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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

8. Hunted by German Dogs

German military canines. Digital Cosmonaut

In late 1942, Odette was almost captured when a French Resistance contact, tasked with finding an out-of-the-way landing area, screwed up. The site was supposed to be suitable for the nighttime landing of a modified Hudson bomber, which was to airlift an SOE operative and four French generals back to Britain. Ineptly, the contact selected an airfield located about a thousand yards from a German antiaircraft battery.

A new landing site was selected, this one an abandoned airfield about 500 miles away. After dodging Germans and collaborationist Vichy police, Odette and her party made it to the airfield, only to discover that the control tower and a nearby barracks were occupied by German troops. It was a trap, and the party was forced to scatter, with Germans hot on their tail. Odette crashed into bushes, with German dogs snapping at her heels. She plunged into an icy stream, and battled the freezing current to the other side, before she finally shook off her pursuers.

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.