She Landed by Moonlight: The Story of Secret Agent Pearl Witherington: the Real ‘Charlotte Gray’

432 pages

Tearless

How many WW2 female Secret Agents can you name? Odette Sansom, yes. Violette Szabo, yes. Noor Khan, yes. Charlotte Gray, No: She was fictional. Pearl Witherington? Never heard of her. Any others; there were many of them? No. Then read on.

This book is indeed about Pearl Witherington, alias Marie, alias Pauline, alias Mme Cornioley. But it is about far more; almost an unofficial history, but an accurate one of SOE. So what was SOE? Churchill’s 1940 brainchild, the ‘Special Operations Executive’ created to Set Europe Ablaze. But surely we already had the Foreign Office’s SIS – ‘Secret Intelligence Service’ MI6? Yes; and they were and regarded themselves as the ‘professionals’, while SOE were the newcomers and mere ‘amateurs’. No love lost between the two and no secrets shared between them, at least until after D-Day. And what about MI9, created to arrange routes for escaping PoWs and evading aircrew? And Combined Operations? And De Gaulle’s ‘Free French’? Well, the security of these last was about as watertight as a sieve, so no secrets shared with them. Indeed, nobody shared any secrets with anybody else.

Well, what about the Germans? Readers may remember early post-war war films depicting the Germans as blundering dunderheads. The truth was otherwise. Admiral Canaris’ Abwehr and Himmler’s SD were both very sharp but they, like the SIS and SOE, also despised each other. And for the early war years it was very much SOE’s HQ that seemed sometimes to be the blundering dunderhead.

All this and more in this fascinating book.  And it is essentially in two halves: pre- and post-D-Day.

Pearl, the oldest of four sisters, bi-national by birth, French by nature and nurture because the family live in Paris, but with an alcoholic father who died young, Pearl has to become the breadwinner, obtains a job, pre-war, in the office of the RAF Attache in Paris. Falls in love with Henri, a French soldier, who was too upmarket for her almost poverty-stricken Parisienne gamine lifestyle, but he evades German captivity and they did eventually marry. Escapes, with her mother and sisters, after France fell in 1940, to UK. Recruited, eventually, to the SOE.  Usual training, Wanborough House in Surrey, commando training at Arisaig, French speaking at the secret house near Beaulieu and thence parachuted back into France, not thankfully as a ‘pianist’ wireless operator whose expectations of survival before detection were very limited (because they were all initially sent with the same type of suitcase and their transmissions were soon identified), but as an agent to foster resistance.

We are then treated to some of the crass ineptitude and sheer naiveness of SOE’s Baker Street HQ as agent after agent, detected by the Germans, falling victim to torture and execution, led to further betrayals. Not exactly what immediate post-war books portrayed.

As D-Day nears, tensions rise on both sides. Air drops of agents, weapons, ammunition, food; some successful, some not: double agents, betrayals, and captures. Pearl develops an uncanny ability to sense danger and survives many very close shaves; knowing where to find support and where to expect otherwise.

After D-Day her sector and others are invited to impede German reinforcements reaching Normandy, especially by the dreaded Das Reich brigade (partly recruited from the French Departements of Alsace-Lorraine) stationed in the south which had been expected to reach Normandy within three days but actually, due to maquisard attacks, roads blocked by felled trees, bridges destroyed, trains derailed, takes 17. Reprisals and retribution are grotesque. At Oradour, the village is set on fire, women and children are herded into the village church and burnt alive; their menfolk machine-gunned to death in barns. No captured maquisard can expect the dignity of a sudden death.

Pearl, by then aged about 30, and by now a charismatic guerilla leader of some 1,500 maquisards, and who has trained a further 1,500, has becomes a veritable Jeanne D’Arc in the eyes and esteem of her co-resistance fighters.

De Gaulle in Paris, dismissive of the succour given to him and to all his Free French Forces within and beyond France by the UK and the US, orders all SOE out of France.

Had Pearl been a man, she would have been decorated with the DSO or at least an MC but there was no scope at that time for the British to grant an award to a woman who served in a combat role. Offered a Civil MBE, she rejects this but later does accept a Military MBE. Not so shabbily treated by the French by whom she is decorated with the Legion d’Honneurand the Croix de Guerre. And it is not until 1999 that her war services are finally recognised by the British when she is appointed CBE by HM the Queen.

But immediately post-war? Like so many; an anti-climax; living, at least to start with, in poor circumstances with her husband, Henri, in Paris.

Those who know France will recognise the monuments in every village, every town, every city, at the churches and calvaires to those Mort pour La France, some killed in warfare, some executed by firing squad, some publicly hanged, some tortured to death, and some who were simply ‘disappeared’. And after reading of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazi Occupiers, assisted by French collaborators (some of whom sought suddenly and with duplicity to change their allegiances after D-Day), you may ponder how any Germans can now make a home or have a holiday home in France.

How many WW2 female Secret Agents can you name? Pearl Witherington. “Yes, indeed.”  So do please read on…