Spies played a key role in securing victory for the Allies in World War II. From the spy who saved key Allied leaders from assassination, to clandestine operatives inserted into France before D-Day, to spies who tricked the Nazis into making the wrong military deployments, espionage was vital to the war’s outcome. Below are twenty things about those spies and other fascinating undercover agents who paved the way for Allied victory in WWII.
20. Operation Sussex – the Spies Who Set the Stage for Allied Victory on D-Day
In the runup to D-Day, the Allies mounted Operation Sussex to spy on the German military before and after the 1944 Normandy landings. It was an ambitious joint venture of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), and the Free French Bureau Central de Renseignements et d’Action (BCRA). 104 spies volunteered for the hazardous mission to infiltrate into Nazi-occupied France, and report back with their on-the-ground observations about the Wehrmacht’s deployments. Their numbers included 22-year-old Evelyne Claire Clopet.
Born in Pornic, France, the daughter of a merchant marine captain, Clopet joined her parents in Morocco early in WWII. After the Allied Torch landings liberated French North Africa, she joined the Free French intelligence arm. Commissioned as a second lieutenant, she spent a year working on transmissions and communications in Algeria. When word arrived that the Allies were in desperate need of spies for hazardous duty in occupied France, she volunteered for Operation Sussex. Flown to England in February, 1944, she was taught how to parachute, lethal close combat skills, sabotage, the identification of enemy units, radio communications, and how to send and decipher coded messages. After months of intensive training, Clopet was parachuted into German-occupied France along with a handful of other spies on the night of July 7-8, 1944.
