'Women Warriors: Hidden Spies of World War II' tells the stories of 52 courageous women

“Women Warriors: Hidden Spies of World War II” is a collection of vignettes of 52 courageous women, most of whom spied for the Allies in German-occupied France.

They were part of a group created by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and known as the Special Operations Executive’s F Section.

Most of the SOE spies were men; they were recognized as heroes for their wartime work shortly after the war ended. Not these 52 women.

It wasn’t until the late 1960s and early ’70s that their hazardous roles as SOE agents were declassified, according to Donna Pedace of Los Lunas, the author of the book.

Pedace said that some of the women have been written about but her recently published book, she believes, is the first time all 52 have been acknowledged for their heroics.

Some of the SOE women were recruited, others volunteered.

Not all survived.

One of them, Noor Inayat Khan, was executed by the Nazis. She put aside her pacifist Sufi beliefs to join Great Britain’s Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. With the military desperate for wireless radio operators, Khan learned Morse Code and how to operate a wireless radio.

The SOE recruited her because she was fluent in French.

Within a few days of her arrival in occupied Paris, Pedace writes, the Gestapo captured members of Khan’s group and seized their wireless sets.

Khan avoided capture. She was ordered to return to England for her safety. She refused, saying she was the only communications link between Paris and London and was vital to French Resistance fighters. She was also crucial to the safe passage home of more than 30 Allied pilots shot down over France, Pedace writes.

After six months in occupied France, Pedace writes, she was betrayed and captured.

Khan was tortured by the Gestapo at its Paris headquarters. Twice she tried to escape and twice she was recaptured.

She was transferred to the Pforzheim prison where she was kept in isolation most the time, shackled in chains and leg irons. Khan was regularly tortured and interrogated, but revealed nothing about the identities of those in her group, nor of any resistance fighters.

After almost a year of torture and deprivation, Khan was taken from her cell on the night of Sept. 11, 1944, and driven to Karlsruhe prison where she met three of her imprisoned female SOE colleagues.

The four were put on a train bound for the Dachau concentration camp.

All night, Peace writes, Khan was kicked and beaten for her continued refusal to cooperate with the Gestapo.

At Dachau, she and the other three agents were forced to kneel in the yard beside the camp crematorium. A guard shot them in the back of the head. Their bodies were believed to have been burned in the crematorium.

Khan was the subject of a PBS documentary in 2014 titled “Enemy of the Reich: The Noor Inayat Khan Story.”

In 2019, a biopic, “A Call to Spy,” was released at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It pays tribute to Khan, fellow SOE spy Virginia Hall, and Vera Atkins, London-based SOE official nicknamed “Spy Master of Great Britain.”

Hall, Pedace writes, was considered by the Third Reich as the most dangerous Allied spy. “They believed Virginia was responsible for more sabotage missions, jailbreaks and leaks of Nazi troop movements than any other spy in France,” according to Pedace.

Hall was American. While on a hunting trip in Turkey, she tripped over a fence and accidentally shot herself in the left foot. The leg was amputated below the knee. But the disability did not slow Hall. After a year in the hospital, she had a wooden prosthetic leg built and returned to work with the U.S. Foreign Service.

Hall left the Foreign Service and moved to Paris then England, months before the Germans invaded France, working as an ambulance driver.

She officially joined the SOE in March 1941, nine months before the United States officially entered the war. Back in France, she wrote stories for the New York Post that were coded and forwarded to the SOE in London.

After the U.S. entry in the war, Hall was a key contact initially in Vichy France for arriving SOE agents and in providing help to the resistance.

Hall’s leadership was instrumental in gathering intelligence on German troop movements. She became so notorious that the Gestapo, though not knowing her name nor her identity, knew of her successes in aiding the resistance. Pedace quoted a Nazi poster: “The woman who limps (Hall) is one of the most dangerous Allied agents in France. We must find and destroy her.”

They never did. Hall survived the war and lived until 1982.

Many more women held administrative SOE positions than were field agents. And the woman in the highest ranking administrative SOE post during the war was Vera Atkins, born in Romania to Jewish parents.

Atkins was the secretary to Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE’s F Section.

Atkins was no mere secretary. She is credited with recruiting, training, supervising and being protective of the female field agents.

Atkins was believed to have been the model for the character of Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond 007 novels and films.

On the front cover of Pedace’s book is a statue with the likeness of French-born SOE agent Violette Szabo, a memorial intended to honor all female SOE agents. Captured by the Germans, Szabo was executed at Ravensbrück concentration camp.