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| Female French Resistance fighters |
One thing we
really haven’t dealt with much thus far is the Second World War resistance
movement. I was particularly inspired recently to read of some of the female
intelligence agents, and thought you might appreciate a little mission behind
enemy lines this week into the world of spies and sabotage!
Noor Inayat Khan
“I wish some Indians
would win high military distinction in this war. If one or two could do
something in the Allied service which was very brave and which everybody
admired it would help to make a bridge between the English people and the
Indians.”
Born in Russia to an American mother
and father of Indian nobility, Khan grew up in France. At the start of the war
they fled to England, where she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF)
in November 1940. Since she was fluent in French, she was referred to
recruiters for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a British organization
formed with the task of assisting resistance movements in occupied Europe. Once
recruited, Khan became the first female radio operator to go into occupied
France. In July 1943, she established herself in the Paris Prosper Network,
which was soon discovered by the Nazis. The other wireless operators were
captured, leaving Khan as the sole communicator with London.
She continued working until her own
arrest on 13 October 1943, and while she didn’t talk during interrogations, the
Germans found her notebooks, broke her code, and impersonated her SOE discarded
the message as unreliable. London continued to treat the impersonated messages
as genuine, leading to several more arrests and executions by the Germans.
Meanwhile, Khan attempted several
escapes and even managed one successfully in November 1943 before being quickly
recaptured. The Nazis deemed her “very dangerous” and sent her to Pforzheim,
Germany, where she endured ten months of solitary confinement as a Night and
Fog prisoner (one of Hitler’s directives against resistance workers whereby
local populations would be intimidated by the disappearance of captured loved
ones). In September 1944, Khan and three other SOE agents were transferred to
Dachau and executed. A bronze bust of Khan now stands in London’s Gordon Square
Gardens.
Odette Hallowes
“They will kill me, I
know. But then they would not win anything. What is the point? They’ll have a
dead body, useless to them. They won’t have me. I won’t let them have me… it’s
a kind of bargaining.”
It all started with a postcard.
French-born Hallowes had moved with her three daughters to England at the start
of the war. In 1942, the Admiralty asked civilians for photos and postcards of
the French coast for military intelligence. Hallowes accidentally addressed her
postcard to the war office, which led to an interviewer with a recruiter for
the SOE.
While she was reluctant to leave her
daughters, Hallowes trained as one of the first female SOE recruits. She landed
in France in November 1942, where she contacted Captain Peter Churchill,
another agent. She aided him in the resistance for the next five months.
Meanwhile, a German intelligence
officer had captured one of Hallowes’s contacts and infiltrated the resistance.
He captured Hallowes and Churchill on 16 April 1943 and transported them to
Fresnese Prison. When the bribes failed to extract information, the two were
interrogated and tortured. They quickly fabricated a story that Churchill was
the nephew of the prime minister and Hallowes was his wife, hoping that this
would give them a reprieve.
By July 1944, Hallowes was at the
RavensbrΓΌck
concentration camp as a Night and Fog prisoner. She survived five months on a
starvation diet before she was released to a normal cell. Her trial ended in
May 1945, when her ward turned her over to American troops in the hopes of
shortening his sentence. He was tried and executed, while Hallowes went on to
enjoy life into her eighties.
Nancy Wake
“I have only one thing
to say: I killed a lot of Germans, and I’m sorry I didn’t kill more.”
Wake was always a strong and
independent woman. At sixteen, she ran away from home and worked as a nurse and
journalist before settling in Marseille with her husband. He was a member of
Marseille’s upper society, and Wake lived a life of luxury until the Germans
invaded France.
Without any formal training, she
became an essential member of the resistance in Marseille. She used the cover
of her expensive flat and socialite status to aid refugees and Allied spies.
She was so successful that the Germans nicknamed her “White Mouse” and made her
the Gestapo’s most-wanted person. When the situation grew too dangerous, she
fled to England in 1943.
There, she immediately joined the
SOE, trained with a group of male recruits and parachuted back into France in
April 1944. She became one of the leaders of the resistance group Maquis
d’Auvergne, coordinating supplies and sabotage attacks for the 7,000 men under
her command. Before the war’s end, the group fought 22,000 Germans and suffered
only a hundred casualties, but wounded or killed 1,400 German soldiers.
Here’s an interesting anecdote about
Wake: Sometimes, a firm hand was required in demonstrating to over 7,000 men
that a woman could lead them. On one occasion, several new recruits refused to
do their share of chores. “You don’t want to collect water, I hear?” She asked,
marching up to them. They were all sitting on a tree trunk and indicated that
this was so. “Well then, of course, you mustn’t,” she said sweetly. “You are
gendarmes. Water-carrying is not for you. Now you just stay there comfortably
in the sun and I’ll get the water for you.” She put the buckets in her car,
drove to the nearby lake, filled them up and drove them back to the
headquarters. Then, grim-faced, she opened the door of the car, took out one
bucket of water, marched across to the first gendarme and deposited it
violently over his head. “Don’t move!” she bellowed to his startled companions.
Petrified, they sat where they were. One after another, she helmeted every one
of them with a pail full of water. (Russel Braddon, Nancy Wake: SOE’s Greatest Heroine)
I appreciate your “dropping in” to
celebrate these remarkable women with me this week. All information and images
come from Victoria Van Vlear’s article “Subversive Heroes” in Heroes of World War II Fall 2016, pp.
87-91.
Thanks for reading,
Delany
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