"A Woman of No Importance"

[fiefoe]

Sonia Purnell's account of this almost forgotten war hero is less light-hearted than what's in "Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare", and she's so larger than life that it's almost unbelievable.

• ("All the Light We Cannot See"): Private Virginia Hall often ran low on fuel and medicines but still pressed on in her French army ambulance toward the advancing enemy. She persevered even when the German Stukas came screaming down to drop 110-pound bombs onto the convoys all around her, torching the cars and cratering the roads. Even when fighter planes swept over the treetops to machine-gun the ditches where women and children were trying to take cover from the carnage. Even though French soldiers were deserting their units, abandoning their weapons, and running away, some in their tanks.
• * The fact that a young woman who had lost her leg in tragic circumstances broke through the tightest constrictions and overcame prejudice and even hostility to help the Allies win the Second World War is astonishing. That a female guerrilla leader of her stature remains so little known to this day is incredible.
• Where possible, I have stuck to the version of events as told by the people closest to them. At times, however, it has been as if Virginia and I have been playing our own game of cat and mouse; as if from the grave she remains, as she used to put it, “unwilling to talk” about what she did.
• This is not a military account of the battle for France, nor an analysis of the shifting shapes of espionage or the evolving role of Special Forces, although, of course, they weave a rich and dramatic background to Virginia’s tale. This book is rather an attempt to reveal how one woman really did help turn the tide of history. How adversity and rejection and suffering can sometimes turn, in the end, into resolve and ultimately triumph, even against the backdrop of a horrifying conflict that casts its long shadow over the way we live today.
• flappers. They were a new breed of young women who broke the Prohibition-era rules on drinking and scandalized their elders by cutting their hair short, smoking, and dancing to jazz. They rejected the one-sided restrictions of a traditional marriage and were taking a more active role in politics, not least because in 1920 (after a century of protests) American women had been granted the vote. Virginia looked around her: home life was stifling, but the world outside seemed to offer enticing new freedoms.
• father (to whom she was unusually close) who allowed her to spend the next seven years studying at five prestigious universities. <> She had begun in 1924 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Radcliffe (now part of Harvard) but the bluestocking atmosphere bored her, and in 1925 she moved to the more metropolitan Barnard College in Manhattan
• Like many well-to-do East Coast Americans before and after her, Virginia viewed the French capital as the elegant gateway to liberation. Hundreds of young Americans boarded Cunard liners for Europe every week, sending back word on how fashionable women in Paris—the so-called garçonnes—were positively expected to be independent, athletic, and androgynous in appearance, and to work and love as they pleased.
• She never saw her lover again, and was later to discover that he had probably perished in spring 1940, one of thousands of Polish officers executed in cold blood by Russia’s secret police during the Second World War and buried in mass graves in the forest at Katyn.
• With the confidence of youth—plus her languages and extensive academic study—she expected to succeed in the requisite entrance exam. The fact that only six out of fifteen hundred Foreign Service officers were women should have been due warning. The rejection was quick and brutal.
• it was as she climbed over a wire fence running through the tall reeds of the wetlands that Virginia stumbled. As she fell, her gun slipped off her shoulder and got caught in her ankle-length coat. She reached out to grab it, but in so doing fired a round at point-blank range into her left foot... She was on the brink of death when, on Christmas Day, surgeons sawed off her left leg below the knee in a last-ditch bid to save her.4 She was twenty-seven.
• Going up and down steps remained a particular challenge—and consequently Venice, as she was to discover, could scarcely have been less suitable for a new amputee. <> La Serenissima was a walking city. Virginia gazed with horror at its slippery cobbled passages and the 400 humpbacked bridges, many with steps, over the city’s 177 canals. She quickly devised an ingenious solution: her own gondola emblazoned with a splendid golden lion would be her carriage.
• * On February 4, 1938, Roosevelt asked for a briefing from Hull, who appears to have taken umbrage at this special lobbying on her behalf. Virginia’s disability hampered her performance, the president was told, and she was not up to the demands of a diplomatic position. Hull, apparently ignoring the glowing reports from the consulate in Venice, agreed she might make a “fine career girl,”9 but only by remaining in the clerical grades. FDR had overcome his own semiparalysis from polio to reach the highest office of all. Yet, with some irony, he saw no reason to pursue the matter further.
• Fearful of the future, all hopes of promotion dashed, pigeonholed as a disabled woman of no importance, she resigned from the State Department in March 1939. For all her ambition at the start, her career had proved little more faithful or rewarding than the old-fashioned marriage she had once spurned.
• she signed up in February 1940 with the French 9th Artillery Regiment to drive ambulances for the Service de Santé des Armées. She had no medical skills but did have a driver’s license, and the service was one of the few military corps open to women volunteers—and also to foreigners.
• The French were locked in an outdated defensive mentality, sitting behind walls and sending messages to each other by carrier pigeon. They had little chance against the devastating brilliance of the Nazi forces with their frightening speed, flamethrowers, and lightning waves of aerial bombardment. The negligent apathy—and in some cases venality—of the old French elite allowed a world power to descend into a subject people in just six weeks.
• She noticed how as a nominally neutral American she was permitted greater freedoms than the French she worked alongside.
• The Special Operations Executive had been approved on July 19, 1940, the day that Hitler had made a triumphant speech at the Reichstag in Berlin, boasting of his victories. In response, Winston Churchill had personally ordered SOE to “set Europe ablaze” through an unprecedented onslaught of sabotage, subversion, and spying. He wanted SOE agents—in reality more Special Forces than spies—to find the way to light the flame of resistance... If this new paramilitary version of fifth columnists violated the old Queensberry Rules of international conflict (involving codes of conduct, ranks, and uniforms), then the Nazis had given them no choice. <> If this new paramilitary version of fifth columnists violated the old Queensberry Rules of international conflict (involving codes of conduct, ranks, and uniforms), then the Nazis had given them no choice.
• She had allowed more than a year to elapse since her resignation and was no longer eligible for an official ticket, and in wartime others were all but impossible to come by. Unexpectedly stuck in London alone, she dug out the telephone number she had been given in Irun. Nicolas Bodington, an ex-Paris correspondent for Reuters, took the call
• * What did become clear was that SOE’s new, most “ungentlemanly” brand of warfare would draw in large part on the terror waged against the British by Irish republican paramilitaries. In the Anglo-Irish war of 1919–1921, the British had observed how regular troops could be defeated by a hostile population whose will had been stiffened by a few resolute gunmen... As one intelligence writer has put it: if MI6 officers spotted enemy troops crossing a bridge they would observe them from a distance and estimate their number, whereas SOE would simply demolish the bridge.
• Most recruits had not even got that far, pulling out horrified the minute they discovered what they were expected to do; others were ejected once found to be mad or bad... So many backed out that SOE would later set up a “cooler,” a remote country house in the wilds of Scotland where quitters would be forcibly confined until what knowledge they had gleaned of SOE was of no use.
• * Churchill’s Cabinet had forbidden women from front-line service of any sort. Government lawyers advised that women were particularly vulnerable if caught, as they were not recognized as combatants and therefore not protected by international laws on war. Within SOE itself, old-fashioned attitudes were also widespread...  It now seemed as if her disability was the only thing not to count against her... Indeed, SOE decided in its desperation that it must and would be ready to work with “any man, woman or institution, whether Roman Catholic or masonic, trotskyist or liberal, syndicalist or capitalist, rationalist or chauvinist, radical or conservative, stalinist or anarchist, gentile or Jew, that would help it beat the Nazis.”
• She picked up when to change an address, how to make secret inks (urine comes up brilliantly when subjected to heat), and even how to conceal her personality (through altering a distinctive laugh, gesture, or demeanor). She was shown how to seal microfilm documents (equivalent to nine sheets of letter-size paper) in tiny containers and insert them in her navel or rectum—or, as she discovered, in a handy little slot in her metal heel.
• No one in London gave Agent 3844 more than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving even the first few days. For all Virginia’s qualities, dispatching a one-legged thirty-five-year-old desk clerk on a blind mission into wartime France was on paper an almost insane gamble.
• the Vichy government adopted some of the worst excesses of Nazi ideology under the banner of a new moral order for France. Pétain’s repression of Jews or “immigrants,” as he referred to them—whom he had already banned from universities and the leading professions—was at this point often more draconian than Hitler’s.
• Lyon’s proximity to the border with neutral Switzerland (just eighty miles to the east) could also open up a new channel of communications, as Virginia remained without a wireless operator. The city’s dramatic topography and confusing layout was another factor in making it a natural birthplace for an underground movement. Divided into discrete areas, the heart of town was a peninsula washed by two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, which were straddled by seventeen bridges and surrounded by wooded hills... hundreds of steep stone steps led up to Vieux Lyon, with its impenetrable network of traboules, or interconnecting passages through buildings and between streets, “much like an above-ground sewer system,
• The nuns, who wore a “quaint headdress—a white dutch cap with wings,” fed her with produce from their own farm. Despite their otherworldliness, they became not only her first shelter in Lyon, but also her earliest recruits. Thanks to Virginia’s lateral thinking, F Section had just secured one of the best early safe houses in Vichy France.
• The upside was that in those early months such regressive views meant that most men struggled to believe that women could be involved in subversion.
• Altering her hairstyle, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, putting on glasses, changing her makeup, wearing different gloves to hide her hands, or even inserting slivers of rubber into her mouth to puff out her cheeks: it all worked surprisingly well. With a little improvisation she could be three or four different women—Brigitte, Virginia, Marie, or Germaine—within the space of an afternoon.
• When the Vichy police picked him up the following morning, they found in his pocket a piece of paper London had carelessly provided to all its outgoing agents. It was a map showing the location of an SOE safe house in Marseille
• Yet some sixth sense seemingly stopped her from joining this mass gathering of the SOE clan. She had long ago discovered through necessity the benefits of self-dependency and was already far older than her years. By contrast, one Lieutenant Marc Jumeau, a tall bushy-haired technical adviser, one of the four parachutists near Bergerac on October 10, lacked her caution and was in search of friendly company in a frightening world. The first to arrive at the Villa des Bois, he ignored the fact that no one had answered when he had phoned the house several times earlier... But whether treachery or not, the fact was that in one swoop, French rather than German police had practically cleaned out SOE in the entire Free Zone... André Bloch, who had been transmitting from the Occupied Zone, also vanished after being denounced by a French neighbor for merely looking like a Jew... Now there was not a single working SOE radio operator at liberty in the whole of France.
• * London was left “with little else in the field except Miss Virginia Hall.”48 Only she had means of contacting Baker Street. Only she had a growing circuit uncontaminated by the arrests. Only she was supplying vital information on Vichy and the Nazi occupiers. The future of Allied intelligence in France now rested on a solitary woman who had been written off for most of her adult life.
• how to spoil food bound for Berlin. The best way was to insert “a small piece of putrified meat” in a carcass, make a pinhole in tinned provisions, place salt water in sugar, or allow vegetables and cereal to get damp
• Clothes were hard to buy—especially bras, because of the labor and multiple components involved. Leather stocks had been requisitioned by the German military so there was a desperate shortage of normal shoes. The rudimentary footwear sometimes still on sale in the shops had wooden soles that click-clacked loudly as their wearers walked down the street—a wartime feature that became the soundtrack to Nazi rule.
• nobody’s idea of a typical résistante. A thirty-seven-year-old “burning brunette” with “animal sexual magnetism,” Germaine Guérin was part owner of one of Lyon’s most successful brothels. Wrapping herself in jewels, silks, and furs, she exuded a “gypsy warmth”.. Germaine “moved in sordid surroundings and her morals were irregular,” Simpson recalled, although he also recognized her underlying virtue. “She had . . . the shining cleanliness of a sea-lion.”
• * Virginia already had the nuns at La Mulatière as her devoted helpers but now she found herself recruiting from the other end of the morality spectrum... despite obvious differences in background, Simpson observed them discovering they had much else in common: they were both happiest when flirting with danger; they enjoyed a wicked sense of humor; they could both “make something out of nothing”; and they shared a “disdain for their own sensations of fear.”
• Virginia had reserved particular contempt for prostitutes entertaining German clients, but now she affectionately dubbed such women her “tart friends.” Thanks to their “Jerry bed companions,” as she put it, they knew “a hell of a lot!”... His “many a devilish idea for the discomfiture of the German clients”14 appear to have included infecting as many as possible with syphilis or gonorrhea. He doled out special white cards denoting a girl to be free of infection,... (Rousset's) willingness was all the more exceptional given that the reactionary regime in Vichy France expected women to stay at home, get married, and have a minimum of four children as their patriotic duty. Abortion was illegal and punishable by guillotine.
• Gum chewing had to be specifically banned and bowlegged Texans painstakingly taught how to move like Europeans and to avoid putting their hands in their pockets, which was seen as a “Yankee” peccadillo.
• She also recruited a forger, a highly respectable engraver in an upmarket shopping arcade called the Passage de l’Hôtel-Dieu. Monsieur Chambrillard became expert at re-creating official papers for Virginia that fooled even the most eagle-eyed inspectors.
• * The problem was that many people were still more focused on their own factional struggles—including those between Communists and the increasing numbers of supporters of General de Gaulle—than in accepting command from London on exactly how to serve the Allied cause. <> Virginia plowed on, refusing to take sides among these eternally feuding political tribes. She constantly presented herself as a unifying force, interested in anyone genuinely willing to put winning the war first, whatever their secondary allegiances.
• Train: Virginia reported, “crowded beyond belief and look like a Walt Disney brainstorm,”22 with people pressed up against the windows and holding on to the entrance platforms so that the doors could not shut properly. Virginia sometimes found herself stuck in the doorway, narrowly avoiding death (or what she called the “void”) for up to two hours at a time by clenching the hand of a complete stranger just inside the carriage.
• “Fear never abated,” recalled one candid French resister. “Fear for oneself; fear of being denounced; fear of being followed without knowing it; fear that it will be ‘them,’ when at dawn one hears or thinks one hears a door slam shut or someone coming up the stairs. . . . Fear, finally, of being afraid and of not being able to surmount it.”25 Resistance called for a lonely courage, for men and women who could fight on their own. But the solitude was an eternal strain. One agent took to eating dinner in front of the mirror as no one except a reflection could be entirely trusted.
• * Virginia reminded newcomers to eat like Frenchmen—gustily using bread to wipe up their gravy, not leaving a speck of food on the plate, and certainly not neatly aligning their cutlery at half past six at the end of a meal like a well-brought-up Brit. And as they were no longer in England they should desist in always carrying a raincoat. Virginia tried to think of everything. Banned from buying cigarettes for her “boys” to soothe what they all called “attacks of the jitters,” she collected stubs from the floors of cafés for them to smoke instead. It also helped them blend in. Stub snatching had become a national—and respectable—pastime
• Without the protection afforded to regular forces by the Geneva Conventions, they were unlikely to survive capture. (Indeed, only 15, or 1 in 8, of the 119 London-based SOE agents who were arrested in France during the war came home.)
• The police were rounding up innocent people to be deported to Germany to satisfy the monstrous Nazi appetite for slave labor in their factories (just as Churchill’s assailants had threatened). Vichy had previously agreed to send thousands of volunteers to the Fatherland, promising good food, good pay, concerts, and free holidays. But few had been taken in and the numbers had fallen far short of Nazi demands. Now Vichy had secretly agreed to resort to forced expatriations, and ordered roundups of random people in several target cities.
• Churchill spent his last night in Marseille being told by Virginia that it had been Mafia gangsters impersonating Vichy police who had conned him into surrendering the twenty-five thousand francs and that another racket involved selling suspected résistants to the Germans in return for cash or their victims’ possessions.
• Cowburn pleaded with her to leave Lyon at once to save herself—after all, she had already been in France for six months and that was normally considered the limit of any mission.
• her work was so varied and vital it was described after the war as of “universal character.”10 Despite the mounting dangers, she was collecting details of the political situation in France; the scope and effect of Vichy propaganda; the use of dummy wooden aircraft to fool British aerial reconnaissance; the identity and movements of German regiments; the warring factions within the French Resistance; the installation of machine gun nests on the flat roofs of Paris;
• It was not just Alain who was distracted by a frantic love life. Perhaps it was down to the fact that Benzedrine often caused a dramatic rush of libido. In any case, several male agents were playing around with dozens of different women, who posed obvious risks to Virginia and the entire SOE operation.
• Virginia’s police contacts were extraordinarily well informed, even on the movements of their German counterparts. Thanks to a stream of tip-offs, she moved one contact no fewer than thirty-two times to keep him one step ahead of the Gestapo.
• * A weak signal or mistakes in the Morse—virtually every operator made either their dashes a little too short or their dots a tad long, their “fist” or style considered as individual as a fingerprint—only added to the whole laborious process. During what seemed like an eternity, he would sit there with his eyes on the road outside looking for suspect vehicles, his Colt pistol next to his hand, his poison capsule in his mouth, his ears straining for any usual noise.
• Many families and even married couples were similarly riven between collaborators and résistants.
• * He endured several interrogations and was imprisoned in a Nazi-run jail in Dijon before managing to escape in a stinking garbage pail with the help of a priest. He then headed up to Paris, where, incredibly, he lived in domestic bliss for a while with an aristocratic German officer whom he had met in a bar and who risked his own life by becoming Rake’s lover. Rake was not to be distracted for long, however.
• Another method was to switch off the power district by district, and when the signals stopped they knew to lock down that part of the city. No wonder the attrition rate was high, and Zeff and the other radiomen now working in France were suffering. Although SOE was sending in more operators, none was now officially expected to survive more than three months.
• Her extraordinary courage and Virginia’s ingenuity meant that Bégué soon had all he needed to make a key for the door of the barracks, using bread from the prison canteen to take a mold of the lock. Every evening from now on the Camerons choir bellowed out the “most obscene”7 songs to drown out the noise of the filing and hammering.
• * Now, one of you look under my cassock . . . where my legs should be.” One of them duly lifted up the robe to a collective gasp. “Great Scott! It’s a piano!” exclaimed Bégué, no doubt guessing who must have arranged for the transmitter to be smuggled in in such an ingenious fashion. “Yes,” the priest replied. “I was given to understand that you can get plenty of music out of it. It has been nicely tuned.
• the Camerons were delighted to hear RAF bombers roaring over them a couple of nights later and see the sky glow red as heavy explosions shook the ground and “sent clouds of sparks into the night.”9 It was more than gratifying to overhear the same guard the following day discussing the destruction of the plant. They were, incredibly, playing a role in the war even while still behind barbed wire.
• the Camerons: both the Germans and Vichy knew full well that the Allies had pulled off a spectacular escape and a major propaganda coup. The breakout acquired a legendary status far beyond Mauzac... Although it is astonishingly little known, the official SOE historian M. R. D. Foot acknowledged the Mauzac jailbreak as “one of the war’s most useful operations of the kind.”
• The fear now was that Jouve was also in a position to sell SOE agents, including Virginia herself, so she urgently asked for more pills from London, but Jouve disappeared before she could “touch” her.28 The threats on all sides had driven her to become a battle-hardened assassin, a far cry from the Virginia of January, who could not bring herself to swear in her letter to Bodington. This new version of Virginia understood it was now a case of killing others to survive.
• Perhaps her exhaustion after so long in the field had worn her down. Perhaps she had become too confident in her own precautions. Or maybe she simply saw the material provided by WOL as too valuable to lose. And in any case Rousset, whose judgment she valued, continued to believe in the priest. She had grown used to harboring doubts about just about everyone; after all
• That was not, of course, the case with Célestin, whom she had seen very recently. Yet despite the unimaginable treatment he suffered at the hands of the Gestapo, the fashion illustrator’s heroic silence bought Virginia a few more days. Again and again they asked him about Marie or “that terrorist.” They got no answer. But the Gestapo smelled blood.
• He also broke off diplomatic relations with America and interned the most senior officer at the United States embassy...  Any attempt by the Allies to attack Hitler’s territory from their new base on the other side of the Mediterranean would be met with the Wehrmacht’s iron fist. Within hours, Virginia’s friends and protectors would become powerless in a full Nazi state where German terror would be unbridled.
• The biting north wind cut through them even down here on the coastal plain, and the November air smelled of snow. Virginia’s only chance of escape lay over one of the cruelest mountain passes in the Pyrenees, eight thousand feet above them, past the glaciers and sharp flanks of the Canigou Massif. Treacherous and sometimes impassable even in the summer months, few would expect an escapee to try negotiating the narrow, rocky trail, where the snow could reach waist height in winter
• Even this was nothing compared to the misery of the next twelve miles. After months of semistarvation enforced by wartime conditions in France, she now had to climb five thousand feet in the cruelest of winter conditions; each sideways step jarred her hip as she dragged her false leg up the vertiginous slope with the weight of her bag tearing at her shoulder and cutting into her frozen hand.
• * stories were rife of wolves and bears picking off escapees along this stretch. There would, in fact, be no more breaks during the afternoon or the long, bitter night that followed.
• It was here that many agents, couriers, and helpers of all sorts—including Virginia’s beloved “nephew” Marcel Leccia (now an accomplished saboteur)—came to visit Germaine for instructions from London or just companionship now that the boss had gone. One by one, in good faith, she introduced them to Alesch, who lay in wait in her kitchen, almost as if he had become family, to observe the comings and goings. Thus with appalling ease much of the remnants of Virginia’s operations became known to him. When Nicolas, now the most senior agent in Lyon, dropped by, Alesch even dared to demand yet more money
• In truth, anyone connected to Virginia was now in mortal danger, and in one frantic chase through the traboules a Gestapo officer actually caught hold of Zeff’s foot but he managed to pull free, leaving his shoe in the German’s hand.
• As the man’s hat rolled off into the dirt, Alfred was hit by a whiff of eau de cologne that made him retch. Then, as his eyes adjusted to the dark, came the appalling realization that his victim was not Alesch. He had killed the wrong man.
• A top-secret inquiry in April 1943 blamed the success of double agents but also the Germans’ highly developed radio-detection operations. Radio operators were the sole and slender link with occupied countries such as France, and their sets considered the most meaningful and emotionally charged objects of the war. These brave men, and later women, were particularly vulnerable to capture, and their commanders acknowledged their life expectancy in the field was becoming intolerably brief.
• The predatory Milice—Vichy’s version of the Gestapo, created in January 1943—sowed further dissent by using local knowledge to infiltrate, repress, and torture fellow countrymen. Its chief was a French member of the Waffen SS, and its black-shirted members (mostly would-be gangsters or wealthy young hardline royalists) swaggered around with newly acquired weapons; their thuggish barbarity disgusted even some Germans. Incredibly, one in six miliciens was a woman. <> At the beginning of 1943, pro-Allied French youths started to display their allegiances by ostentatiously reading All Quiet on the Western Front (a German First World War novel feared by the Nazis because of its pacifist messages) or carrying two fishing rods (in French deux gaules, sounding like de Gaulle).
• * Most important of all, however, was that DFV (her new code name) should be tightly controlled. “You will see . . . that we have done our best to tie DFV up so that she can have no excuse for undertaking any work without your prior knowledge and approval,” her immediate superior DF crowed to H/X. “I do not envisage that you will have any trouble,” he said, with Miss Hall. <> There was an equally insulting showdown over money. Paid in dollars to support her cover as a Chicago Times employee, her new bosses deliberately sought to cut how much she received by forcing her to change most of her salary into pesetas on the black market at an unfavorable rate.
• Neither did Buckmaster know that her real name and exact role in Lyon was shortly to be deliberately communicated to the Germans by MI6, again in the belief that it was inconceivable she would return to the field. The rival British Intelligence Service had seized a wireless from a German agent arrested in England and Virginia’s details were nuggets of truth transmitted to his controllers to give validity to a mass of disinformation designed to mislead the Germans about the location and timing of the planned cross-Channel landings.33 The result, by the end of 1943, was that Virginia’s name, description, and role were universally known across German intelligence and beyond. She remained a figure at the center of the clandestine war in France—even if she did not know it.
• “All those first OSS arrivals in London,” wrote the satirist Malcolm Muggeridge, who was then working for MI6, “how well I remember them, arriving like jeunes filles en fleur . . . all fresh and innocent, to start work in our frosty old intelligence brothel.” <> OSS was wasting time on fantasies such as introducing estrogen into Hitler’s food to remove his moustache or putting mustard gas in flower beds to make Nazi generals go blind.
• she had had her fine, white American teeth ground down by a much-feared female London dentist to resemble those of a French countrywoman. At five foot eight, she was tall for a peasant but her clothes had been made, distressed, and rigorously checked by Jewish refugees in a secret atelier behind London’s Oxford Circus to ensure they looked real—right down to the way the buttons were sewn on, as the French favored parallel threading while the British and Americans preferred a crisscross pattern.
• George Langelaan, one of the Mauzac escapees, was one of a handful of other compromised agents who all agreed to, or even requested, surgery before returning to the field. Two major operations had involved breaking Langelaan’s pointed chin and making it smoother and rounder with a bone graft from his pelvis
• Agents were trained to hold out for forty-eight hours before revealing anything important—allowing their circuit time to go into hiding. The first fifteen minutes were generally considered the worst and captives were advised to try to shut themselves down, mentally transporting themselves into another place if possible and coping with each minute at a time.
• now that battle was finally joined, every Resistance chief in the region urgently wanted Virginia’s help to call in more guns and explosives. Barely eating or sleeping, she roamed over hundreds of miles of countryside to inspect Resistance groups for their reliability and needs and transmit her recommendations back to London. Cars or trucks and gas were rarely available; so, incredibly, Virginia made many of these trips by bicycle.
• And it was also still possible that D-Day would not succeed and the Allies would be repulsed. Eisenhower’s forces took six days simply to connect the five slender bridgeheads on the landing beaches, and efforts to penetrate the interior were meeting determined German resistance and getting bogged down in the hedgerows and ditches of the Norman bocage.
• * the Vivarais plateau: Albert Camus, who came from Algeria in summer 1942 for the tuberculosis in his lungs, called it a “handsome country,” but also “a little somber.” He thought of the fir trees massing on the crests of the hills as “an army of savages,” waiting as it grew light to rush down into the valley—and the real world. For the plateau had the ambience of a land apart, a mysterious place suspended in the skies, whose people were sometimes likened to the Amish in America... a proud tradition of sheltering the persecuted, dating back four hundred years to when the Protestant Huguenots had flocked there to escape the French Catholic dragonnades (an early form of religious cleansing)... No wonder it had become a magnet for those fleeing from the Nazis, whether Jews avoiding the camps or young men dodging slave labor in Germany to join the Maquis. As Virginia was to discover, virtually every family in the area was secretly risking their lives by sheltering at least one person on the run.
• She tested the strength of the wind by holding up a hankerchief by the corner—if it failed to fly fully horizontally then it was less than fifteen miles an hour and would be good for parachuting. She noted the coordinates, chose a code name (after a fish), and a recognition letter to be transmitted by lamp in Morse code to the pilot of an approaching plane.
• Yet far from seeming cowed by the dangers she faced, Virginia looked her most radiant, as if she had found an almost spiritual peace in the midst of the deadliest turmoil. She reminded Jacqueline of a Renaissance statue of the Madonna—”very beautiful” and suffused with a “remarkable calm” despite the “contents of the cases she was carrying.”
• * Resistance in France was more factional than ever—riven by personality clashes and political allegiances, particularly between the Gaullists (supporters of de Gaulle) and the Communists (who resented his growing influence and conservative views)... Indeed, there was so much fighting between the French themselves that some historians refer to the guerre franco-français of this time, a French civil war playing out as a kind of subplot as the European war reached its climax.
• For her men—and the villagers who watched with awe from afar—it was as if wherever La Madone turned up the night skies came alive with the roar of Halifaxes. In all there were twenty-two drops—twenty on the Bream ground and two on neighboring zones.
• Sometimes she went several nights at a time without sleep, delving into her supplies of Benzedrine to keep going and sharing them with her bleary-eyed team. Such was the pressure that the slightest failure triggered an explosion of temper, swearing, smoking, and spitting on the ground in frustration like the trooper she had become. <> “Diane breathed energy, courage and charm. But she could also be imposing and imperious,”27 said André Roux, one of Bob’s men. “From time to time we were treated to Homeric bollockings,” agreed Dédé.
• Virginia’s work had also helped to pave the way for the Allied recapture of Paris. According to a 1988 report in Army, the Association of the United States Army’s magazine, her intelligence on the disposition and direction of the German Seventh Army from her time as a milkmaid in central France and thereafter had been “vital.”
• Eisenhower himself would go on to say that its combined actions—sabotage, ambushes, harassment, and constant sapping of Nazi morale—had shortened the war in Europe by nine months and kept eight German divisions permanently away from the D-Day battlefields. But now it was clearly time for the professionals to finish the job. Her offer to help was rejected. It was all too late. <> It was a humiliating end to what perhaps had always been an unlikely dream. Virginia, Paul, and Henry returned to the château where she gathered the boys and delivered the news that she was to disband the Diane Irregulars with immediate effect.
• Remorse is a strong motivator. Perhaps regret for his obstructive behavior was the reason Fayol was to devote a decade of his later years to researching Virginia,   
• * De Gaulle was famously antagonistic toward American or British agents working on his patch... ungracious in the extreme, imprisoned one SOE operative and threatened others with incarceration unless they left liberated France immediately. And in a sign of what was to come, he was apparently particularly keen to remove all women from the front line and have their role largely expunged from the record.
• “Diana and friend” (as Virginia and Paul were often now known) were dispatched to OSS Central European headquarters in a royal palace at Caserta, north of Naples (also Eisenhower’s seat as Supreme Allied Commander), to receive intensive training. Here in the opulent Versailles-style rooms and two-mile-long landscaped park she was inducted in garroting, handling a dagger, and bringing death to a man silently with bare hands. Firing a gun should be done in a crouching stance, with a two-handed grip on the pistol held at waist level and using the double tap—or two shots fired in quick succession.
• OSS’s future looked increasingly uncertain now that the war was drawing to an end and its original patron dead, so he was anxious to publicize the award to burnish the agency’s prestige. Donovan therefore took the unusual step of suggesting a ceremony at the White House.
• There was a widespread fear that never having witnessed the realities of life under the Nazi heel, Americans were “obstinately incredulous”51 of the depths of barbarity suffered in France and therefore too lenient with those responsible. Virginia was the rare American who had seen and shared it.
• Occasionally they would protest that they were patriots, at least one claiming to have personally put “twenty-eight German soldiers hors de combat” by targeted infection.52 Most people, however, were interested only in clearly defined acts of heroism rather than these more complex displays of courage. Virginia, though, understood that valor came in many different forms.
• Truman: As a Democrat he instinctively distrusted the charismatic, Republican-leaning Wild Bill and anyone connected to him, a distaste reinforced by a vigorous media campaign (fed by rivals such as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover) comparing OSS to an American Gestapo.
• Alesch had by now become a cause célèbre, an embodiment of betrayal and Nazi evil. When he was summoned to the Paris court on May 25, 1948, to stand trial on charges of “intelligences avec l’ennemi,” crowds flocked to see him in the dock.
• Part of OSS’s legacy was its legendary boozing, or as one historian has put it, “All hands . . . sailed out of the Second World War on a tide of alcohol.”9 Virginia and Paul were no exception
• In contrast to the celebration of a strong-willed woman under Wild Bill Donovan’s wartime regime, the Father Knows Best thinking in the mid-1950s expected a model female to be an obedient blonde at home with the kids. To be childless and characterized as “frank and outspoken” was a danger sign. Peacetime was slowly but surely imprisoning her.
• CIA: It was a subtle if classic undermining of a female officer who had coolly avoided capture by the Gestapo for three long years, was serving as a captain in the military reserve, and had proved that even a devastating accident could not impede her performance. A further insinuation came in the remark that she had “unrealistic” ideas about her value to the Agency and that her “independence” was her most significant feature.
• * The recommendation that supervisors should be trained to be fairer to both sexes was accepted by the agency’s board, but seems to have had virtually no impact. The sole visible difference was that women were now admitted to the CIA gym once a week—but it was small beer when female employees were still expected to report for work in spotless white gloves.
• * The CIA’s anti-Communist zeal had already led to Operation Paperclip, the code name for the wholesale recruitment of former senior Nazis on the grounds that however barbaric their conduct in the war they also ranked as the ultimate anti-Soviets. The U.S. Army’s intelligence operation had taken on the Butcher of Lyon himself, Klaus Barbie.
• Virginia’s shoddy treatment was later cited within the CIA itself as a textbook case of discrimination.29 “She was head and shoulders above a lot of the men who rose much further up the organization than she did,” notes Craig Gralley.
• Writing about Waiting for Godot, the theater critic Robert Scanlan once observed that while the play is not a literal representation of Samuel Beckett’s experiences in the Resistance, its imagery—and the states of mind it represents—clearly derive from that time: “All those who endured the war in Europe emerged transformed, and they had great difficulty expressing the magnitude of their inner tumult.”36