SHADOW WARRIORS
THE STORIES OF THE WOMEN WHO VOLUNTEERED TO COVERTLY FIGHT THE NAZIS BEHIND ENEMY LINES
In World War I women were almost exclusively a feature of the home front, knitting jumpers and socks for their husbands and sons off in the trenches or working on the assembly line in munitions and other factories. But less than a generation later, in the next global conflagration, a number of women took on quite a different role – not as frontline troops but in the equally perilous guise as secret operatives working behind enemy lines.
Two decades after WWI, a corps of daring American and British women had abandoned the security of their homes for the shadowy world of espionage and sabotage. They were recruited by the US’S Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) to be covertly sent into Nazi-occupied countries.
Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis unravel the fascinating tale of how, for the first time in European military history, women were trained as combatants, most of them to be parachuted behind enemy lines. As the authors point out, “This was the first war in which old gender rules changed, as intelligence agencies created specific training and roles for women.”
These agents ranged from girls barely out of their teens to mature mothers, from working-class to highsociety women. Each was trained to blend in with the local population and even to adopt disguises. Burglars taught them how to pick locks and blow safes. They were instructed in the use of rubber truncheons and automatic weapons, as well as the killing knife, with its blade blackened. They were taught to throw grenades, leap from a fast-moving train and plant a bomb on the hull of a ship. They trained as wireless operators, learned how to send secret messages and arrange for weapons to be dropped for resistance fighters. Each of these courageous women knew that torture and death was the price of failure.
These women had to overcome a deeply entrenched culture of sexism. In the US and British intelligence services, the accepted belief was that cloak-and-dagger work was exclusively a male domain. This was proved to be wrong. Despite once being described as “a nice girl, who would make an excellent wife for an unimaginative man,” for instance, Yolande Beekman became an effective agent who was captured and executed by the Germans.
The authors present portraits of a corps of remarkable women, whose achievements have at last gained much-deserved recognition. The reader meets exceptional operatives like Mary Herbert, who helped organise sabotage attacks in the docks at Bordeaux; Virginia Hall, a spy for the OSS and SOE in occupied France, despite the handicap of having only one leg; Denise Block, the saboteur of German communications lines in the run-up to D-day; Nancy Wake, who led a deadly attack on a Gestapo headquarters; and Pearl Witherington, who was one of the great leaders of the French Resistance.
These women were taught to fight and kill, to bring bombing raids down on targets, to lead sabotage operations and to turn large numbers of men into underground armies. The authors rightly state that the women agents were “soldiers, taking the fight to the enemy where he least expected it”.
“EACH OF THESE COURAGEOUS WOMEN KNEW THAT TORTURE AND DEATH WAS THE PRICE OF FAILURE”