Moonlight Missions

Andrée had been part of the first group of women trained at the Beaulieu School and was also the first woman to complete parachute training. countrymen. There she met Captain Maurice Dufour while working as a nurse at a Vichy-operated POW camp, and together they worked with MI9, the British secret agency financing the Allied escape routes, to help Allied soldiers escape from the prison. Their roles came to an end in when a high-ranking colleague was captured by the Nazi Gestapo and gave up information that blew their cover, and they had to escape through the very same underground railroad that they had used to help others. Andrée was commended for her service and asked to join de Gaulle’s Free French, but during her interview she refused to divulge the details of her roles or the people she worked with (full intelligence briefs were required for employment), and she was rejected. Captain Jepson was impressed by her intelligence, loyalty, and dedication to the safety of her colleagues and allowed her to join the French Section under British command.

Introduced to the SOE by her brother, Claude, Lise de Baissac was a model recruit even by standards set for men. In the Beaulieu training school of the French Section led by Major Maurice Buckmaster and Squadron Officer Vera Atkins, Lise and four other women underwent a three-week recurring course that taught the survival, combat, sabotage, and recruitment skills they would need to infiltrate France and set up a network of rebels. Out of all the women in her class, Lise was the only one able to complete and pass the course, due to her natural athletic abilities, intelligence, and driven and analytical mind. She was to be sent to parachute training immediately to prepare for her mission. The invasion was the Allies’ biggest secret of World War II. The most senior officials would be told only what they needed to know of the time and date and the specific roles they would have when it began. D-Day was set for July 12th, 1943.

After completing their training, Andrée and Lise were set to drop together into the French countryside in September 1942 where they would be received by allies including Yvonne Rudellat. Yvonne was one of two women already in France (the other being Virginia Hall) who helped new agents get acclimated to their roles as well as gave them all the information they would need to start their missions. Andrée was happy to see her friend whom she trained with in the very first course of the Beaulieu school, and together they travelled to a safe house to rest for a few nights. When they were ready, Lise set off for Poitiers, and Andrée went home to Paris.

Within a month, both women accomplished much in receiving SOE agents and introducing them to their networks. By policy these networks were named after professions, and two had grown to a significant size within the Nazi-occupied zone; in Paris there was PHYSICIAN which would come to be led by Captain Francis Suttel, Andrée’s commanding officer; in Bordeaux there was SCIENTIST which was led by Claude, Lise’s brother. Before Lise and Andrée arrived, groups of French resistance fighters had only been able to commit disorganized Bangs, small-scale acts of sabotage, against the Germans to

little effect. Their arrival and work were a beacon of hope for an organized offensive that would take back control of France. In each network’s sphere of influence, they were responsible for recruiting and training rebels for the invasion as well as orchestrating acts of sabotage that would ruin German supplies and facilities. Coordinating efforts were organized through de Gaulle’s BBC radio in the form of coded messages that were broadcasted at the end of each program. These coded messages would also detail what supplies and agents would be dropped in by parachute every full moon, when visibility of the land was at its best in the cover of night. Acts of sabotage, however, were conducted during new moons when visibility was poor.

On one such night, Yvonne Rudellat and her team travelled to a small village by the name of Montrichard and approached a railway tunnel in between scheduled passes of train cars. “For almost three years, it had been the silent crossroads for human violence and international catastrophe: Nazi troops, guns, freight, and food moved through; the tiny village was a node in the rail network linking Berlin to its vast subjugated continent and the Battle of the Atlantic. It was the direct supply line between Germany and its Kriegsmarine warships and submarine wolf packs hunting Allied shipping convoys. Railroads were the veins by which the Reich bled France” (Rose 87). Their mission was simple enough; they had to blow up the tunnel and sever one of the Nazi’s crucial supply lines. However, only Yvonne could do the job, she was specially chosen for it. Weighing at only 80 pounds and just barely reaching the height of five feet and two inches, she was the only one who could climb into the narrow

(above) Lise and Andrée, right and left respectively, complete their final equipment checks before they make their first parachute drop into France.

(below) Lise casually exits her new residence on Avenue Foch and makes her way to her radio operator—her purse concealing documents detailing classified Allied information that could easily indicate her as a spy. ventilation shaft within the tunnel and set the bomb. By the time it went off, Yvonne and her team were long gone and listening to an explosion they could no longer see.

In Poitiers, Lise had taken on a daring residence on Avenue Foch. The apartment she moved into was only one door down from the Nazi Gestapo headquarters, a mansion for which the third floor was being used for a new team of expert spy hunters and radio and language specialists. Led by SS-Sturmbannführer Karl Bömelburg, the team of spy hunters listened to the same BBC radio broadcasts and telegraph signals as the Allies to record and make copies of coded messages. Even though they did not have the keys to the codes they used, Gestapo intelligence would be able to decipher them before too long. “Code breakers looked for patterns and applied statistical analysis. For example, e is the most frequently occurring letter in the English language, used about 10 percent of the time. The letters j, k, q, x, and z occur least often... So with simple counting and a little deduction, any message could be cryptanalyzed” (Rose 72). With such an operation going on next door, Lise’s cover was perfect; there was no British spy crazy enough to live so close to their enemy.