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The Night Witches and Other Warrior Women of World War II

Khalid Elhassan December 8, 2019 31 min

Lyudmila Pavlichenko - World War II — WWII Red Army snipers. Pintrest

10. From Housewife to Spy

In 1942, Odette Sansom, a housewife and mother of three in Somerset, England, heard a broadcast from the British Admiralty, appealing for photographs of the French coast. Odette had grown up in northern France and had some photos. So she sent them, but to the wrong address: the War Office, instead of the Admiralty. What she wrote attracted the attention of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret organization tasked by Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze!“, and they swiftly recruited her.

SOE operative Odette Sansom and her daughters. Code Name Lise

Just a few months after first hearing that Admiralty broadcast, 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, Odette Sansom would become WWII’s most highly decorated spy, of either sex.

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.