Women Warriors From The Sky


After the first World War and prior to the second, many countries organized airborne troopers, comprised of entirely men.

Soon after the invasions of Belgium, France and Poland, women joined their brothers of the silk to aid in the survival of their way of life.


Lise de Baissac
“Odile”
(1905 –2004)

Along with Andree Borrel, Lise de Baissac became the first two women agents to be parachuted into France.
Lise de Baissac was born in Mauritius on May 11, 1905. During the Second World War,she joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
Given the code name “Marguerite”, Baissac and Andrée Borrel, became the first women agents to be was parachuted into France on 24th September 1942. They landed in the village of Boisrenard close to the town of Mer.
After staying with the French Resistance for a couple of days Lise moved to Poiters. Over the next few months Lise acted as liaison officer between the Prosper, Scientist and Bricklayer networks.As she did not have a wireless she had to travel to Paris to send and receive messages and collect funds, or to Bordeaux where Claude de Baissac was building up the large circuit, organizing sabotage and providing reports on submarines and shipping.In June 1943, the Gestapo arrested several agents involved with the Prosper network including Andrée Borrel, Francis Suttill and Gilbert Norman, but Baissac managed to escape back to England. Lise was dropped back into France in April 1944, to work with the Pimento Circuit run by the SOE agent Anthony Brooks and joined her brother Claude de Baissac, who had gone to Normandy to reconnoitre large landing grounds that could be held for 48 hours while airborne troops established themselves. A British army officer later claimed: “The part she played in aiding the Maquis and the British underground movement in France cannot be too highly stressed and did much to facilitate the Maquis preparations and resistance prior to the American breakthrough in Mayenne.” According to her Special Operations Executive file: “She was the inspiration of groups on the Orne and by her initiative caused heavy losses to the Germans with tyre bursters on the roads near St Aubin-le-Desert, St Mars, and as far as Laval, Le Mans and Rennes. She also took part in several armed attacks on enemy columns.
Lise de Baissac was awarded the MBE in September, 1945. After the war she married Henri Villameur, an artist and interior decorator living in Marseilles.

Krystyna Skarbek
aka
Christine Granville
(1908–1952)

“Bewitching, beautiful with brilliant, brown, arresting eyes, and crackling vitality”, had “a positive nostalgie for danger” and “was miserable without a chance to meet it.” Under the nom de guerre “Madame Pauline”, Krystyna Skarbek parachuted into France carrying a map printed on silk and cyanide pills; her fearless bombast, resourcefulness and undeniable charm would be legendary. She became Winston Churchhill’s favorite spy and is rumored to be model for Vesper Lynd, Ian Fleming’s first Bond girl. She was said to be deadly with her pistol but preferred silent killing with her ever-present knife, or even her bare hands. That impish grin belied a woman capable of anything.

Born Maria Krystyna Janina on May 1, in Warsaw to Count Jerzy Skarbek, and Stefania (Goldfeder) as their second child. Called Vesper (star) by her father and taking after her father’s side of the family, the Skarbeks had saved Poland from medieval invaders and served its royal courts, she inherited the self‐assuredness, patriotism and fearlessness of her ancestors, she could be extremely persuasive, selfless and fiercely loyal, but was equally capable of cold ruthlessness. Krystyna’s love for the outdoors, skiing and horses would serve her well later in life. A “tom-boy”, she rode astride rather than side-saddle and was an expert skier with regular visits to Zakopane in the Tatra mountains of southern Poland. Another trait that put her in good stead for her future clandestine work was her ability to keep secrets; throughout her life she was careful what she divulged, even to her closest friends. Physically stunning from the very start, in 1930, Krystyna Skarbek competed in the Miss Polonia contest, placing sixth; her father died the same year. She married and divorced Karol Getlich when she was young, and married Jerzy Gizycki, an adventurer and diplomat, at the Evangelical Reformed Church in Warsaw on November 2, 1938. After marriage the couple left for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where Jerzy took up the post of Polish consul.They were in Ethiopia when German forces invaded Poland the following September. Krystyna and her husband went to London, where she volunteered to work for the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS); she had a plan: she would go to Budapest, print propaganda leaflets, and ski across the Tatra mountains into Poland to undertake intelligence missions and assist Polish resistance fighters. Reluctantly, MI6 approved the plan. Given the name Christine Granville, she departed for Budapest on December 21, 1939. She met the one-legged Polish war hero Andrzej Kowerski, and the two fell in love; he became Andrew Kennedy. With the help of a member of Poland’s Olympic ski team, she was able to cross the mountains into her native country. The Nazis considering the Tatra mountains too treacherous to cross did not guard that part of the frontier. In Warsaw, Krystyna located her mother but was unable to convince her to give up her work in the underground; she was later taken away by Gestapo and she died at Warsaw’s Pawiak prison. Helping organize a system of Polish couriers to smuggle intelligence from Warsaw to Budapest, Krystyna Skarbek’s intelligence activities were so successful that large posters with a reward for her capture were put up in every railroad station in Poland. She procured photos of German troops massing on the borders of the Soviet Union, alerting England of Germany’s upcoming invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa. (Her prediction that Germany would invade the Soviet Union came true on June 22, 1941. British prime minister Winston Churchill,who had heard Soviet leader Josef Stalin dismiss the possibility, dubbed Skarbek his favorite spy.) SOE was founded in July 1940 and Granville, her official name upon naturalization as a British subject, began her career as one of the longest serving of all Britain’s wartime women agents. She and her husband were arrested early in 1941 by the Gestapo. During her interrogation, Christine bit her own tongue hard enough to draw blood, coughed hard, and succeeded in convincing a Hungarian doctor that she was suffering from tuberculosis.
Kowerski (Kennedy) and Christine, as a result of her “illness”, were released. She was then smuggled out of Hungary in the trunk of a car belonging to British ambassador Sir Owen O’Malley, crossing successfully into Yugoslavia. O’Malley, called her”the bravest person I ever knew. She could do anything with dynamite—except eat it.” Her husband followed in an Opel he claimed to have sold to someone across the border, and the two made their way through hundreds of miles of Nazi-occupied territory to SOE headquarters in Cairo.
On July 6, 1944, she parachuted into southern France under the code-name “Pauline Armand”. Her mission was to aid the French resistance in advance of the Allied ground advance in France.
Described by the legendary intelligence officer Vera Atkins as a “beautiful animal with a great appetite for love and laughter,” her daring exploits are stuff of legend. She masterminded the escape of senior SOE agent Francis Cammaerts. Gaining the agent’s release by threatening to turn a mob loose, after the Allies liberated the region, an officer of the French collaborationist Milice, handed Cammaerts over to Granville; Cammaerts had been due to be executed on the morning of his escape. In early August 1944, after a two-day hike through the mountains she persuaded Polish conscripts in the German garrison at Col de Larche, to desert and then managed to convince the resident German troops to surrender also. Arrested and detained by enemy authorities on numerous occasions, lies, threats, bribery and even sexual coercion were all tools of the trade craft for Agent Pauline; once she and Kennedy were stopped near the Italian border by two German soldiers. Told to put her hands in the air she did so, revealing a grenade under each arm, pin withdrawn. When she threatened to drop them, killing all the group, the German soldiers fled.
After the war Christine discovered that her mother had died in prison. She returned to Cairo where she took a job at Middle East headquarters, SOE agreed to continue paying her until December 1945, Christine also gained her parachute “wings” at the RAF base in Haifa and she became a British citizen in December 1946. In May 1947 she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE). French recognition of Christine’s contribution to the liberation of France came with the award of the Croix de Guerre.
On June 15, 1952. Christine Granville was stabbed to death in the Shelbourne Hotel, in London, by Dennis George Muldowney, whose advances Christine had spurned; Muldowney was hanged at HMP Pentonville on September 30, 1952. Following Andrzej Kowerski (Andrew Kennedy)’s death in December 1988, his ashes were interred at the foot of Christine’s grave.
Her Fairbairn Sykes dagger, medals and some of her papers are now in the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum Kensington, London. In May 2017, a bronze bust, by Ian Wolter, was unveiled at the Polish Hearth Club in Kensington, London.
“Great energy and very quick thinking and very helpful and very kind, a true, real person.” Iza Muszkowska, 94 at the funeral.

Nancy Wake
“White Mouse”
(1912–2011)

Nancy Wake is credited with helping hundreds of POWs escape, was the Allies’ most decorated woman of WWII, and the Gestapo’s most-wanted. Because of her ability to evade capture, the Nazis code-named her the ‘White Mouse’. Dropped by parachute into the Auvergne region of France, the saboteur and Resistance fighter, organized an army of 7,000 Maquis guerrillas. Even without a weapon, she could be deadly. “She is the most feminine woman I know until the fighting starts. Then she is like five men”-Captain Ian Garrow. “Somebody once asked me: ‘Have you ever been afraid?’ Hah! I’ve never been afraid in my life” -at the age of 89. Born the youngest of six children, in Roseneath, Wellington, New Zealand, on August 30, 1912 to Charles Augustus and Ella Rosieur, Bancy was ‘a force of nature’. When Nancy was still in diapers, her family moved to Sydney. Nancy attended the North Sydney Household Arts School and at the age of 16, ran away from home. With £200 that she had inherited from an aunt, she journeyed to New York City, then London where she trained herself as a journalist; moving to Paris she worked for Hearst newspapers as European correspondent. “I was a loner and I had a good imagination.” In 1939 Nancy married French industrialist, Henri Fiocca, in the town hall of Marseilles. “He was the love of my life.” Living in luxury on a hill overlooking Marseilles when Germany invaded France just six months after being married, she joined the Resistance as a courier, smuggling messages and food to underground groups in Southern France. She bought an ambulance and used it to help refugees fleeing the German advance. She obtained false papers that allowed her to stay and work in the Vichy France, and spirited more than a thousand escaped prisoners of war and downed Allied fliers out of France. The Gestapo nicknamed her the “White Mouse”and by 1943, she was No.1 on the Gestapo’s most wanted list and there was a five million-franc price on her head. Being too risky for Nancy to stay in France decided she should go back to Britain. “Henri said ‘You have to leave’, and I remember going out the door saying I’d do some shopping, that I’d be back soon. And I left and I never saw him again. She learned that the Gestapo had tortured her husband to death in 1943 for refusing to disclose her whereabouts. Nancy Wake became one of 39 women and 430 men in the French Section of the British S O E. She was trained in survival skills, silent killing, codes and radio operation, night parachuting, plastic explosives, Sten guns, rifles, pistols and grenades. In late April 1944, Nancy Wake and Major John Farmer, were parachuted into France, in preparation for the D-Day invasion, to locate and organize the bands of Maquis, establish ammunition and arms caches from the parachute drops, and arrange radio communication with England. Their mission was to organize the Resistance. The Resistance movement’s principal objective was to weaken the German army for a major attack by allied troops. (Nancy’s parachute became stuck in a tree. Her agent said he hoped all trees could bear such beautiful fruit. Nancy told him not to give her ‘that French shit’.) On one occasion Nancy bicycled 500 km, in 71 hours through several German checkpoints to replace codes her wireless operator had been forced to destroy in a German raid. In June 1944, a bitter battle between 22,000 SS troops and her 7,000 Maquis resulted in 1,400 German and 100 of her own men dead. Nancy personally led a raid on Gestapo headquarters in Montucon, and silenced (killed) a sentry with her bare hands during a raid on a German gun factory. She had to shoot her way out roadblocks; and execute a German female spy. Nancy continued to work with the SOE and at the British Air Ministry in the Intelligence Department. In 1960 she married a former prisoner of war, Englishman John Forward, and returned to Australia to live. On December 6, 2001, Nancy left her home in Port Macquarie, Australia to spend her final years in her cherished England. Nancy became a resident of the Stafford Hotel in London, welcomed warmly, offered free residence and her own specially reserved bar stool, until moving to the Star and Garter forces retirement home in 2003 where she passed away eight years later on August 7. Right up to her death, she remained assertive about what would happen to her body: “I want to be cremated, and I want my ashes to be scattered over the mountains where I fought with the resistance. That will be good enough for me”. Nancy Wake – Code Name: The White Mouse

Sabiha Gökçen
(1913–2001)

Hard to believe but the world’s first female combat pilot was from a Muslim country.
Adopted by Turkish President Mustafa Atatürk in 1925, Sabiha was given the surname Gökçen meaning ‘belonging to the sky’. During an airshow of gliders and parachutists, she got very excited and Atatürk asked her whether she wanted to become a skydiver? “Yes indeed, I am ready right now”. The President instructed the head of the school to enroll her as their first female trainee.
Sabiha Gökçen (March 22, 1913 – March 22, 2001)
Sabiha’s birth and early childhood is very confusing but during Turkish President Atatürk’s visit to Bursa in 1925, her life dramatically changed. Sabiha, no last name, at only twelve years old, spoke with President Atatürk and expressed her desire to study in a boarding school. After learning of her story and about her miserable living conditions, Atatürk decided to adopt Sabiha and took her to live in the Çankaya Presidential Residence in Ankara.
She attended the Çankaya Primary School in Ankara and the Üsküdar American Academy in Istanbul.
Atatürk, who attached great importance to aviation and oversaw the foundation of the Turkish Aeronautical Association, in 1925 took Sabiha along with him to the opening ceremony of Türkkuşu (Turkishbird) Flight School on May 5, 1935. During the airshow of gliders and parachutists invited from foreign countries, she got very excited. Atatürk asked her whether she would want to become a skydiver, to which she responded: “Yes indeed, I am ready right now”. Atatürk instructed Fuat Bulca, the head of the school, to enroll her as the school’s first female jump student. That same year, Atatürk granted Turkish women full political rights, making Turkey one of the first nations in the world to give women the right to vote.
She was meant to become a skydiver, but Sabiha was more interested in flying than jumping. She made her first solo flight in 1936 and received her pilot’s license. Sabiha was sent to Russia with seven male students for an advanced course in glider and powered aircraft piloting.
A year later she joined the military aviation school at Eskisehir, becoming the first woman in the world to obtain military flight wings .
Sabiha honed her skills by flying bombers and fighters in the 1st Aircraft Regiment at Eskişehir Airbase. After participating in the Aegean and Thrace exercises in 1937, she took part in the Dersim rebellion and became the first Turkish female air force pilot to fly in combat. The General Staff citing the “serious damage” that she had inflicted with her 50 kg bomb to a group of fifty fleeing “bandits.” including killing the rebel Ieader, she was awarded with a Takdirname (letter of appreciation). She was also awarded the Turkish Aeronautical Association’s first “Murassa (Jeweled) Medal” for her superior performance in this operation.
In 1938, she carried out a five-day flight around the Balkan countries to great acclaim. In the same year, she was appointed “Chief Trainer” of the Türkkuşu Flight School of the Turkish Aeronautical Association, where she served until 1954 as a flight instructor and became a member of the association’s executive board. She trained four female aviators, Edibe Subaşı, Yıldız Uçman, Sahavet Karapas and Nezihe Viranyalı. Sabiha Gökçen continued to fly around the world until 1964. Her book entitled “A Life Along the Path of Atatürk” was published in 1981 by the Turkish Aeronautical Association to commemorate Atatürk’s 100th birthday.
Throughout her career in the Turkish Air Force, Sabiha Gökçen flew 22 different types of aircraft for more than 8,000 hours, 32 hours of which were active combat and bombardment missions.
Sabiha Gökçen International Airport in Istanbul is named after her. Sabiha died two months after the official opening of the airport, on March 22, 2001, her 88th birthday, at the Gulhane Military Medical Academy in Ankara.
She was selected as the only female pilot for the poster of “The 20 Greatest Aviators in History” published by the United States Air Force in 1996.

Lilian Rolfe
(1914-1945)

Lilian and her twin sister Helen Fedora Rolfe were the daughters of George Rolfe, in Paris. She and Helen came to England for summer school to learn English and spoke French at home. When the twins were 17 in 1930, the family moved to Brazil with Lilian and Helen “finishing school” there.[She worked for the Canadian Embassy but when the war started she changed to the British Embassy. She completed courses in first aid and Morse code. At the onset of World War II, Lilian worked at the British Embassy in Rio de Janeiro;before going to London, England in 1943 to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. Because of her fluency in French, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive(SOE),where she was trained as a wireless operator.

Following the D-Day landings, an increasingly aggressive manhunt by the Gestapo led to the arrest of her superior officer. Nonetheless, Rolfe continued to work until her arrest at a transmitting house in Nargis on 31 July 1944. Transported to Fresnes Prison in Paris, she was interrogated repeatedly and tortured until August 1944, when she was shipped to Ravensbrück concentration camp. According to an admission made by a German officer after the war’s end, she was so ill that she could not walk. On 5 February 1945, 30-year-old Rolfe was executed by the Germans and her body disposed of in the crematorium.The name of Lilian Rolfe is engraved on the Runnymede Memorial in Surrey, England. The “Lilian Rolfe House” at the Vincennes Estate, Lambeth was dedicated to her memory. In her honor, the government of France posthumously awarded her the Croix de Guerre.[
Three other female members of the SOE were also executed at Ravensbrück: Denise Bloch, Cecily Lefort, and Violette Szabo.

Pearl Witherington
“Agent Wrestler”
(1914-2008)

Agent “Wrestler” was a secret agent of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE). Dropped in by parachute in 1943, she organized 1,500 Resistance fighters against the Nazis.
Cecile Pearl Witherington was born in France on June 24th, to English parents. Pearl’s childhood was hard; her alcoholic father died when she was 15, forcing her to begin working at an early age to support her mother and three younger sisters.She had been engaged before the war but he was captured while fighting in the French Army.
In December 1940, as the Nazis were invading Western Europe, Pearl managed her family’s escape to England. Working for the Air Ministry, because of her fluent French, she was accepted into the SOE training. At age 29, on the night of  September 22-23, 1943, after three weeks of training, Pearl parachuted in near Châteauroux, France. “Agent Wrestler,” and her 1,500 Resistance fighters blew up 800 stretches of railway lines and supply routes. The Nazis put a price on Witherington’s head of one million francs. On  June 11, they attacked her headquarters, casualties among her force were horrifically high but Pearl narrowly escaped.
When the fighting was over, she reunited with Henri Cornioley, her fiancé from before the war. They went to London in October 1944 and were married. In 1945, the new Mrs Cornioley was appointed a military MBE for her wartime work. With the war over, the couple settled in France. Pearl raised funds for the SOE memorial at Valençay, inaugurated in 1991.
In 2004, Pearl Cornioley was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, receiving the insignia from Queen Elizabeth during a state visit to France. In April of 2006, at age 91, Pearl was awarded her RAF Parachute Wings in recognition of her wartime jumps and night-time drop into occupied France.
Pearl Cornioley died in Châteauvieux, France on February 24,  2008.”Deep down inside me I’m a very shy person but I’ve always had a lot of responsibilities ever since I was quite small. So I thought, ‘Well, this is something I feel I can do’ . . . And anyway I didn’t like the Germans. Never did. I’m a baby of the 1914-18 war.” – Cecile Pearl Witherington Cornioley

Jacqueline Nearne
(1916-1982)

On September 2, 2010, police were called to a tiny, seaside flat in Torquay, England and discovered the body of local ‘cat lady’ and eccentric recluse Eileen Nearne. They also discovered medals, papers and……an amazing story of two girls.

Eileen Mary “Didi” Nearne was a member of the UK’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II. She parachuted into occupied France as a radio operator under the codename “Rose”.
Didi was not the only special agent in the family – her sister Jacqueline was also SOE.
In January 1943, Jacqueline — codename “Designer” parachuted into Occupied France. Before leaving, she had made Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, head of the French section of SOE, promise that Didi would never be sent on a mission to France, but fourteen months later on March 2, Eileen “Didi” Nearne — codename “Rose” was also dropped into occupied France. On landing she was greeted by two Frenchmen, who exclaimed: “Oh, a young girl. Go back, it’s too dangerous!”
Given the mission of helping set up a network in Paris called “Wizard”, over the course of the next five months she transmitted 105 messages to London.
All the while, Jacqueline became the courier for the Resistance, delivering messages and weapons across France, organizing sabotage operations, blowing up a Luftwaffe aircraft engine factory, setting fire to Nazi equipment, damaging railway lines and stealing 30,000 liters of German fuel; nearly a year-and-a-half of constant operations. In April 1944, despite her protests, Jacqueline was returned to Britain. 
On July 25, 1944, “Didi” was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo before being incarcerated at Ravensbrück concentration camp. She was only 23. On August 15, just ten days before the Allies liberated Paris, “Didi” was put on a train crammed with hundreds of others into cattle trucks. After nine months of Hell, with the Allies advancing through Germany, “Didi” and two other women made for their escape; appalled at the state of the women, a priest hid them in a bell tower. When U.S. troops arrived in Leipzig, Didi and her friends gave themselves up to them.
“Didi” Nearne was one of only a handful of British agents to survive Ravensbrück. When Didi arrived back in Britain, Jacqueline was appalled at her emaciated, confused state. 
After the war “Didi” and Jacqueline lived together in London. After Jacqueline died from cancer on August 15, 1982, “Didi” moved to Torquay and lived there, unnoticed, until her death. She was 89 years. No one in Torquay had any inkling about Didi’s wartime adventures!
Originially to be a modest funeral, until it emerged she was a member of the UK’s Special Operations Executive, Eileen Mary “Didi” Nearne’ s funeral was provided free of charge by the Torbay & District Funeral Service of Torquay,and held on September 21, at Our Lady Help of Christians and St Denis Roman Catholic Church; the eulogy was made by Special Forces Club Chairman Adrian Stones. Her ashes scattered at sea, 
Rarely had two members of the same family sacrificed so much to such dangerous work.

Dickey Chapelle
aka
Georgette Louise Meyer
(1918–1965)

Georgette “Dickey” Chapelle leaped off the towers with the Screaming Eagles at Fort Campbell, jumped with troops in Korea and Vietnam, participated in more battles than any other American—17 operations in all, was the only female photographer during the bloodiest battles of the war in the Pacific, wrote nine books and was also a pilot.
After reporting on the Battle of Iwo Jima, where she took one of her most iconic photos, she was assigned to the invasion fleet anchored off Okinawa and under the Admiral’s direct orders not to go ashore. Dickey Chapelle went anyway and made her way to the U.S. Marines Sixth Division command post, before the Navy caught up with her, withdrew her military press credentials, pulled her off the island and sent her home.
Ten years later she contacted General Lemuel C. Shepherd, Jr. Commandant of the Marine Corps, who would help Dickey reinstate her military press pass.
For the next ten years she covered wars around the world, including the Hungarian uprising, during which the Soviets arrested her as a spy, threatened her with execution, and held her for seven weeks at Budapest’s notorious “House of Terror”
Main Street Prison. Dickey also covered conflicts in China, India, Korea, Iraq, Iran, Algeria and Lebanon, the Cuban revolution and finally the war in Vietnam where she was killed by a boobytrap while covering Operation Black Ferret. Georgette “Dickey” Chapelle became the first American female war correspondent to die during combat operations.
Born Georgette Louise Meyer on March 14, 1918, to strict pacifist parents Paul Gerhard Meyer and Edna Franziska Engelhardt Meyer, she grew up in a safe middle-class home in Shorewood, Wisconsin. Despite the sheltered upbringing, Georgette was determined to live by her own rules. Enamored by aeronautics, at the age of 14 she wrote an article “Why We Want to Fly” under the byline G.L. Meyer for the United States Air Service magazine; believing it was written by a young man, the editor published it.
That next year she met Admiral Richard “Dickey” Byrd who spoke at her high school; Georgette immediately changed her name to Dickey.
Graduating high school two years early as Valedictorian, she was one of only three women admitted to the Engineering School at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but she spent more time at the airfield hitching rides in airplanes, writing articles about aviation and taking aerial photographs. Dickey missed too many classes, earned low grades, and was asked to leave MIT after her second year. Working for TWA, she made her way to New York, where she studied photography, married her teacher WWI Navy photographer Tony Chapelle in 1940 and began pursuing a career in photojournalism.
Her career as a war reporter lasted close to three decades. She received numerous awards from the Women’s National Press Club and the Overseas Press Club’s George Polk Award. With Vietnamese paratrooper and U.S. Army jump wings pinned to her Australian bush hat, black-rimmed glasses, pearl earrings and camera, she ventured where other reporters feared to tread. Dickey Chapelle was “adopted” into many different nations’ military units, including rebel groups in Algeria and Cuba, where Fidel Castro called her “the polite little American with all that tiger blood in her veins”. She became the first female reporter to win approval from the Pentagon to jump with American troops. In 1962, she was interviewed by a young Mike Wallace for his radio show. He asked Dickey whether jumping out of planes, being at the front, or going into combat with the Marines was a “woman’s place”, to which she responded: “It is not a woman’s place. There’s no question about it. There’s only one other species on earth for whom a war zone is no place, and that’s men. But as long as men continue to fight wars, why I think observers of both sexes will be sent to see what happens.”
One evening while in Laos, three separate Marines approached her to say that she’d photographed or interviewed their fathers in Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
On the evening of November 3, 1965, she had dinner with Lt. Gen. Lewis Walt, Marine Commander in Vietnam and told him that “When my time comes, I want it to be on a patrol with the Marines.”
At 08:00 the following morning, Georgette Louise “Dickey” Meyer Chapelle while on patrol with a Marine platoon during a search and destroy operation 16 km south of Chu Lai, Quang Ngai Province a lieutenant in front of her kicked a tripwire boobytrap, consisting of a mortar shell and hand grenade. She was hit in the neck by a piece of shrapnel, severing her carotid artery; she died soon afterwards, uttering her final words: “I guess it was bound to happen”. She was 46.
Dickey was given a full military burial with full honors. She was carried to her grave by an honor guard consisting of six Marines at Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Dickey became the first female war correspondent to be killed in Vietnam, as well as the first American female reporter to be killed in action.
In October 2016, at the Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association banquet in San Diego, Dickey Chapelle, the “small woman with a foul mouth” who relished running Marines half her age and twice her size into the ground during PT was honorably given her Eagle, Globe and Anchor pin and the title: United States Marine by Commandant Gen. Robert Neller.

Andrée Borrel
(1919 –1944)

Along with Lise de Baissac, Andrée Borrel became one the first women agents to be was parachuted into France on  September 24, 1942.
After the fall of France during the Second World War – Andree Borrel joined the resistance and helped British Airman who had been shot down over France to return to England. Andrée came to England via Lisbon to avoid arrest by the Gestapo her activities had become known to the Germans.
Once in England she joined the French section of the Special Operations Executive.After training, Andree was parachuted into France and carried out clandestine operations. She also acted as a courier for the Prosper Network because of her knowledge of Paris.
Andree Borrel was arrested on the June 23, 1943 – probably because of a traitor in the group. She was taken to Gestapo Headquarters at 84 Avenue Foch, Paris and interrogated with brute force. She was then sent to Fresnes Prison until May 1944.
Andrée was then sent to Natzweiler Concentration Camp, where on the July 6 1944 she was executed by a lethal phenol injection and then incinerated in the Camp Crematorium.
Andree Borrel was posthumously Awarded The Croix de Guerre, Medaille de la Resistance, by the French Government for her sacrifice for France. Also Awarded the..KCBC (King’s Commendation For Brave Conduct) by the British Government.


http://www.ladiesofskydiving.com/women-warriors-lest-we-forget/

Phyllis “Pippa” Latour Doyle
(1921)

As one of very few female agents working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE), in preparation for D-day, Pippa was dropped by parachute into Normandy on May 1 1944, to spy upon and sabotage Nazi-occupied Europe. Under the code name Paulette, at age 23, to trick the Nazis, she posed as a poor 14-year-old French girl, using a bicycle to sell soap, schmooze enemy soldiers and gather intelligence; she relayed 135 secret messages back to England. She had joined the Royal Air force in 1941 to train as a flight mechanic until the clandestine services spotted her potential. Growing up in French Equatorial Africa, Pippa was fluent in the french language; instead of repairing aircraft, she was earmarked for training in espionage.
“It wasn’t until after my first round of training that they told me they wanted me to become a member of the SOE. They said I could have three days to think about it. I told them I didn’t need three days to make a decision; I’d take the job now.”
Born on April 8 in South Africa to Philippe, a French doctor and Louise, a British citizen; her father died just three months later and when she was three, her mother who remarried a racing driver, was killed when the race car she was driving crashed into a barrier; Phyllis then went to live with her father’s cousin in the AEF(French Equatorial Africa); later returning to South Africa. She moved from South Africa to England and joined the WAAF in November 1941 as an air frame mechanic but was immediately asked to become a spy. “I did it for revenge.” Her godmother had committed suicide after being taken prisoner by the Nazis and her godmother’s father had been shot by the Germans.
Trained by a cat burglar, “We learnt how to get in a high window, and down drain pipes, how to climb over roofs without being caught.” Given three separate code names – Genevieve, Plus Fours and Lampooner – she was first deployed in Aquitaine in Vichy France in 1942. Any intelligence that she gathered, she would encode for transmitting with codes that were hidden on a piece of silk she used to tie up her hair. She was once brought in for questioning, but the Nazis did not examine her hair tie, and she was released. She would sleep in forests, forced to forage for food, or stay with Allied sympathizers. “One family I stayed with told me we were eating squirrel,” she told the Army News, “I found out later it was rat. I was half starved so I didn’t care.”
Pippa was awarded the Croix de Guerre on January 16, 1946 and the Member of the British Empire (MBE Military) on September 4, 1954.
At 93 and living in a rest home in New Zealand, 70 years after parachuting behind enemy lines, Phyllis Latour Doyle was presented with France’s highest decoration. “I have deep admiration for her bravery and it will be with great honour that I will present her with the award of Chevalier de l’Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur”–French ambassador to New Zealand, Laurent Contini.
As of February 2018,Pippa resides in Auckland, New Zealand.

Hannah Senesh
(1921—1944)

A poet and Special Operations Executive (SOE) paratrooper, Hannah Senesh was one of 37 parachutists on the only rescue mission by the Jewish people during the Holocaust. She was dropped by the British Army during the Second World War to rescue of Hungarian Jews about to be deported to Auschwitz.
Hannah was arrested at the Hungarian border, imprisoned and tortured; refusing to reveal details of her mission, he was tried and executed by firing squad. She is hailed as a national heroine in Israel, where her poetry is widely known and the headquarters of the Zionist youth movements Israel Hatzeira, a kibbutz and several streets are named after her.Born July 17, 1921 in Budapest, Hungary to Katalin and author/ journalist Béla, Hannah kept a diary from age 13 until shortly before her death. She enrolled in a Protestant private school for girls that accepted Catholic and Jewish student; considered a gifted pupil, she joined Maccabea, a Hungarian Zionist students organization. She left Hungary for Eretz Yisrael, British Mandate of Palestine in 1939 and she studied in the Girls’ Agricultural School at Nahalal, writing poetry, as well as a play about kibbutz life.
In 1941, she moved to Kibbutz Sdot Yam and joined the Haganah, the paramilitary group predating the Israel Defense Forces. In 1943, she enlisted in the British Army Women’s Auxiliary Air Force as an Aircraftwoman 2nd Class, began her training in Egypt as a paratrooper for the British SOE and volunteered to be parachuted into Europe.
Hannah Senesh trained in Egypt and was one of the thirty-three people chosen to parachute behind enemy lines. With the goal of reaching her native Budapest, Hannah parachuted into Yugoslavia along with fellow SOE Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstei on March 14, 1944 and spent three months with Tito’s partisans. She wrote her poem “Blessed is the Match,” during this time.
On June 7, 1944, at the height of the deportation of Hungarian Jews, Agent Senesh crossed the border into Hungary and was arrested by Hungarian gendarmes, who found her British military transmitter, She was taken to a prison, stripped, tied to a chair, whipped and beatenfor three days; she lost several teeth. The guards wanted to know the code for her transmitter so they could find out who the parachutists were and trap others. Transferred to a Budapest prison, Hannah was repeatedly interrogated and tortured, but only revealed her name and refused to provide the transmitter code, even when her mother was also arrested. They threatened to kill her mother if she did not cooperate, but she refused. While in prison, Hannah used a mirror to flash signals out of the window to prisoners in other cells and communicated using large cut-out letters that she placed in her cell window.
She was tried for treason on October 28, 1944. Throughout her ordeal her courage never waivered; refusing the blindfold and staring squarely at her executioners, Hannah Senesh was executed by a firing squad on November 7. She was 23 years old.
Her diary was published in Hebrew in 1946. Her remains were brought to Israel in 1950 and re-interred at the military cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. She had one brother György.Found in Hannah’s cell after her execution:
One – two – three… eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark…
Life is a fleeting question mark
One – two – three… maybe another week.
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.

Yvonne Baseden
“Odette”

(1922-2017)

At the age of 22, on the night of March 18/19, 1944, paired with Gonzagues de Saint-Geniès (“Lucien”), Yvonne Baseden parachuted into France, near Mont-de-Marsan, as a British SOE operative. They worked alongside the local Resistance helping to prepare for the (D-Day) invasion.She played a key role in the first daylight parachute drop of weapons and supplies over France(Operation Zebra). Later captured and imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp; “Lucien” was fatally wounded.
Yvonne survived that pit of Hell; traded by the Swedish Red Cross for Nazi prisoners and released,spending her first nights of freedom, sleeping under the skeletons of dinosaurs on the floor of the Malmö Museum of Prehistory.


Anne-Marie Walters
“Agent Colette”
(March 16,1923—October 3, 1998)

Starr Wars 1944

“Collette” parachuted into the Armagnac area of southwestern France on January 3, 1944 to become a courier for the SOE and George Starr’s Wheelwright circuit. Throughout spring and summer, she carried messages, often on foot or bicycle, also she received air drops, delivered explosives, and helped downed airmen to escape.
Born in Geneva, Switzerland to an English father, Deputy Secretary-General of the League of Nations, Francis Paul (F.P.) Walters, and a French mother, she moved to England with her family after the outbreak of World War II and joined the WAAF in 1941. On July 6, 1943 she was recruited into SOE and spent the summer and autumn learning the clandestine arts from Special Training School 23 at Loch Morar, Scotland. Described as “well-educated, intelligent, quick, practical, and cunning” and “will not hesitate to make use of her physical attractiveness in gaining influence over men”, Anne-Marie’s first attempt to parachute into France in December of 1943 was called off due to bad weather over the drop zone; her flight back to England ended in a crash-landing because of fog. She suffered a minor head injury in the crash.
On the night of January 3,1944, her jump this time was successful. With fellow agent Claude Arnault (“Jean-Claude”) and after parachuting into the Armagnac area in SW France to join George Starr’s WHEELWRIGHT network, “Collette” acted as a courier until after D-Day. Yvonne Cormeau was Starr’s wireless operator and Claude Arnault was the explosives expert. Anne-Marie’s cover story was that of a student from Paris recovering from pneumonia and staying with a friend of her father. She stayed with the family at their farmhouse; Starr’s headquarters was just 3 kilometres away. As a courier, she traveled by bus, train, bicycle, and charcoal-powered vehicle all over southwestern France. One of her first jobs was to organize the flight to Spain across the Pyrenees for a group of fifteen members of the French Resistance who had escaped from a French prison. She also helped smuggle several suitcases full of explosives to Toulouse to blow up a gun powder factory. “Collette” was accepted by the resistance fighters, the marquis, regarded her as “the true sister of the marquisards.”
On June 21st, two thousand German soldiers attacked Starr’s Wheelwright network. During the battle Anne-Marie distributed hand grenades to the maquisards, burned and buried documents, and salvaged the network’s money during the retreat; nineteen of the maquisards were killed.
She left France on August 1, 1944 and traveled through Spain to Algiers where she met with British authorities who proposed that she return to France for Operation Jedburgh, but SOE vetoed, so she returned to London carrying urgent dispatches.
On July 17, 1945, in recognition of her “personal courage and willingness to undergo any danger,” Anne-Marie Walters was awarded the MBE for her vital work in occupied France and the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance française from France. In 1946, Anne-Marie Walters published Moondrop to Gascony about her war-time activities, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize the next year. After the war, she lived the United States, Spain, and France and was a translator, an editor, and literary agent.
Anne-Marie Walters Comert died in France in 1998, at the age of 75, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease and is survived by her two children, Jean-Pierre and Sophie.

“If anyone had told me that I would spend the summer of 1943 being timed at assault courses, tapping Morse messages on a dummy key, shooting at moving pieces of cardboard, crawling across the countryside and blowing up mock targets, I would have shrugged my shoulders with disbelief.

Elisabeth Friang
“Brigitte”

(1924-2011)

Brigitte Friang, a paratrooping journalist, and member of the French Resistance during WWII, not only survived being shot in the stomach, captured and tortured by the Gestapo, being recaptured after escaping, and more torture, she survived Fresnes Prison and Ravensbrück concentration camp and the hellish Dachau deathmarch of May 1945. Becoming one of the few journalists of her generation to cover the Suez conflict, the Six Day War and the Vietnam War, Brigitte was, during the opening hours of Operation Castor, parachuted into Điện Biên Phu (Vietnam). She made several combat jumps including one with Lt Col Bigeard’s 6th Colonial Paratroop Battalion at Tu-Le.

Born on January 23, 1924 in Paris, to a bourgeois family, Brigette was only sixteen and still in high school when France was invaded by Hitler’s Wehrmacht on May 10, 1940. She immediately joined the French Resistance, where she participated for the next three years decoding clandestine transmissions and in August 1943, she entered the Office of the Air Operations (BOA) to carry documents and radio bags, to set up clandestine dropzones, to organize parachuting missions into western France, to welcome the agents and finally to oversee the weapons of the BCRA (Secret Service of Free France). In March 1944, Brigitte was betrayed by a member of her network, but managed to escape being captured until March 21, when she attempted to organize the escape of her mentor, one of General Charles de Gaulle’s top assistants, Pierre Brossolette. Brigitte was shot and arrested at the Trocadero by the Gestapo; she was twenty years old. Barbarically tortured and interned for the next fourteen months, she refused to break. Brigitte survived the untreated wounds of her arrest, the hunger, the cold, the Nazi barbarism of torture and rape until the final days of the Third Reich, when Brigitte, along with a convoy of women, was forced on a “hallucinating” three week march of nearly 300 miles (470 km) on foot to Dachau for extermination.
“Walk as far as you can.” was the mantra that the young 57 pound(26 kg) Brigitte repeated with every step in her fight against death. She escaped again and on her return to Paris after liberation, she personally welcomed home the survivors of the death camps.
After World War Two she went to work for French press secretary Andre Malraux from 1947 to 1951 and again for 1958 and 1959. She passed her military paratrooper certificate, became a war correspondent, first for the written press, then for television. She was again captured (twice but released unharmed), this time by the Việt Minh. First woman correspondent of the war, from 1951 to 1954, Brigitte Friang was one of the few women to cover the French-Indochina war; she celebrated her 30th birthday on January 23, 1954 in Điện Biên Phu. Brigitte covered the Suez expedition in 1956, the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Tet Offensive in 1968. After 1968, Brigitte became an independent journalist and wrote several books. She had told her life story in “Look Who Died” (Robert Laffont). She was also the author of “Parachutes and Petticoats”,”Regarde-toi qui meures: 1943—1945″, “Look at Yourself Dying” and also “Another Malraux”- recounting her relationship with General de Gaulle.
Awarded the military title of Cavalier of the Legion of Honor, Brigitte Friang was Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and the National Order of Merit, Rosette of the Resistance and Croix de Guerre 1939-1945 and TOE (Territories of External Operations).
Elisabeth “Brigette” Friang passed at the age of 87.

Sonya Butt

“Sonia d’Artois”
(1924-2014)

The final surviving female British spy of WWII and heroine of the SOE, “Plucky” Sonia Butt was parachuted under the codename “Blanche” into the city of Sarthe, France, only nine days before D-Day. Coordinating ambushes and sabotage; she delayed the progress of the 2nd SS Panzer Division on its way to Normandy. Sonya put on such a convincing act that on France’s liberation, a local mob labeled her a Nazi collaborator and she narrowly escaped being beaten, tied to a lamp post and having her head shaved.

Sonya Esmée Florence Butt was was born in Eastchurch, Isle of Sheppey, England on May 14, to a RAF officer, and grew up in the south of France. After her parent’s divorce, her mother took her and her brother abroad. She returned to Britain and joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, the very day she became eligible: November 14, 1941(age 17 1/2).  She “got into hot water” doing tasks such as peeling potatoes; she advertised  her fluency in French in an attempt to get attached to the Free French squadrons and escape her dreary routine. This did bring her to the attention of SOE, and she was soon accepted for training on December 11, 1943.
On  May 28 1944, only nine days before D-Day, Sonya was parachuted into the department of the Sarthe in the area of Le Mans to work as a courier, under the nom de guerre Suzanne Bonvie –codename “Blanche”. She was one of the last WAAFs to land in France before the Allied invasion. As a courier, her primary responsibilities were to carry money, pass messages and maintain contact with the SOE agents, Maquis and local operatives working with the Resistance.  After one of the other agents dropped with her was shot during a battle between the Maquis and the Nazis, Sonya took on the additional role of weapons instructor.  “I filled in wherever the need arose.” In June 1944, she was stopped by two Germans and detained for questioning, thrown in solitary. Four hours later they came back, her cover story and false papers held; she was released.
The Americans took Le Mans on August 8.  Accused of being a Nazi collaborator, her fellow resisters explained to French mob that she was no traitor. General Eisenhower  asked that she pass through enemy’s lines and relay intelligence about enemy positions and supplies to General Patton’s army? Sonya bicycling through battlefields, her jacket peppered with bullets. Once being knocked her off her bicycle by Nazi soldiers, beaten and raped. Left in rags, she took refuge in a farmhouse; the next day she delivered the information  and returned the way she came.
In October 1944, on the successful completion of her mission, she returned to England.  She had fallen in love, while making her second training parachute jump, with Canadian SOE agent Guy d’Artois;  he was decorated for assisting the Maquis in Burgundy. She became Mrs. Soniad’Artois, moved to Canada and quietly disappeared from public view to become a wife and mother of three sons and three daughters. On March 15, 1999, Major Lyle Guy d’Artois  died in the Veterans Hospital in Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec. Sonia Esmée Florence “Toni” Buttd’Artois passeed away at the Lakeshore General Hospital in Pointe-Claire, Quebec on December 21, 2014. She was honored on January 10, 2015 at Saint-Thomas d’Aquin Church in Hudson, QC. She was 90.
Sonia and Guy were buried together in National Field of Honour Cemetery Pointe-Claire, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
What little I was able to do was motivated by my love for France.

Catherine Leroy
(1944-2006)



Born in war, on August 27, 1944 in the suburbs of Paris during the city’s liberation by the Allies. She was a multi-award honored war photographer, the first news-person, male or female, to parachute into combat with US forces, and the first to photograph the Vietcong behind their own lines, one of only two women photojournalists during the early years of the Vietnam conflict.
She attended a Catholic boarding school and in 1963, at the age of 18, to impress her boyfriend, she earned a parachutist’s license and had logged 84 jumps by 1966.

With no contracts and very few of published photos, she purchased a one-way ticket from her native France to Laos in 1966. With just her Leica M2 and $200 in her pocket, she decided to travel to Vietnam to “give war a human face.”
At first impression, she was an un-intimidating, five-foot-tall, pig-tailed girl, but when fully loaded with pack, boots, cameras, and close to her bodyweight of 85lbs of gear, she proved that women could tough it out in the field and spew notorious obscenities with the toughest Marine. In 1967, she was hit by a mortar burst, her chest was ripped open; the shrapnel that would have killed her, was only stopped by her Nikon F-2. During the Tet offensive, in early 1968, she was captured by the North Vietnamese Army. Explaining that she was a journalist, the soldiers were charmed into letting her go, and were persuaded to let her take photos, saying that it was important because only one side of the story was being seen. The photos ran  in Life magazine; she wrote the cover story herself.
In 1975, with America leaving Indochina, Leroy moved on to Lebanon, where the civil war was just beginning, to continue her work. During the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, her stunning pictures began to change, less of battle dead and dying and more were of the living, such as a father with his one-legged daughter; her leg has been blown off in the siege, a young warrior cradling a kitten and crippled and demented patients abandoned in a bombed-out mental hospital. Beirut was considered the high watermark of  her career as a combat photographer: “I was there for Newsweek magazine and we documented our experiences in the book God Cried (1983).”
Leroy never promoted herself or her work but still won numerous honors, including in 1967 George Polk Award for the Picture of the Year. She was the first woman to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award – “best published photographic reporting from abroad requiring exceptional courage and enterprise” – for her coverage of the civil war in Lebanon, in 1976. In 1997, she was the recipient of an Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism from the University of Missouri. “I’ve always found that it was very exhilarating to be shot at without result.” “It’s the biggest high of all, a massive rush of adrenaline. The high you experience in times of great danger is a high that you cannot experience anywhere else.”
By the 1980’s, the physical and psychological traumatic stress of combat photography had begun to change Leroy; she grew sick of war and the job of photographing it. She turned to fashion photography  in Japan, looking like a tiny and very lethal Ninja, clad entirely in a black Yoji Yamamoto creation, wearing black wrap-round sunglasses.
After hanging up her camera, she moved to Los Angeles and opened Piece Unique, selling used haute couture.
Catherine Leroy died July 8 2006 in Santa Monica, California, just a week after her lung cancer was diagnosed.
Hill Fights