Resistance Fighters

The FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) commission was a volunteer corps located in England of young, upper-class women who made up the majority of the SOE’s support staff. Agents on the field such as Andrée or Lise would hand off messages to their radio operator who would then scramble the words into code. This code would be received by the women of FANY who were listening to transmissions on schedule-based frequencies; the transmission would be put through a cipher twice, each time being decoded by a different key in a process called double transposition. Along with recording and decoding the hundreds of messages they received every day from various countries, FANYs would create poems to be used as codes once they become more complicated. De Gualle’s BBC radio would use these poem codes when necessary to unite agents on ongoing operations.

By early 1943 in the dead of winter, France was rife with conflict; terrorist attacks against the Germans had increased exponentially due to food shortages and inflation. Beginning with ‘voluntary’ conscription, the Vichy-led south had instituted a policy of rounding up three young men to work in German factories in exchange for one French POW to be repatriated back to France. This ‘voluntary’ offering of service became mandatory when families refused to send their sons and nephews into enemy territory for fear for their lives. Raw materials and food were also being used up by occupying Germans as well as being sent to Germany to fuel the soldiers fighting the Soviets in the East. Women had to queue for hours to hopefully buy the bare necessities they needed to live; the rations of meat they were allowed to take were said to be so small that they could be wrapped in a metro ticket. “Starvation diminished France; one-third of the children born during the war had stunted growth, three-pound newborns were common, and only one in five was born at a normal weight. Women grew gaunt, and their periods were infrequent or stopped altogether...” (Rose 133).

With the few supplies they had been receiving from SOE, resistance fighters and rebel civilians sabotaged facilities, stole supplies, and killed as many Nazis as they could. Hitler had instituted conscription so that potential rebels would be sent to Germany out of sight and out of mind, but the policy had just created more. Out of anger, Hitler commanded his French officers to kill 50 French hostages as well as round up 300 Frenchmen for imprisonment for every German that was killed by rebel forces. The next attack on a German would lead to an increase of 100 hostages being killed and so on; retaliation would only stop if the rebels backed off. However, every move Hitler made just made the French populace angrier, and neither the SOE nor the rebels in the field had any intention of stopping.

After the Soviet win at the Battle of Stalingrad, the Allies were starting to change the tide of the war. The French were eager and ready to fight back, but the SOE had not been sending enough firepower to arm the various