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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

9. Navigating the Tricky Intricacies of the French Resistance

An SOE radio transmitter and receiver. Wikimedia

When she arrived in southern France, Odette Sansom’s 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 of 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.

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.