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This Housewife Became World War II’s Highly Decorated Spy

Khalid Elhassan June 12, 2019 24 min

Odette Hallowes - World War II — Odette Sansom and her daughters. Code Name Lise

13. The Risks of an SOE Operative

French gendarmes under Gestapo supervision, rounding up Jews in Marseilles for deportation. Frank Falla Archive

Odette found a convent boarding school for her daughters, and arranged for them to spend holidays with an aunt and uncle, before reporting to the SOE to commence her training. Before that, however, she had to go through an interview with Maurice Buckmaster, her F Section boss. He was amazed to discover that she had three daughters, noting that, despite her thirty years, Odette looked like a child herself. Perhaps feeling a bit guilty, he tried to make sure that she had no romantic illusions about what awaited her:

“In many ways it’s a beastly life. It will be physically hard. More than that, it will be mentally exhausting, for you will be living a gigantic lie, or series of lies, for months on end. And if you slip up and get caught, we can do little to save you“. When she asked “save me from what?“, she got the chillingly offhand reply: “Oh, from the usual sickening sort of thing; prison, the firing squad, the rope, the crematorium; from whatever happens to amuse the Gestapo“.

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.