Sydney Williams :Burrowing into Books “A Woman of No Importance,” Sonia Purnel
“‘There are endless nightmares of uncertainty,’ explained one. ‘The tensions,the nerve strain and fatigue, the all-demanding alertness of living a lie, these are [the agent’s]to meet, accept and control. They are never really conquered.’”
Quote from a former member of the SOE in war-torn France Sonia Purnell
Besides being a gripping tale of the Resistance in France during the Second World War, this is the story of Virginia Hall, an American woman, with an artificial leg, who operated behind enemy lines at a time when being a female in a combat zone was unusual, let alone one who was disabled. “If caught,” Ms. Purnell writes, “women were…subjected to the worst forms of torture the depraved Nazi mind-set could devise.”
Virginia Hall was the daughter of a wealthy Baltimore banker and a social-climbing mother. She was born in 1906 and like her mother was ambitious but directed her ambition “toward a career and exploring the world rather than bagging a feckless husband.” At age twenty, after one year at Radcliffe and one at Barnard, she moved to Paris and enrolled in the École Libre des Sciences Politiques. She spent three years in Europe, becoming fluent in French, German, Spanish and Italian. She came home and joined the State Department as a clerk. In 1931, she returned to Europe, working for State in Poland and Turkey. An accident in the fall of 1933, while on a hunting trip near the Aegean Sea, caused her to shoot herself in her left foot. Fearful of gangrene, doctors in Turkey amputated the leg below the knee.
In the spring of 1934, she was back in Maryland. Two years later, she rejoined the State Department and returned to Europe. With the Continent spinning toward war, she worked in Vienna. “Pigeonholed as a disabled woman of no importance, she resigned from the State Department in March 1939.” In February 1940, she joined the French 9th Artillery Regiment as an ambulance driver. In June 1941, when France was overrun, she returned to London and enlisted in the newly formed SOE (Special Operations Executive). By early September 1941 she was a spy in Lyon, France. She had found her métier.
The story of her exploits in France, especially in Lyons and later in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon are told in excruciating detail. All agents are scared and most suffered from insomnia. “Everyone experienced loneliness and an urge to share their thoughts and fears, but survival meant holding back.” Yet, for Virginia: “For all the grinding fear, she had never been so happy. For all the frustration, she had never been so fulfilled.” Nevertheless, “the Gestapo considered her the most dangerous of all Allied spies.”
The three and a half years she spent with the Resistance demonstrated her bravery, coolness, competence and selflessness. The collapse of the Vichy government, in late 1942, necessitated a recall to London, which meant a fifty-mile hike across the Pyrenees in winter, difficult for anyone, but Ms. Hall had to do it on a wooden leg, while carrying a suitcase. After a debriefing, she returned to France in May 1943, now working for the OSS and based on the Haute-Loire plateau, where she became known as the “Madonna of the Mountains.” Two years later, the War was over. In September 1945 she returned to the United States.
Virginia Hall was awarded medals from three countries – an MBE, the Croix de Guerre and the DSC (Distinguished Service Cross). In 1957 she married Lieutenant Paul Goillot, whom she had met in September 1944 when he parachuted into France and became one of her “irregulars.” While she became one of the first officers, of the newly formed CIA, it was “in fighting for the liberty of another nation, she had found freedom for herself.”
The only criticism I had with the book is that it has too much detail: the frequent moves she had to make, the naivete of some of her comrades and the savgery of her enemies. One winces as one reads. Her survival, as it was for any member of the Resistance, was a miracle – a function of navigating between tens of thousands of French collaborators and those few who never let despair or the brutality of the Nazi occupiers dictate their behavior. Ms. Hall died in 1982 at age 76. In June 1988, her name was added to the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame. On the Haute-Loire plateau, she remains a legend.
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