D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II by Sarah Rose

In 1940 France was split into two halves with one half (the part with Paris) occupied by German forces and the other half run by a puppet government headed by Petain, a war hero from World War I who wanted to return the country to its Catholic roots and get rid of the Jews.  Their laws were stricter than the Reich's Nerenberg's Laws.  Petain promised a judenfrei "free zone" (which is what the unoccupied zone was called) and said he'd get Hitler 10,000 Jews.

General Charles de Gaule was not a leader of a government in exile as much as he would like to have been.  There were resistance fighters, but not many in the occupied portion of France.  Two of these were Andree Borrel and her boyfriend Maurice Dufour ran a successful operation in the south of France in the Free Zone getting pilots out of the country and to England. They were betrayed and were forced to use their underground railroad to get out themselves.  When they got to England they were questioned by de Gaulle who wanted to know all the names on their network and their drop zones and other secrets.  They refused to give him the information because the fewer people who know the safer the people are.  Andree was sent to the Brits who had an interest in her and Maurice was brutally tortured by de Gaulle's men but he never gave up any information.

Andree was picked by Captain Selwyn Jepson who was seeking women to send into France to build up a resistance network that would help when they invaded France in 1943.  This was 1941 and he chose her to be a parachuter.  Major Maurice Buckmaster and Squadron Officer Vera Atkins (who was not only a Romanian immigrant but also Jewish, something she kept hidden from everyone and she was the inspiration for Moneypenny in the Bond novels), ran the spy training school for women called Beaulieu that was training agents for F Section, also known as The Firm (whose motto was "Merde, alors!", or "Well, shit!").  General de Gaulle was recruiting his own men and women for resistance work called RF Section.  These women working for F Section had to have lived in France but be Britsh citizens.

Odette Sampson had married an Englishman, a pilot who had stayed with her family during World War I that she had thought she was in love with.  They had three daughters together but the marriage was on the rocks.  She worked as a courier for Captain Peter Churchill in the Riveria because that is where her boat landed and she was unable to get passage to the occupied zone where her station was supposed to be.  She and Peter would fall in love while building up a rather large resistance force in the south of France, though it would take time as the locals were not interested in going against Germany at first because all the Germans had done to them so far is taken their food.  It was worse in the occupied zone where arrests were made over nothing. 

Yvonne Rudellat was the first member of the Corps feminins to be sent over.  She was in her forties and had an adult daughter but no husband.  She was given a cover as a married couple with a locally recruited agent named Pierre Culioli.  Her age was a perfect cover and it didn't stop people from listening to her.  She had a commanding presence.  She was stationed in the occupied zone and taught others how to build bombs and put together guns.  She set off bombs or Bangs, blowing up certain strategic sights and recruited many to the resistance over time.

Lise de Baissac was the second woman ever to parachute into a war zone with Andree being the first.  Lise set up a room two doors down from the Gestapo in the small town of Poitiers in the free zone.  She knew she wouldn't have success recruiting so she stuck with getting agents out through the underground network and helping her brother Claude who was setting up a cell not far away.

Things began to go wrong when one of the members of CARTE, an organization that was on the ground in France working as a resistance group but a poorly run one, is caught and flips putting Odette and Peter in jeopardy and their cell as well.  Others would be caught causing England to call back those in the field and meaning that D-Day for France would have to wait another year as they would have to reset up everything all over again.  But the French at this point was finally motivated and also finally trusting and less antagonistic toward the English agents that were being sent over.

One of the female agents who went through the training was ultimately washed out even though she did everything right because she was Jewish, Helene Aron was sent to Scotland where those who screw up but know too much information go. There had been talk of sending her back to Vichy France and leaving her there where there was a chance she could have been sent to a camp.  But she knew too much about D-Day.

This is a fascinating look at women who risked everything including their lives for something bigger than themselves.  It was by no easy feat to get those women over there, to begin with.  While Churchill himself had authorized women to roles in combat that didn't mean that the men in charge of sending them over there would want to do so.  But in the end they did and it was a good thing they did because the French people responded better to the women agents and were won over by them.  These brave women whose deeds were kept secret until 2003 when it was deemed to be no longer top secret.  Now their stories can be told and this book does an excellent job of doing so and making them very real to you. I give it five out of five stars.   

Quotes

  It was in General Foch’s private railway car that the kaiser’s forces surrendered, for the cessation of hostilities that was schdulted to begin at 11:00 a.m., on November 11, 1918. General Foch disparaged the Treaty of Versailles for it lenience toward the conquered Krauts. “This is not a peace. It is an armistice of twenty years,” he blustered when it was ratified, on June 28, 1919. Hitler’s war in Europe started almost exactly twenty years later, on September 1,1939. Foch was off by a mere sixty-five days.

-Sarah Rose (D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II p 73)

When the Corps feminins went to war, they broke barriers, smashed taboos, and altered the course of history.  Among their many firsts, they were the first women in organized combat, the first women in active-duty special forces, the first women paratroopers infiltrated into a war zone, the first female commando raiders, the first female signals officers behind enemy lines they were first to write women into the history of war.

-Sarah Rose (D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II p 280)

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/D-Day-Girls-Resistance-Sabotaged-Helped-ebook/dp/B07GNS3LGK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=N2RWW29Y9IJN&keywords=d-day+girls&qid=1559572578&s=gateway&sprefix=D-day%2Caps%2C182&sr=8-1