I attended the best schools and colleges on the east coast but wanted to continue my studies in Europe. I studied in France, Germany and Austria, finally landing a job as a consular official at the American embassy in Warsaw. I accidentally shot myself in the left leg in a hunting accident in Turkey, and it was eventually amputated from the knee down and replaced with a prosthetic wooden leg I nicknamed Cuthbert. I resigned from the Department of State in 1939.
The same year I was in Paris as war arrived there. I joined the Ambulance Service before the fall of France and ended up in Vichy-controlled territory when the fighting stopped in the summer of 1940. I made my way to London and volunteered for Britain’s newly formed Special Operations Executive, which sent me back to Vichy in August 1941. I spent the next 15 months there, helping to coordinate the activities of the French underground in Vichy and the occupied zone of France. When the Germans suddenly seized all of France in November 1942, I escaped to Spain by crossing the Pyrenees mountains on foot.
Back in London in July 1943 I was quietly made a Member of the Order of the British Empire. The British had wanted to recognize my contribution with a higher honor but were afraid it might compromise my identity as I was then still active as an operative.
In 1944 I joined the Office of Strategic Services. In March 1944, after mastering Morse code and wireless radio operation, I returned to France as an operative. The OSS landed me from a British motor torpedo boat in Brittany (my artificial leg kept me from parachuting in). I eluded the Gestapo and contacted the French Resistance in central France. I mapped drop zones for supplies and commandos from England, found safe houses, and linked up with a Jedburgh team after the allied forces landed at Normandy. I helped train three battalions of Resistance forces to wage guerrilla warfare against the Germans and kept up a stream of valuable reporting until Allied troops overtook my small band in September.
The Gestapo once declared me "the most dangerous of all Allied spies" who had to be destroyed.
In 1945 Wild Bill Donovan personally awarded me the Distinguished Service Cross.
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Here's the game: I give you clues and you try to guess what more or less famous person I'm talking about. The clues are written in the first person, but they weren't really written by that person, they were written by me. A sample clue would be: I was the first pilot to make a successful solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic "the hard way," i.e. from East to West. When you are ready to see the answer, click on "comments" and the answer will appear in a new window.
1 comment:
The answer is Virginia Hall.
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