After writing a novel about the French Revolution, my appetite for research had been whetted. Apart from family anecdotes – my father was at Dunkirk and fought in the desert and Italy – I knew shamingly little about the Second World War and decided to do something about it. Very rapidly, I learnt that it was a complicated war fought on many fronts. This included the secret arenas of which one was the Special Operations Executive whose agents went into the occupied territories to gather intelligence, commit acts of sabotage and to train resistance armies.

The subject was catnip to this novelist, and it fascinated me that, among other things, what marked out the SOE was its willingness to use women for this kind of work. Many of these remarkable female agents (along with their equally astonishing male colleagues) did not return from the field and what they achieved behind the enemy lines resulted in some of the most poignant and intriguing stories of the war.

What were their motivations of these women – desire for escape, frustration at conventional female roles, intense patriotism? How did some of them leave children behind knowing their life expectancy was, in the case of radio operators, down to the six weeks or so? If you lived and returned, how did you negotiate the rest of your life?

I set Light of the Moon in the French Dordogne, an area which I knew and introduced an element into it which I drew from family history i.e. my aunt marrying a German directly after the war which made me consider where the lines of patriotism and duty should be drawn but I referred often to the notes below which I made about five of those women.

No white mouse but a lioness

At the outbreak of the war, New Zealand born Nancy Wake was married to a Frenchman and living in Marseilles. Immediately, she began working resistance work and was so successful at it that the infuriated Germans nicknamed her ‘the white mouse’. Mouse-like she was not, being something of a bombshell  – one of her fellow SOE colleagues said she was the sexiest woman he had ever met. Forced to flee France, she left behind her husband who was tortured horribly before being shot leaving behind the message: ‘tell Nancy I love her and did not betray her’. Her determination and bravery were spotted by the SOE and she was recruited into the organization. In April 1944, she was parachuted into the Auvergne and ended up leading a resistance army. On one occasion, her 7000 strong group of maquisards battled with 22,000 SS soldiers and inflicted 1,400 casualties on them. she took a German officer as a lover for operational reasons and was apparently heard to say: ‘of course, I will have to kill him.’ She did indeed betray him which led to him being shot. Her maquisards revered her and, after the war, she was awarded several decorations, including the George medal, dying in 2011 at the age of 98.

If Cuthbert Troublesome, Eliminate Him

A US citizen and a linguist, Virginia Hall lost a leg in a shooting accident and often referred to her wooden prosthesis as ‘Cuthbert’.  Undaunted by this, she worked for the SOE in Vichy France  and was so successful that the Germans put ‘the limping lady’ on their most wanted list. By November 1942, her luck was running out and she knew she had to escape and signalled to SOE home station that she hoped Cuthbert would not give her trouble. Back came the reply ‘If Cuthbert troublesome, eliminate him’. In March 1944, now working for the American OSS and with a codename of ‘Diane’, she returned to France (legend has it she parachuted back in with her leg in her knapsack) and disguised herself as an elderly milkmaid with grey hair and long skirts. In this persona, she organized sabotage, gathered intelligence and trained the underground army so that when D-Day arrived the Resistance was in a position to sabotage German movements and to hinder the German defence against the allies’ landings.  Remarkably, she survived and, back in the States, she married a fellow OSS agent and, having worked for the CIA until she retired, died in 1982.

The Life That I Have…

As a bilingual war widow and new mother, Violette Szabo’s patriotism and her grief and anger at the death of her French husband drove her to join the SOE where she was adored for her bravery and, as one eye witness put it, her ‘infectious laughter’. Many also reckoned that, among so many good-looking women agents, she was perhaps the most beautiful.  Leo Marks, SOE’s legendary codemaster, fell under her spell and gave Violette his poem ‘The Life that I Have’  (which he had written in memory of his own fiancée ) to use for her codes. She was parachuted into the highly dangerous Rouen area in April 1944 and, having made her reconnaissance, she got herself to Paris where she coolly shopped for clothes and perfume. Early into her second mission in August 1944, and hobbled by an injured ankle, she was captured by a Panzer division and repeatedly interrogated and, later, transported to Germany. On the train, which was being bombed by the allies, she managed to crawl to the lavatories to bring water to desperately thirsty male prisoners. In Ravensbruck where conditions were brutal a fellow prisoner said of her: ‘she always had such strength and never complained’. Another recalls her ‘talking incessantly about “my baby, my baby”. In February 1945, aged twenty-three, she was executed with two other SOE girls. Violette was awarded a posthumous George Cross and her biography, Carve Her Name with Pride, was made into a successful film. She was also chosen as the face for the memorial to the SOE on London’s South Bank.

‘I am willing to pay the price…’

British-born Monica de Wichfeld was married to a Danish landowner with three children when the Nazi’s invaded in April 1940. Many Danes were prepared to put up with the occupiers, Monica was not. She set about distributing anti-German literature and, after she met a Danish SOE agent, worked with him to build up a network of agents and saboteurs. More than once, the elegant Monica would row secretly across her husband’s lake late at night with parachuted in guns and explosives in order to hide them on the estate. When the call came in September 1943 to round up the Jews, Monica was forbidden by her leaders for safety reasons to help to smuggle them out of Denmark. She ignored their commands and was instrumental in the escape of many to Sweden, passing off some as her servants.  Greatly at risk, she was urged to flee Denmark but she declared: ‘I am willing to pay the price’. Betrayed by a colleague,  she was arrested and interrogated in January 1944 but never betrayed her fellow resistance workers and sentenced to death. However, so strongly was Monica identified with a resurgent Danish patriotism that the Germans were afraid of unrest if the sentence was carried out. Instead, she was transported to Waldheim in the Reich where she died of pneumonia in February 1945. Her daughter, Varinka, also worked for the SOE but it appears her sons did not – an intriguing and potentially explosive and divisive family situation which I explored in my novel I Can’t Begin to Tell You.

‘I wish some Indians would win high military distinction…’

SOE’s first female clandestine wireless operator, Noor Inyat Khan’s Indian father was a Sufi leader and her mother was American. Growing up in France, she immersed herself in music, art and Sufism and this background contributed to the mix of innocence and ferocious integrity and courage which characterized Noor. Trained in signals in the WAAFs, she was recruited by an SOE desperate for ratio operators and, in June 1943 with the code name Madeleine, was sent into Paris to join the PROSPER network, many of whose members were rounded up shortly after her arrival. Knowing there was a dearth of radio operators, she refused to leave France and transmitted under terrifying conditions from July until (almost certainly betrayed) her arrest in October. Her code books captured, the Germans transmitted on her radio and, despite being nicknamed ‘Bang Away Lulu’ because of her heavy handed ‘fist’, the discrepancies were not picked up by SOE headquarters.  Silent under interrogation and refusing to sign a promise not to escape, she was eventually transported to Dachau where – and the details vary as to how but is likely she was beaten to a pulp before being shot and thrown into the ovens –  she met her death in 1944. Allegedly, her last word was ‘liberté’. When war first broke out, Noor said: ‘I wish some Indians would win high military distinction… it would help to make a bridge between the English people and the Indians’. Her bravery and sacrifice more than achieved this and she was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the George Cross.

I am grateful to the sources below for above information. Any mistakes are mine.

• A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE  by Sarah Helm (Abacus)
• Between Silk and Cyanide: The Story of SOE’s Code War by Leo Marks (Sutton)
• Monica: Heroine of the Danish Resistance  by Christine Sutherland (Canongate)

Elizabeth Buchan is the author of Light of the Moon the Aspects of History Fiction Book of the Month. You can read more of her work here.