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Overlooked Important WWII Figures from History

Khalid Elhassan October 20, 2019 31 min

13. Odette Gets Started

Standard SOE radio transmitter and receiver. Wikimedia

Upon arrival in southern France, Odette Sansom’s first task was to arrange room and board for her SOE network’s radio operator, who had no ration card – a necessity at the time. She pulled that off and other early assignments, but things got hairy barely a week after her arrival, in November of 1942. That was when the Germans, reacting to the Allied landings in North Africa, invaded and occupied the nominally independent rump France, in which Odette and her SOE network operated.

The new conditions worsened the network’s internal strife. Odette was kept busy with her secret courier work between the SOE and various Resistance elements, while the network descended into chaos. That led to sloppy security work, which almost got Odette captured by the Germans during a failed attempt to arrange a clandestine night time airplane landing.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.