo. Unlike the Police Nationale, which sought out “enemies of the state,” the Milice hunted, tortured, and killed for personal gain and satisfaction.Those with grudges against former lovers or business associates found the Milice the perfect outlet for their revenge.

The Maquis, using arms dropped by London that had often been arranged by Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester and the Marksman network, had increased its attacks. In retaliation the Milice burned down farms and shot villagers. Rochester had narrowly missed being caught—and most probably executed—when she arrived at a location late, to check a dropping area. The village’s population had been wiped out by the Milice.

Despite the growing dangers, the tall American woman continued her work, carrying messages and supplies. Network leader Richard Heslop said she was unable to stay still, always pestering him for new tasks and missions.

His concerns about the fact that she looked and acted so little like a local French countrywoman still nagged at him, but it amused him too. Watching her striding toward him in the mountains, she looked so much like an English lady that he expected her to have two Labradors at her heels and to greet him with the words, “Had a bloody good walk, you know, nothing like it for keeping fit.”

Another leading SOE agent, George Millar, remembered she had a “genially commanding” attitude to her maquisards, that she dressed in “superb” tweeds, and kept expensive luggage including gold-tipped bottles and jars in her Alpine hideouts. If the mountains gave her a feeling of security, that was about to change.

On February 2, 1944, the BBC broadcast a warning: “Attention the Maquis! Attention the Haute-Savoie! The Oberführer Joseph Darnand has decided to launch a massive attack tomorrow, February 3, against the patriots hiding out in the mountains of the Haute-Savoie. . . . There is not a minute to spare—you must take up your defensive positions!”

Hundreds of résistants climbed through the deep snow to join the maquisards who had gathered on the Glières Plateau, a vast area in the hills above Annecy, almost uninhabitable during the winter months. Here they believed that had created an “impregnable fortress.” It was actually a trap.

A final reckoning on the Glières was coming, but Rochester would not be there to see it. Heslop’s concerns about her appearance in these dangerous times eventually led him to act. He could no longer use La Grande for missions to the towns—she was too recognizable, too well known. She had worked hard, done her bit. He asked London to recall her. When Baker Street’s message came through agreeing to his request, Rochester refused to go. Heslop reminded her that her invalid mother was in Paris, under surveillance as an enemy alien, and that her capture could put her mother in danger.

Early in March 1944, Rochester left, not for London but for Paris, where she moved into a convent. While sheltering she learned about a friend who was being held in prison. She began to plot an escape attempt.

On March 20, she visited a Swiss friend’s apartment, where she had left her bicycle. There was a rapping at the door and, as she answered it, two Germans and a Milice officer pushed her back and accused her of being an American spy.

Unsure how they had found her—she later believed either she had been betrayed or a telephone call she had made in Paris had been intercepted—Rochester decided to stick near to the truth without admitting anything incriminating. She admitted to being an American but said she had recently returned to France from Switzerland. She was able to describe her life in Geneva well, as she knew the city from her days working on an escape line for Jews and airmen through the French Alps.

Unsure what to do with her but with no incriminating evidence on her person or proven links to a spy network, the Gestapo locked her up in Frèsnes prison.

Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester’s future might have looked uncertain, but her move from Les Glières came just before a major assault by elite German mountain troops of the Gebirgsjäger. A three-thousand-strong force scaled the “citadel of Glières” on March 26 and dispersed the Maquis over four days of fighting. Heslop escaped.

More than 130 miles to the south, a second Resistance gathering on a lofty plateau also believed itself to be impregnable. The Maquis had been gathering at the immense and awe-inspiring Vercors plateau in the Rhône-Alpes region of the southeast, planning to make it a Resistance redoubt at the heart of France following an invasion.

This they would do, but like the maquisards of Glières they would discover that the Germans still had the will and the firepower to put down even a mass insurrection. Among the Resistance fighters of the Vercors was a female SOE agent, too—and like Rochester she was foreign born.

Christine Granville was an adventurer, a lover of life and of men, who had been described as “the sort of woman our mothers warned us about.” She was strong-willed, multilingual, and incredibly brave. Vera Atkins called her a “beautiful animal with a great appetite for love and laughter.”

Born Krystyna Skarbek in Poland, she had a Jewish mother and an aristocratic father, and was brought up a Catholic with a deep love of her country.

She had been traveling in Africa with her husband when Poland had been invaded, and had gone to Britain to volunteer to help. MI6 saw her potential, recruited and trained her, and sent her to Hungary posing as a journalist. From there she had organized a supply route for the Polish Resistance, making a series of dangerous trips across the border on her own. She also organized propaganda to persuade the Poles that the British had not abandoned them and planned acts of sabotage, with an old friend from the Polish Army, with whom she began an affair.

She was twice arrested in Hungary, but escaped. In Poland she tried to persuade her mother—her father had died before the war—to go into hiding as her Jewishness was well known. Her mother refused and was later arrested by the Gestapo. Granville never saw her again.

In February 1941, she smuggled out microfilm from Poland containing footage taken by Resistance fighters and drove it in a battered old Opel car to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. There she had made contact with a young air attaché at the British Legation and handed over the microfilm. It was found to contain footage of hundreds of tanks, army regiments, and Panzer divisions being amassed near the Russian border.

Granville had delivered the first intelligence showing that Hitler might be planning an attack on his ally, the Soviet Union.

She escaped through Yugoslavia, Turkey, Syria, and Palestine to Egypt, where she was recruited by the SOE under the name Christine Granville—an English-sounding name she had earlier given herself while in Hungary. Her handlers were delighted with the new intelligence she now delivered to them. Her prewar travels and aristocratic blood meant that she knew important people in many European countries and could provide information on their activities and political affiliations. She had also made a detailed study of the bridges of Syria as she had driven through.

Granville was recruited into the FANYs, although she only ever wore the uniform to have her photograph taken for her identity card. In October 1942 she took an SOE wireless operator’s course in Cairo in preparation for her planned drop on a mission into Turkey. The operation was canceled, and it was early 1944 before she completed her parachute training in Palestine at RAF airbase Ramat David, near Haifa.

In March that year she received training in elementary explosives and attended an SIS firearms course. Although she had hunted with a rifle before the war on her family’s estate, she found the Sten too loud. She preferred the “ideal” fighting knife developed by SOE instructors Bill Fairburn and Eric Sykes. She had a leather sheath designed so she could strap the knife to her thigh.

Christine Granville was desperate to get back into the war and, when another mission—this time to Hungary—was canceled, she realized that France was the place that they needed to send her.

She confronted an SOE coordinator, Douglas Dodds-Parker, and told him: “I want to go to France. I am going to France.”

He told her she was too flamboyant, too brave, and that she would get caught.

“I’ll kill you,” she told him.

Dodds-Parker sent her to see the new regional head of the SOE, Major General William Stawell. After dinner the pair disappeared behind a sand dune, and when Stawell returned he was said to be “knocking at the knees.” Stawell instructed his officers to find Granville a mission immediately. She was going to France.

As D-day approached, the Stationer circuit was showing signs of strain. Jacqueline Nearne, still unaware that her sister was in France 260 miles to the north, was close to a breaking point. She had been working undercover across a huge area of the country for more than a year, carrying out sabotage operations, relaying messages, and helping to organize sometimes ragged bunches of maquisards.

Network leader Maurice Southgate was exhausted too, with problems arising across the circuit. One agent proved unreliable and ran off with a mistress known to have pro-Nazi sympathies. Another disappeared while searching out potential new landing zones near Poitiers and then sent a cryptic note asking Southgate or Pearl Witherington to meet him in the city. Southgate was unavailable, so Witherington made her way to Poitiers boys’ school where the agent had a contact. In fact, the agent had been arrested, the note had been sent by the Germans, and Witherington was headed straight into a trap.

When she arrived at the school, she was stopped by a concierge who whispered that the building was crawling with Gestapo. Witherington realized that she had to escape calmly in case she was being watched. She took a deep breath, tied a scarf over her head, and walked away.

The pressure experienced by the leaders of Stationer would continue to take its toll on her. Having spent so much time sleeping in unheated railway carriages, she had developed rheumatism, which forced her to stop her courier work for a while.

With the network under such strain, Nearne finally agreed to follow Buckmaster’s and Southgate’s orders and return to London for rest. She traveled to a landing ground at Villers-les-Orme to meet a Lysander. Nearne’s smile flashed in the dark when she saw the message that Buckmaster had written on the side of the fuselage in chalk: JACQUELINE MUST COME. THIS IS AN ORDER. The inbound passengers got out, and she exchanged greetings with one: it was her friend Lise de Baissac. There was time only to embrace.

Nearne clambered into the aircraft cockpit beside a Frenchman whom she had never met. He shook her hand and introduced himself with his code name, Regis. He was Jean Savy. Nearne was seated next to her sister’s leader, traveling back to London on a trip that Eileen had arranged, with his urgent message for Buckmaster.

The code name Regis meant nothing to her, and she turned her head to watch the French countryside move past the canopy as the plane lifted into the sky.

Jean Savy had discovered the Nazis’ latest plan for a new Blitz on London. While traveling to the northeast of Paris, he had come upon a quarry that the Germans appeared to be using as an ammunition dump. After liaising with local résistants, and taking a closer look at the site, he discovered that in fact the quarry contained around two thousand V-1 rockets. The Allies already knew about other rocket sites and, in August 1943, had launched an RAF raid on the rocket-making center at Peenemünde on Germany’s Baltic coast. But the quarry Savy had found at Saint-Leu-d’Esserent contained enough firepower to perhaps bring London to its knees.

Working with Savy’s intelligence, the RAF launched a series of raids that destroyed the rockets at the quarry. But it was just one site of many, and on June 13, 1944, the first of the V-1s—sometimes called doodlebugs—reigned down on London. The Nazi regime was still far from defeated.

Five weeks before D-day, Maurice Southgate was arrested in the town of Montluçon, sixty miles from Vichy, at the home of one of his wireless operators.

During his interrogation at Avenue Foch, the SD colonel who was questioning him asked if he knew the man code-named Claude, real name Henri Déricourt. The SD colonel already seemed to know everything about Southgate and many of his associates. “Claude is a very good man of ours,” the colonel explained smugly. “From him we get reports, documents, and names of people.”

The Germans may well have thought they were about to have another summer of success to rival the arrests of the Prosper network almost a year earlier. They surrounded Montluçon, almost trapping Southgate’s courier Pearl Witherington and her fiancé, Henri Cornioley, who was now working with her. They escaped the cordon by splitting up and taking various back roads to safety.

Witherington had, by now, been in France for eight months. She had worked tirelessly, once even escaping death from members of her own side when, without a password, she arrived to collect money from a Maquis leader she did not know. They believed she was an agent of the Milice and prepared to strangle her. She only persuaded them she was SOE by giving the name of the farmer in whose field she had landed months before.

One SOE instructor had noted of Witherington: “This student, though a woman, has definitely got leaders’ qualities.” Despite the sexism of the qualifying phrase “though a woman,” the instructor’s assessment of her leadership skills was correct. Witherington’s work in the field proved it. London made the decision to split the large and unwieldy Stationer circuit and make Witherington, code name Pauline, leader of the northern half. Cool and resourceful, she immediately split her circuit, dubbed Wrestler, into four subcircuits each under a lieutenant reporting directly to her.

Witherington called in fresh arms drops from London and organized her networks into something approaching a private army. The legend of Pauline, the agent for whose capture the Nazis would offer a reward of one million francs, was born. D-day was coming near and, in its wake, she would become an incomparable leader of Resistance action.

Nancy Wake, a woman of equally strong character, was on her way to the rugged countryside just east of Witherington. Like Pauline, Wake would become a battlefield leader. And like Christine Granville, she had caused her SOE instructors a considerable amount of trouble.

After escaping from the South of France and reaching London, Wake had approached the SOE for an interview. When she attended Orchard Court, she was delighted to realize that they knew all about the activities of the “White Mouse” who had eluded the Gestapo in Marseille.

Wake’s training began with psychological examinations, which were designed to see if an agent would stand up to pressure. She loathed them. When confronted with the Rorschach inkblot test, she replied, “I see ink blots.”

In Scotland, she got into an argument with a fellow trainee. Wake had been defending her friend Denis Rake, one of the SOE’s most remarkable agents. Openly homosexual at a time when being gay was a criminal offense, Rake had been a circus performer before the war. Despite hating guns and explosives, he had already worked for the SOE in France as a radio operator. He spoke French and German fluently.

The woman Wake had argued with reported her to Selwyn Jepson and raised concerns about the level of Wake’s drinking. Jepson summoned her and began to reprimand her. “We don’t like our girls to drink,” he said. She told him “what he could do and where he could put it” and was instantly fired. When she returned to her flat in London, she received a telegram ordering her to return her FANY uniform. Wake telephoned Baker Street and said if the SOE wanted her uniform Jepson could pick it up himself. One of the SOE’s most remarkable careers almost ended before it had begun.

Fortunately, Maurice Buckmaster heard about the argument. He and Wake had hit it off immediately. She saw him as “an Englishman of the old school,” and they had shared their common experience as prewar journalists in Paris. Buckmaster smoothed over the situation, and Wake was rehired.

She never apologized to Jepson and saw no reason to change her behavior on her return to the SOE. At Inverie Bay in northern Scotland, she loved the weapons training but began to worry that her reports might not be good enough. Determined to find out what her instructors thought of her, she made an impression of the office key in some plasticine and had a new key cut. Then one evening she let herself into the office and rifled through the drawers. She was pleased to see that there were no negative remarks in her file; in fact, instructors felt her larger-than-life personality was “good for morale.”

At Ringway, an American sergeant tried to embarrass her by passing a small package across the breakfast table with a wink. “It’s a present,” he smirked. Thinking it was chocolate, Wake opened it to see three condoms inside. The sergeant winked but, unperturbed, Wake began to read aloud the instructions for their use—in great detail. When the red-faced soldier left, Wake put the condoms in her pocket and finished her meal.

Outside the room an officer apologized for the sergeant’s attempt to humiliate her and asked if she would like him to take the offending items back. “That’s not necessary,” Wake told him. “They might come in handy later on.”

Her exuberance lasted right through until her last night in Britain. When she boarded a Liberator on the night of April 30, 1944, she did so with a raging hangover. She spent the flight fighting off the urge to be sick into her oxygen mask. Alongside her was Major John Farmer, who would lead the new network of which she would be a part. Code-named Freelance, the network’s role would be to unite Resistance groups in the Corrèze. Denis Rake, who would be their wireless operator, had added parachuting to his list of dislikes, and was being brought in by Lysander to meet up with them later.

Over the drop zone Wake remembered the instructor’s voice at Ringway as he barked in her ear, “Remember what your mother told you: keep your knees together! Now roll, roll as you land!”

Wake did not get the opportunity to roll—her parachute caught in a tree. A local teacher and rugby player, Henri Tardivat, who led the Resistance reception committee, helped her down, making a quip designed to charm about how all trees should bear such beautiful fruit. Wake told him to cut out “that French bullshit.” They would become firm friends.

Wake and Farmer had been counting on the initial help of Maurice Southgate and were unaware of his arrest until they landed. One powerful Resistance leader, known as Gaspard, turned them away, saying he was not prepared to work with the British, but a second, Henri Fournier, offered them accommodation and help. When Rake arrived they were able to organize arms and explosives for Fournier’s Maquis. Wake carried and coded the messages, using the personal code poem that she had agreed on with the SOE’s codemaster, Leo Marks. He usually chose romantic poems or Biblical texts for the agents, but something more bawdy was deemed more appropriate for Wake. She agreed.

The poem she had memorized went:

She stood right there,

In the moonlight fair,

And the moon shone

Through her nightie;

It lit right on

The nipple of her tit,

Oh Jesus Christ Almighty!

Wake, Farmer, and Rake lived in the woods with a ragged bunch of résistants. Wake led them in weapons training, and the novelty of having a woman among them was hard to ignore—even if she wore army boots, khaki trousers, a shirt and tie, and a beret. On the first morning she went out among the pine trees to urinate, she noticed the bushes around her were moving. When she got back to camp she told the sniggering men that they had seen her peeing once and that should be enough.

From her base in the forested valley at Chaudes-Aigues, Wake became the chef du parachutage for the estimated seven thousand maquisards in the area. She chose the fields she would use for parachute drops and gave them code names so London could identify them using a Michelin map.

Early on, Wake insisted on joining a Resistance raid on a shop owned by a collaborator in the town of Saint-Flour. As she broke the window glass, helped grab handfuls of supplies, and sat in the getaway truck as it sped into the darkness, she decided that she “liked this kind of thing.”

In the weeks to come, Nancy Wake would climb under bridges to set explosives and lead attacks on German convoys and a raid on a Gestapo headquarters. She was the perfect soldier-agent to be on the ground in France as the final details of the D-day landings were arranged.