D-Day Girls Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Rose

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Crown, Sarah Rose.

  Title: D-Day girls : the untold story of the female spies who helped win World War Two / by Sarah Rose.

  Other titles: D-Day girls, the untold story of the female spies who helped win WWII | Untold story of the female spies who helped win World War Two

  Description: First edition. | New York : Crown, 2019 | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018038372 | ISBN 9780451495082 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451495099 (pbk.)

  Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Secret service—Great Britain. | Women spies—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Women spies—Great Britain—Biography. | Odette, 1912–1995. | Borrel, Andrée, 1919–1944 | Baissac, Lise de, 1905–2004 | Espionage, British—France—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—France. | World War, 1939–1945—Women—Great Britain.

  Classification: LCC D810.S7 C766 2019 | DDC 940.54/864109252—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018038372

  ISBN 9780451495082

  Ebook ISBN 9780451495105

  Map by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Cover design by Elena Giavaldi

  Cover illustration by Mark Stutzman

  v5.4

  ep

  For Gerald Rose. He fought for Title IX.

  Gloucester: Is Paris lost? Is Rouen yielded up?

  If Henry were recall’d to life again,

  These news would cause him once more yield the ghost.

  Exeter: How were they lost? What treachery was used?

  Messenger: No treachery; but want of men and money.

  —William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1, act 1, scene 1

  Tout simplement, mon colonel, parce que les hommes les avaient laissé tomber.

  I took up arms, “quite simply, Colonel, because the men had dropped them.”

  —Marguerite Gonnet, at trial, 1942

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Character Chart

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1: God Help Us

  CHAPTER 2: Ungentlemanly Warfare

  CHAPTER 3: A First-Class Agent

  CHAPTER 4: The Queen of the Organization

  CHAPTER 5: Merde alors!

  CHAPTER 6: To the Very Last Man

  PART II

  CHAPTER 7: A Thousand Dangers

  CHAPTER 8: The Dark Years

  CHAPTER 9: Alone in the World

  CHAPTER 10: Robert est arrivé

  CHAPTER 11: The Paris of the Sahara

  CHAPTER 12: Our Possibilities

  CHAPTER 13: The Demolition Must Never Fail

  CHAPTER 14: An Obstinate Woman

  CHAPTER 15: An Endless Calvary

  CHAPTER 16: The Swap

  CHAPTER 17: The Dog Sneezed on the Curtains

  CHAPTER 18: Hunted

  CHAPTER 19: When the Hour of Action Strikes

  PART III

  CHAPTER 20: Kisses

  CHAPTER 21: A Patriotic Profession

  CHAPTER 22: A Little Braver

  CHAPTER 23: The Sighing Begins

  CHAPTER 24: Death on One Side, Life on the Other

  CHAPTER 25: Your Mind Goes on Thinking

  EPILOGUE: A Useful Life

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Character Chart

  Andrée Borrel

  FIELD NAME: Denise

  OPERATIONAL NAME: Whitebeam

  COVER IDENTITY: Monique Urbain

  Lise de Baissac

  FIELD NAME: Odile

  OPERATIONAL NAME: Artist

  COVER IDENTITIES: Irène Brisée, Jeanette Bouville

  Odette Sansom

  FIELD NAME: Lise

  OPERATIONAL NAME: Clothier

  COVER IDENTITY: Odette Metayer

  Yvonne Rudellat

  FIELD NAME: Suzanne

  OPERATIONAL NAME: Soaptree

  COVER IDENTITIES: Jacqueline Viallet, Jacqueline Gauthier, Jacqueline Culioli

  Mary Herbert

  FIELD NAME: Claudine

  OPERATIONAL NAME: Corvette

  COVER IDENTITY: Marie Louise Vernier

  Francis Suttill

  FIELD NAME: Prosper

  OPERATIONAL NAME: Physician

  COVER IDENTITY: François Desprez

  Gilbert Norman

  FIELD NAME: Archambaud

  OPERATIONAL NAME: Butcher

  COVER IDENTITY: Gilbert Aubin

  Peter Churchill

  FIELD NAMES: Michel, Raoul

  OPERATIONAL NAME: Spindle

  COVER IDENTITIES: Pierre Marc Chauvet, Pierre Chambrun

  Claude de Baissac

  FIELD NAME: David

  OPERATIONAL NAME: Scientist

  COVER IDENTITIES: Clement Bastable, Michel Rouault, Claude Marc Boucher

  Part I

  CHAPTER 1

  God Help Us

  London

  Under the eternal gaze of Admiral Lord Nelson, high on a stone column in the center of London, Mrs. Odette Sansom raced toward her appointment at the War Office. The one-eyed, one-armed hero of Trafalgar got pelted in the rain, a bronze memorial to the glory that was Pax Britannica, many bloody conflicts removed from the London of July 10, 1942.

  It was the 1,043rd day of the world’s worst war.

  Much of the city lay in ruins, a ragged collection of gaps and edifices, like a child’s mouth after a lost tooth. Odette tilted her hat against the unremitting damp and sprinted past the admiral’s brass lions as if spirit alone could somehow put London to rights, so that it might smile again.

  Upon meeting Odette, Londoners were confronted with her Gallic élan, her essential Frenchness. She was self-consciously prettier than her English peers: big chestnut eyes, a “fresh complexion” framed by dark hair that was pulled high off her heart-shaped face and hung loose down her neck. Her light coat was cinched with a belt, the only burst of color in an otherwise bland London rain-scape; the city was full of uniforms—soldiers, sailors, airmen. The entire world had gone drab. Although she had lived in England for much of her adult life, Odette never shed her Continental air, nor did she care to; frosty Britain seemed indifferent to sex and to women. With an inextinguishable flair for the theatrical, Odette preened and men in khaki swooned. It was said she even smiled in French.

  The Victoria Hotel was a grande dame on mothballs, requisitioned for war work as the administrative home of the War Office. There were no bellhops to greet Odette; the twinkling chandeliers were packed off to safe storage; the building was dingy and practical like everything else. There were no dandies sharing cigarettes in the pink marble lobby; it was still busy, but with clerks and sergeants, men in mufti held back from the front, the old, the broken, those unsuited for battle, those too useful to be sacrificed. Someone had to run the war.

  Odette arrived on account of a typed invitation—her second from the War Office:

  Dear Madam,

  Your name has been passed to me with the suggestion that you have qualifications and information which may be of value in a phase of the war effort.

  If you are available for interview, I should be glad to see you at the above address at 1100 hrs on Friday 10th July.

  Would you let me know whether you can come or not?

  Yours truly,

  Selwyn Jepson

  Captain

  For an unhappily married woman in the third year of the war, the letter on government stationery was rife with potential. At a minimum, Odette’s appointment afforded a precious afternoon alone; there was a new film opening in Leicester Square, Mrs. Miniver, the story of how English housewives contribute to the war by coping, how matriarchs move mountains while men are at the front. There was window-shopping to do, though, as elsewhere in Europe, very little could be bought under rations on a husband’s service pay. At best, the letter might rearrange Odette’s life a little, for what “qualifications and information” could the army need but her native French-language skills? Perhaps the War Office sought translators. Or secretaries. She was not too old to type at speed, or she could write letters to prisoners of war in France. That would be a very worthy service.

  Odette did not know what would be asked of her, and the captain’s note gave away little. If the War Office had something practical in mind, she was determined to be useful.

  * * *

  Odette lived in the soggy countryside of Somerset. Only thirty
years old, she was a single parent to three young daughters—Lily, Françoise, and Marianne—while her husband, Roy, was enlisted in the fight against Hitler. Roy was the son of the English soldier who billeted with her family during the Great War, and she had married him young—too young—at eighteen, practically an infant herself, she reckoned, so silly and adolescent; she panicked on her wedding night and refused to leave for her honeymoon. Instead, she dragged her mother and mother-in-law to the cinema.

  War had marked Odette’s entire young life. She was only four years old when her father was killed at the Battle of Verdun, just days before the armistice that ended World War I. He was one of 300,000 dead, a shameful, aching waste. The children of the interwar years came of age in a wounded Europe, still bleeding from the sores of Flanders and the Somme. France felt crippled by German brutality; Germany felt likewise about her neighbors’ punitive reparations. Fatherless Odette was raised in her grandparents’ house, her Sundays a litany of mandatory graveside visits and church offerings beside her widowed mother. As with so many daughters of the Great War, trauma altered Odette; it made her at once sweet and hard, vulnerable and ferocious.

  As an adult, married but alone and mothering in England, the Blitz forced Odette to abandon the bustle of city life for the safety of green and empty farmlands. In 1940 and 1941, London’s nights were pierced by bombs and lit by searchlights; the sky was a daily fireworks show of flares and flames. Had she stayed, the baby would have been fitted for a gas mask; she would have learned to distinguish between the sounds of a parachute mine and an anti-aircraft gun, even as she became bilingual in French and English. Somerset was better for the girls.

  Odette’s days were now an endless series of country rituals: queuing at the baker, counting out ration coupons, mending clothes when fabric was impossible to get. Propaganda posters extolled the virtue of thrift: “I’m as patriotic as can be—and ration points don’t worry me!” The message was so bleak. “Go through your wardrobe. Make do and mend.” Odette had been fashionable once, a dressmaker who could pin-tuck and pleat some ooh-la-la into any ensemble, but there was no one left to look pretty for now that she was in rural exile. “Austerity Clothes for the Fourth Year of the War,” exclaimed women’s weeklies; jackets without trimmings and “skirts without sin” were to be applauded. Odette longed for the thrill of London, the pleasure of companionship and attention. Rustic mothering and monasticism did not suit her. It was an unexceptional life for an energetic woman.

  * * *

  Captain Selwyn Jepson sat at his desk in the War Office, room 055a—previously known as Victoria Hotel, room 238—a former bedroom so small that it might have been a broom closet. Shorn of any glamour for the sake of utility, the room contained only one amenity: a sink basin. There was no furniture to speak of, save for an army-issue wood table and two plain chairs. The sparseness was deliberate, at the behest of the captain, who ordered the interview room emptied of everything that might hint of officialdom or even comfort. He was not there to chitchat or to shield himself from visitors behind a big desk. He wanted nothing to get in the way of absolute trust: no separation, status, or rank—unless, of course, he was interviewing a service member, at which point he donned his uniform out of respect.

  Captain Jepson looked down his nose at the file sitting before him. Mrs. Sansom had no apparent enemy affiliation; His Majesty’s Government found nothing objectionable: “Nothing Recorded Against.” In other words, she possessed no criminal record. Scotland Yard and the MI5 security service had apparently decided she was an acceptable candidate for an interview. It was not piercing enough for his standards, to be sure. He would unearth objections, should they exist.

  Full Christian Names: Odette Marie Celine

  Nationality: British

  Nationality at Birth: French

  Upon her marriage, Odette became English by way of a legal concept known as coverture, meaning she was covered by her husband’s legal standing; she became part of him the way a hand is part of the body.

  Odette’s file was opened on account of her keenness to help the war effort. In March 1942, an urgent call went out on the BBC evening news: The navy wanted photos of the French coast. On the 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. broadcasts, wedged between Proms concerts and news in Norwegian, the announcer explained that even the most boring souvenir photos would help. Trivial and mundane scrapbooks could turn the battle in Europe, and as went Europe, so followed the world. The announcement was one of many patriotic calls to service that year; the next morning Britons responded with some thirty thousand envelopes, including ten million vacation snaps.

  Odette also heeded the call. She donated her family photographs to the government, a collection of snapshots of herself as a young girl on the wide beaches near her native Amiens, of picnics and parasols, sand castles and beach shacks, of her brother, her mum, her grandparents, even a father she never got to know, the plain and ordinary reminders of summers long past.

  The smallest details mattered in the world’s largest war. A top secret department at Oxford was at that moment pulling together a detailed map of the French shoreline. While England had ample information on France—Michelin maps, Baedekers narrating every harbor village, and nautical charts sounding every depth—the Admiralty required more specialized intelligence. To plan an invasion, the navy had to render a depiction of the country from wave height, from the prow of an incoming landing craft. The Inter Services Topographical Department (ISTD) was creating a comprehensive picture of the entire French coast and the Low Countries. The navy had to know what the harbors and beaches looked like, the gradient of each sloping dune, winding road, trickling river, any landscape feature that could yield insight into the water supply, blind spots, and approaches. No small-scale commando raid or aerial photographer could possibly produce such a map; the only way to get a broad picture was to cobble one together out of Britons’ prewar holidays. A cast of researchers at the Bodleian Library pored over the scrapbook bounty, taking photographs of photographs, then returned the albums to their rightful owners, who never knew what images had been preserved or even entirely why. The ISTD built a photo mosaic, a montage of family memories, and stitched the panorama together for a colossal topographical quilt. It was the platform for a battle plan of the Allied invasion of Europe. England was at war, and the last battlefield would be France.

  Odette’s photographs were of no military value whatsoever. Her childhood snapshots never even found their way to the Naval War Library. Upon hearing the call on the BBC, Odette mailed her photos to the War Office, not the Admiralty; she was a non-native English speaker who misunderstood the difference. She posted her few family pictures to the wrong branch of service.

  The machinery of military administration nevertheless churned. Postal clerks forwarded her note proffering assistance to a central registry, which funneled the information down appropriate, if opaque, channels to Captain Jepson.

  * * *

  When Odette entered the captain’s office, he rose like a man practiced in gentility. The windows were framed in heavy air raid curtains, making the close room feel even tighter; the raw light between them was harsh and electric.

  Captain Jepson was an elfin man, in a dark suit, forty-two years old with a squeaky pubescent voice. In peacetime, he was a working journalist and middling mystery novelist; at war, he was a cynic who held tightly to the fixtures of his own gloomy mind. With coffee bean eyes and slick, dark hair, his suspicions gave him the air of a man who was eternally constipated.