Interesting read about someone I've never heard off before...

Steve2000 said:
Incredible. I wonder how many more people there were like this that we've never heard about.
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Quite a few. The SOE was very secret. Only a handful of the people in it became at all well known, usually well after the war. Mostly the women because it was unusual to have women in special forces units.
 
Morbius said:
Denise Bloch too.
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Nancy Wake as well. She ran escape routes for the French resistance, made the Nazis most wanted list (they put 5 million francs on her head), got captured by the police but was extricated by some creative lying from another resistance member, which she played along with on the fly (the police didn't know she was the White Mouse that the Nazis were looking for, so they bought the lies) and then escaped through a route she helped to set up, reaching Britain. Rather than resting on her laurels after she reached the relative safety of Britain, she joined the SOE, trained and then went back in to France to train, lead and organise supplies for maquisards. She ended up as the general of an army of 7,000 of them. The Nazis sent 22,000 against them...and lost.

She looked like a model and fought like Rambo. If you made an accurate film of her wartime life, people would laugh at how unrealistic it seemed. They'd also be shocked at her ruthlessness, looking at it from the safety of today. She was later asked if she regretted any of her actions and replied "I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn't kill more."


The names given in this thread illustrate a point I made. Most SOE agents were men, but it's only the women who are remembered.
 
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