‘I do not know about politics or governments … I am a housewife’: The Female Secret Agent and the Male War Machine in Occupied France (1942–5)

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Notes

1. Those who survived the war include: Blanche Charlet; Marie-Thérèse le Chêne; the mothers Mary Herbert (Claudine), Odette (née Brailly, then Sansom, then Churchill) Hallowes (Lise) and Yvonne Cormeau; Yvonne Baseden; Eileen Nearne (Rose); Maureen Paddy O'Sullivan (Micheline); Alix d'Unienville (Aline/Marie-France); Maguerite Peggy (Knight) Smith (Nicole); Pearl Witherington Cornioley (Pauline); Lise de Baissac (Marguerite) and Virginia (Hall) Gollot (Marie). Those women who were executed by the German forces include: Violette (Bushell) Szabo (Louise), Noor Inayat Khan (Madeleine), Diana Rowden (Paulette), Lilian Rolfe (Nadine), Denise Bloch (Ambroise), Yolande Beekman (Yvonne), Eliane Plewman (Gaby), Andrée Borrel (Denise), Cecily Lefort (Alice), Vera Leigh (Simone) and Madeleine Damerment (Solange/Martine). Sonia Olschanezky who was absorbed into the SOE in Paris through the Juggler circuit was executed with Leigh, Borrel and Rowden at the Natzweiler concentration camp and Yvonne Rudellat died in Belsen upon its liberation.

2. Patrick Howarth accounts for Odette's experience as follows: ‘Of the S.O.E. agents who were captured in France and sent to concentration camps few survived. Perhaps the most famous of those who did was a French girl, Odette Brailly who married an Englishman named Sansom by whom she had three children. She was parachuted in to serve as courier to Peter Churchill, a Cambridge ice-hockey blue, who had been operating over an extensive area of southern France. Both were arrested. Odette Sansom succeeded in convincing her interrogators that it was she and not Churchill who made the decisions and, as the citation for the George Cross which she was awarded stated, that it was she and not Churchill who should be shot. In fact they both survived not least because of the skill with which Odette Sansom caused her interrogators to believe that Peter Churchill was related to Winston Churchill and that she was Peter Churchill's wife. They were indeed to be married (Howarth 1980:158).

3. Other mothers recruited included Yvonne Cormeau whose two-year-old daughter Yvette was placed with nuns for three years, as were Odette Churchill's three daughters Françoise, Lily and Marianne. Mary Herbert had a love affair with her circuit leader and gave birth to a daughter in France who was placed in a children's home when the Germans arrested her.

4. Robert Jackson similarly describes the work of Belgian Anne Brusselmans (who aided the escape of 176 Allied airmen): ‘This is the story of a very brave woman—an ordinary housewife’ (Jackson 1976:79).

5. The polarity of women's expected role as mother and nurturer and her deviance as combatant was again reinforced via a Gulf War version in Courage under Fire, directed by Edward Zwick (1996). In this film, what constitutes courage (childbirth notwithstanding) is problematized in terms of mothers in armed combat. In Zwick's film, Denzel Washington's colonel is assigned to review a posthumous female candidate for a Medal of Honour while waiting for an investigation into his own command. His review reveals the death of Meg Ryan's captain at the hands of her mutinous troops under fire. As with Odette and Violette, Ryan's (fictitious) army officer is also a mother. Her daughter too will be raised by her own parents, drawing on the same issues as the real-life fate of Violette Szabo, whose daughter is orphaned when she is executed by the Nazis at Ravensbrück. But, like Odette and Carve Her Name with Pride, Zwick's film omits to negotiate the implications of women who privilege access to state-sanctioned killing over motherhood.

6. F. J. writes in the Daily Cinema on 17 February 1958: ‘There could surely have been no better choice to play Violette Szabo than Virginia McKenna, who has all the nobility and courage of such a character while, at the same time, conveying softer and more feminine moods.’ The treatment is described as ‘very straightforward … careful not to forget romance and family angles’ (J. 1958). McKenna said that ‘although she did not look like Violette at all, she hoped she had captured her spirit in her portrayal of her’ (quoted in Ottway 2002:166).

7. There was certainly an investment in telling the war story from the victor's point of view, as recorded in Today's Cinema on 20 December 1956 (p. 3): Major Daniel Angel struck a deal to make fifteen pictures with Rank and Twentieth-Century Fox and the star of Reach for the Sky, Kenneth Moore, would star in ten of them.

8. Male authors tend to use ‘girl’ in referring to SOE agents. Jackson describes Nancy Wake as: ‘An Australian girl who gave up everything to fight for her adopted country, sten-gun in hand, personally leading several thousand tough guerrillas in a long battle against Germany's picked SS troops’ (Jackson 1976:193). Using the familiar infantilizing ‘girl’ to describe an adult woman spy, Jackson follows the generic schema established by Tickell and Minney to emphasize how exceptional it was for a woman to behave in this way. Marcus Binney similarly opens his book with: ‘The girls who served as secret agents in Churchill's Special Operations Executive were young, beautiful and brave’ (Binney 2002:1). The physical appearance of women secret agents is significant in male biography. Minney employs a free indirect narrative (focalized through Potter, the agent recruiter) to reflect on Szabo: ‘Humanly, he could have wished her less good-looking. She was too pretty altogether to talk of death’ (Minney 1956:67). The fact of physical attractiveness implies the potential waste of the woman as object (her true role being to please the male gaze) rather than as war casualty. As Nancy Wake amounted to a ‘beautiful Australian girl’ for Jackson, Violette Szabo was a ‘lovely young woman’ and Noor Inayat Khan is described as ‘a beautiful charming girl’ (Jackson 1976:121).

9. John Chartres has described the ad hoc precariousness of the parachute preparation at Dunham House, Cheshire where both Odette and Violette trained. ‘The training for secret agents needing to learn how to parachute was in fact pretty brisk and quick … they would be collected early in the morning and driven to the Parachute School … and either do a jump from a Whitley … or go through one or more of the “simulators”. They MIGHT have time to practice dropping through “The Hole” of an old Whitley fuselage’ (Chartres n.d.:19).

10. Noor Inayat Khan's torture and brutalization was only revealed after Vera Atkins's post-war investigations. She was shot at Dachau in 1944 with three others: Yolande Beekman, Eliane Plewman and Madeleine Dammerment. Colonel Hippolyte John Wickey took a deposition from a German officer that described ‘a group of four women, three typical French and one looking more of a Creole type … they were all kicked several times before being shot’. Khan was singled out for worse treatment probably due to her skin colour. ‘The Creole was kept outside, chained and almost naked. She was subjected to ridicule, was slapped and kicked several times, apparently by this same man who was very fond of this type of sport … the next day, rather than drag her along to the crematorium, they gave her some more rough handling. Finally in a cell they shot her with a small pistol and dead or half dead she was carried by some other inmates and thrown into the furnace’ (Helm 2005:416). Both Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe were sent to Ravensbrück with Szabo in August 1944. In January 1945, all three were shot one by one. Bloch and Rolfe were carried to the place of execution on stretchers and their clothing and bodies burned. Andrée Borrel together with Sonia Olschanezky, Diana Rowden and Vera Leigh were killed with a phenol injection and their bodies burned. Sarah Helm quotes Atkins's interrogation notes on Franz Berg, the Natzweiler crematorium stoker, from her personal papers: ‘Two SS orderlies in white coats, names unknown, took women swiftly from the Zellenbau to the crematorium past Berg's door to the next room. Women undressed as ready for bed. No words were spoken and no resistance from three but fourth woman resisted loudly and was shut up and forcibly dragged into room. Berg heard groans. Women were only for minutes next door then dragged along corridor … Fourth woman placed on bed next door asked, “Pourqoui?” Answer: “Pour typhus”’ (238–9). Berg always asserted that they had not been dead when placed in the ovens and were in effect burned alive.

11. Peggy Knight was praised as ‘Mrs Smith’ in the Sunday Express of 19 January 1947 (Binney 2002:263–4).

12. Binney celebrates many of these agents.

13. The Churchill's marriage dissolved after ten years.