← Back to the front page

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

Colorized photo of Princess Noor Inayat Khan. Wikimedia

20. The Tragic End of a War Heroine

Although the average life expectancy of a clandestine wireless operator in German-occupied France was six weeks, Assistant Section Officer Noor Inayat Khan survived for longer than that. She arrived in mid-June, 1943, and lasted for nearly four months before she was arrested by the SD on October 13^th, 1943. She was betrayed to the Germans either by Henri Dericourt, or a female agent named Renee Garry, who was driven by jealousy because her love interest was attracted to Noor. Along with Noor, the Germans captured documents that allowed them to mount a counter-intelligence operation that nabbed three more SOE agents.

Noor escaped her imprisonment twice but was recaptured. After the second attempt, she was classified as a “dangerous prisoner”, and was kept in solitary confinement, with her hands and feet in shackles. Despite harsh conditions and harsher interrogations, Noor refused to give the Nazis anything. After ten months of cruel confinement, she was sent to Dachau Concentration Camp, where she was brutally beaten by an SS officer, before she was shot to death on September 13th, 1944. An inmate who witnessed her death stated that her last words were “Liberte”. After the war, Noor Inayat Khan was posthumously awarded the British George Cross and the French Croix de Guerre.

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.