SHADOW WARRIORS OF WORLD WAR II

Nonfiction

Feminine until the fighting starts

SHADOW WARRIORS OF WORLD WAR II:
The Daring Women of the OSS and SOE

By Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis

304 pp. Chicago Review Press

Reviewed by Diane Diekman

During World War II, an underground army of spies and saboteurs was organized and controlled by Great Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), along with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the United States. Women, who have been “shadow warriors” in many wars, were recruited for this effort. Shadow Warriors of World War II: the Daring Women of the OSS and SOE tells the story of some of these courageous operatives and their fates. Authors Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis wanted to answer these questions: “How was intelligence handled in one of the greatest and most terrible events in history, World War II? Who were the men who formed the clandestine forces and realized women should be among their most important foot soldiers? And who were the women they chose?”

Prime Minister Winston Churchill established the SOE in 1940, with Brigadier Colin McVean Gubbins in charge. They agreed that women must be recruited and trained as secret agents. “Women must be able to pass as locals and be sufficiently trained on how to survive among the German occupiers,” Gubbins summarized the effort. “They will pass on to Resistance fighters the knowledge they will have received.” In addition to guns, explosives, and wireless telegraphy, “armed combat and silent killing must be included in their training. They must be taught to a level that shows they are equally as capable as their male counterparts.”

One of those women was Violette Szabo, a Frenchwoman who wanted to avenge her soldier husband’s death. Concerning her actions in a battle between Resistance fighters and the Germans, the authors write, “Szabo’s courage has never been disputed. She continued firing until she ran out of ammunition. When two soldiers dragged her to an SS officer for a summary interrogation, she spat in his face.” Hundreds of prisoners were put on trains to Germany after D-Day in 1944. Szabo and two other female SOE agents “were executed in the crematorium yard of Ravensbruck by an SS lance corporal with a pistol.”

Elizabeth Devereaux Rochester, a wealthy American living in France, started her service as an ambulance driver and an escort to help downed Royal Air Force pilots escape to the coast. She later trained and led Resistance forces in actions such as demolition of train locomotives. Known as “La Grande” because of her height and regal bearing, she was eventually arrested in Paris and imprisoned by Gestapo forces. Being unable to tie her to a spy network, they left her in prison. She was released after the liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944.

New Zealander Nancy Wake became one of the Gestapo’s most-wanted foreign agents because of her work with the French Resistance. She considered herself a “normal young woman” who learned “male skills” to take the fight to the enemy. She eventually had 7,000 Resistance fighters under her control to set explosives, attack German convoys, and even raid Gestapo headquarters. “She is the most feminine woman I know until the fighting starts,” one Resistance leader said. “Then she is like five men.” After the war, she received medals from Great Britain, the United States, France, Australia, and New Zealand.

Pearl Witherington did not get her medal. Although recommended for the British Military Cross, she could not get it because she was a woman. She received a civilian MBE, which she returned with a note that said, “I spent a year in the field and had I been caught I would have been shot, or worse still, sent to a concentration camp. I consider it most unjust to be given a civilian decoration.” She said there was nothing “civil” about her work.

“But there were also women who openly used their sexuality to obtain information,” the authors tell us. “Most notably of these was Betty Pack, who worked for both the SOE and the Americans, becoming the OSS’s famed agent code-named Cynthia. Pack knew that men held the secrets she wanted and that sex was the way to make them divulge what they knew.” One of her first achievements, in 1942, was to enable the copying of Vichy naval ciphers locked in the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C. She and her lover simulated an all-night tryst while code books were passed through the window to be copied and returned. This action helped the OSS unlock Vichy communications around the world.

President Franklin Roosevelt had ordered formation of the OSS six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was responding to the recommendation of Bill Donovan, a Medal of Honor recipient in the First World War, who designed the organization and became its leader. “The president’s pen paved the way for American women to operate behind enemy lines along with the SOE,” the authors explain. 

Thomas and Lewis, both published historians, have done exhaustive research to bring to light this important and little-known aspect of World War II. There are so many warriors in Shadow Warriors that it is impossible to remember and follow all the characters. The index is helpful for tracking individuals. How these women were recruited, who recruited and trained them, and how well they served are detailed in riveting stories. The authors also describe how traitors and the German enemy brought the networks down. There is no shortage of suspense and agony, all written in a smooth and easy-to-read style. The knowledge of a World War II history buff, especially of the war in France, is incomplete without Shadow Warriors of World War II: the Daring Women of the OSS and SOE.

--Diane Diekman is a retired U.S. Navy captain who grew up in South Dakota and currently lives in Sioux Falls. Her biographies are Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story and Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins.