8. From Housewife in Rural England to Spy in Nazi-Occupied Europe
Many women actively participated in WWII. Few, however, followed the strange path of British housewife Odette Sansom, who went from raising her girls in bucolic England to sneaking into German-occupied France as a spy. In 1942, Odette, a housewife and mother of three girls in Somerset, England, heard a British Admiralty broadcast appeal for French coast photographs. Raised in northern France, she had some photos. She sent them, but to the wrong address: the War Office, instead of the Admiralty. She attracted the attention of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), an organization of clandestine agents and spies, that swiftly recruited her. A few months later, Odette was inserted into occupied France, as a member of an SOE cell. What followed were harrowing adventures, narrow escapes, romance, capture, torture by the Gestapo, and stints in concentration camps. By the time it was all over, she became WWII’s most highly decorated spy.
Odette was a bit of an oddity when she arrived in France: few women served undercover with the SOE at the time. Her first mission was to arrange room and board for her SOE network’s radio operator, who lacked a necessary ration card. She managed that and other early assignments. Then, things got complicated just a week after her arrival. In November, 1942, the Germans reacted to the recent Allied landings in North Africa, and invaded and occupied the nominally independent rump France, in which Odette operated. Odette’s network already had plenty of internal strife, and the new conditions made things worse. She was kept busy with her secret courier work between the SOE and various Resistance groups, 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.
