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The War That Lasted 38 Minutes and Other Fascinating Warfare History

Khalid Elhassan November 18, 2021 35 min

Destroyed Ottoman equipment and carriages after the 1918 Battle of Megiddo. Imperial War Museums

The SOE used Lysanders to secretly infiltrate operatives at night into Nazi-occupied Europe. Brooks Aviation Art

21. A Princess Infiltrates Nazi-Occupied France

In the dark of the night of June 16 – 17, 1943, Assistant Section Officer Noor Inayat Khan, was infiltrated into Nazi-occupied France. Codenamed Madeline and furnished with fake identity documents that named her as Jeanne-Marie Regnier, she boarded a black-painted Westland Lysander. It flew her and two other female SOE agents to a clandestine airfield in the countryside. There, they were met by French SOE agent Henri Dericourt, who coordinated air operations between Britain and clandestine networks on the ground in France.

Dericourt’s service with the SOE was controversial. After the war, accusations were made that he had been a traitor and double agent. It was alleged that he had worked for the Sicherheitdienst (SD), the intelligence arm of the Nazi SS, and that he had betrayed numerous SOE agents and French Resistance members to the Germans. He was tried on the charges and was acquitted. However, suspicions lingered and surrounded him to the end of his life. They included suspicions that he had betrayed Noor Inayat Khan.

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.