A dashed heroine..
WWII Morse code operator Anne receives France’s highest honour
A BRITISH woman who was a teenager when she signed up to send Morse code messages to the Resistance has received France’s top honour – aged 94.
Communicating with fighters battling the Nazis in France was crucial to the success of D-Day.
Anne Ponsonby, who worked at bases in the UK from the age of 18, was presented with the Legion d’Honneur by the
CO of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.
Brigadier Philippa Lorimer told her: “We are enormously proud of the work you did in the corps.”
Anne, who has three children, nine grandchildren and six greatgrandchildren, said: “I am thrilled. It is a beautiful insignia and I will wear it with pride.” Anne, of Winchester, Hants, who was widowed 10 years ago, said: “It’s difficult to explain just how patriotic everyone was then. “I had to send coded messages containing 30 words per minute which is fast. Agents constantly in danger [had] little time to communicate.” Before D-Day in June 1944, Anne was based at Grendon Hall, Bucks. She said: “We knew when D-Day was and weren’t allowed out for a week. [After] the landings we got messages saying ‘Vivent Les Allies, Vive La France, Vive la Grande Bretagne’.” JOY Grandma Anne Boeing fleet is part of worldwide flight ban WRECKAGE Crews at Ethiopian crash site ROWS of Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft sit idle yesterday after two deadly crashes involving the model.
The Southwest Airlines planes, pictured at Southern California Logistics Airport, have been grounded indefinitely by regulators, along with fleets around the world.
It follows the Ethiopian Airlines disaster that killed all 157 people on board on March 10. Accident investigators are said to be focusing on the model’s anti-stall system, suggesting a link between the tragedy and October’s Lion Air crash in Indonesia, which killed 189.
Boeing continued its damagecontrol efforts this week, inviting pilots and the media to its factory in Washington state, to unveil changes to the anti-stall software.