9. Navigating Through the French Resistance’s Internal Politics Was Tricky
When Odette Sansom first arrived in France, she was a bit of an oddity, as there were not that many women serving undercover with the SOE at the time. Her first mission was to arrange room and board for her SOE network’s radio operator, who had no ration card – a necessity at the time. 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, by invading and occupying the nominally independent rump France, in which Odette operated.
Odette’s network 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.
