A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell
JANE RIDLEY A Woman of No Importance By Sonia Purnell Virago £20
Anyone writing a thriller about the Second World War would be pushed to invent a fiction more compelling than the real-life adventures of the American agent Virginia Hall. Sonia Purnell has found a terrific subject. Virginia Hall, claims Purnell, ‘really did help turn the tide of history’, and her full story is told here for the first time.
She was born in Baltimore, the daughter of a long-established banking family. She grew up destined to marry a wealthy man and repair the frayed family finances. A trouser-wearing tomboy, she was a fearless rebel. She ditched her eligible fiancé and escaped to Paris, where she was free from her controlling mother. Her ambition was to be a US diplomat but, because she was a woman, she could only get a job in the secretary grade, in spite of having a university degree.
Out shooting snipe one day in Turkey, Virginia (who was a keen shot) climbed a fence without checking the safety catch on her gun, stumbled and accidentally blasted her left foot. The wound went septic, gangrene set in and the doctors amputated her leg below the knee. She learnt to walk with a prosthetic leg, which she nicknamed Cuthbert.
This disability, which coincided with the death of her father, might easily have ended her career but, writes Purnell, it had the opposite effect. It made the 27-year-old Virginia more determined than ever to succeed.
When war broke out, Virginia signed up to drive a French ambulance. As the Germans poured into France in May 1940, she fearlessly ferried the wounded to safety. The fall of France inspired her to fight for the country’s freedom. Back in London, she contacted a senior officer in Special Operations Executive (SOE), the intelligence agency established by Churchill to light the flame of resistance against the Nazis in France. Desperate for success after repeated failures, SOE took a gamble and recruited the onelegged woman agent.
Based in Lyon, Hall single-handedly established an enormous network, and she directed most of the operations in her area. SOE had trained her in schoolboy things such as secret writing in urine, but spying came naturally to Virginia, who had nerves of steel.
Recruiting support among the French population wasn’t easy in the early days of the Resistance when Britain seemed to be losing the war. One of Hall’s most valuable contacts was a brothel-keeper in Lyon, who encouraged her ‘girls’ to spike the drinks of their German clients, search their pockets, give them heroin and infect them with gonorrhoea.
Purcell tells the thrilling story of the break out of Mauzac military prison, when Hall masterminded the escape of 12 SOE agents with the aid of a legless priest who smuggled in a radio transmitter under his cassock. This was a crucial operation, but no one knew that it was Hall’s achievement.
It goes without saying that she was consistently refused promotion by London. The male agents of SOE emerge badly from this account. Sexist and patronising, they demanded senior rank over Hall in spite of being far less good at the job.
In 1942, the Germans closed in on Virginia, who was by then known to be the spider at the centre of the web. Her nemesis was an evil Nazi priest named Alesch, who conned her into giving away her secrets. She escaped to Spain, climbing 8,000ft over the Pyrenees in acute pain from her bleeding stump. The German reprisals were brutal. Almost all the agents in her network were murdered or imprisoned.
SOE refused to let her return to France because her life was in danger. So Virginia persuaded OSS, its American counterpart, to take her on. Disguised as an elderly peasant woman, she directed guerrilla Resistance groups to revenge the murder of her agents. Crouched over a radio transmitter, she tapped out coded messages to London, which supplied the money and weapons for the liberation of France. But her successes – and those of the Resistance as a whole – were written out by De Gaulle, who claimed for himself the credit for freeing France. After the war Hall returned to the US and went to work for the CIA; this part of her career is a depressing but familiar story of a woman being sidelined and undermined by less competent male colleagues.
Sonia Purcell has exhaustively researched Virginia Hall’s career in archives in many countries, and she writes with authority and in vivid detail. This book is a cracking story.