The women who won the war
A new book salutes the female agents who took on the Nazis. Nigel Jones is impressed
The idea of women secret agents operating in wartime France has been firmly fixed in our consciousness for decades. It started with
Carve Her Name With Pride, the 1958 biopic of the brave and beautiful Violette Szabo (played by Virginia McKenna). Then there was Plenty, David Hare’s 1978 play about the fictional Susan Traherne (portrayed in the film version by Meryl Streep) and, more recently, Cate Blanchett’s turn as the heroine of Sebastian Faulks’s novel Charlotte Gray in a so-so cinematic adaptation.
Indeed, the idea has acquired its own visual clichés: the RAF plane circling above a field in the darkened countryside, the pilot anxiously peering down for the winking lights of the Resistance reception committee; the whump as the agent’s parachute opens in the dark air; the mounting tension as she wobbles down a rural lane on a rusty bike, with radio set and Sten gun stowed in her suitcase; and finally the screams and shouts as brutish Nazis arrest her in the very act of transmitting her vital messages to London.
But before the war, the idea of female spies was anathema to the tweedy chaps who ran MI5 and MI6. That chauvinistic climate only changed in 1940, when Churchill promoted a new spy and sabotage agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), who were given the task of “setting Europe ablaze”.
As Rick Stroud (who has also written about Rommel and El Alamein) explains in Lonely Courage, a fastmoving group biography of seven of the 39 women working for SOE in France, Churchill was persuaded that women were as good as, and often better than, male spies by the exploits of Krystyna Skarbek, also known by the nom de guerre Christine Granville.
A resourceful Polish woman, of mixed Jewish and aristocratic heritage, Granville made her way on her own initiative in December 1939 across the snowbound mountains from Hungary into her homeland, where she collected valuable information about the German occupation and brought it back to London. In 1944, given a new identity and dropped into France, Granville led hundreds of resistance fighters in action against the occupiers. When some of her leading colleagues were captured, she convinced the Germans, by the sheer force of her magnetic personality, to release them. (It is claimed that Ian Fleming had her in mind when he created the character of Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale.) Although Granville survived the war, she was unable to adjust to mundane peacetime. Taking a lowly job as a ship’s stewardess, she was murdered in an Earls Court hotel by a spurned would-be lover.
Only one of Stroud’s magnificent seven heroines – Agnes Humbert – was wholly French, though most had pre-war experience of the country and spoke the language fluently. One such was the Muslim Indian princess Noor Inayat Khan. Trained by SOE as a radio operator, she stayed at her post in Paris even though she knew that her resistance network had been betrayed and that her arrest was virtually inevitable. Caught and tortured, she revealed nothing to her tormentors, and was finally murdered at Dachau.
At the other end of the social scale to Noor was Szabo, a half-French London shopgirl who married a Hungarian in the French Foreign Legion. He was killed in North Africa, leaving her with a baby daughter and a burning need to get back at the Nazis. She volunteered for SOE and, after one successful mission to France, had the misfortune to run into an SS armoured division at a roadblock on her second visit. After a running gunfight, she too was captured, tortured, and executed.
But Stroud’s book is not simply a compendium of tragic tales. Pearl Witherington, a Briton brought up in France, ended the war commanding a Maquis army and accepting the surrender of 18,000 German soldiers. Nancy Wake, an Australian, killed a German sentry with a karate chop just below his ear. In the tussle, he slashed her arm with his bayonet. She said: “I did not weep for that sentry. It was him or me and by that time I had the attitude anyway that the only good German was a dead one.”
Virginia Hall, an American ex-diplomat with only one leg (she had lost the other in a shooting accident), radioed London from the French resistance: “We need a number of perfectly and utterly reliable persons… I am doing too much as it is and find it hard to swing around the circuits fast enough.” She added: “If you could send me a piece of soap I should be both very happy and much cleaner.”
There is little here that is new: all of Stroud’s heroines have had their stories told before. Instead, his achievement is to weave them together into a concise narrative of the Second World War in France and the role of these brave women within it.
The debate continues among historians as to whether the sacrifices and suffering endured by the SOE agents – female and male alike – was justified by their military and intelligence achievements. Twelve of the 39 SOE agents in France died violently; two more died from disease. SOE’s operations were hindered by betrayals, Nazi reprisals, political turf wars between Gaullists and Communists, and the icily efficient German counter-espionage services.
What cannot be disputed, however, is that each of the lives that Stroud relates so well offers a shining example of heroism – a dauntless, patriotic readiness to risk everything for the cause of human decency.