“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 lone-legged thirty-five-year-old desk clerk on a blind mission into wartime France was on paper an almost insane gamble. Her mission, code named Operation Geologist 5, would expose her to grinding fear and the perpetual likelihood of a grisly death. To survive she must live a double life to perfection and avoid capture at all costs.”
I’m Betty Martin with "Martin’s Must Reads" and that’s a quote from Sonia Purcell’s book A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy who Helped Win World War II."
Virginia was one of the first British agents of the SOE (Special Operations Executive) to successfully infiltrate Nazi occupied France with the goal to build up the French Resistance and help Britain when they invaded. She began by setting up safe houses and means of communication and organizing agents.
As the war intensified she helped to free agents and to step up the sabotage campaign. When the British recalled her, saying France had become too dangerous for her, she convinced the American spy agency to send her back. She was the “eyes and ears of the Allies across most of France” and cultivated the support of hundreds of men and women in France.
One chapter recounts how she helped twelve prisoners of war successfully escape from the Mauzac prison. Her work is accredited with helping to pave the way for the Allied recapture of Paris.
If you want to read about a “true hero of the French Resistance”...then you must read A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purcell.
