Following on from my promising start, I have now completed two actual SOE agents, Nancy Wake (in green) and Virginia Hall.
According to her Wikipedia entry, Nancy Wake was a New Zealand nurse and journalist who joined the French Resistance and later the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during World War II, and briefly pursued a post-war career as an intelligence officer in the Air Ministry. The official historian of the SOE, M.R.D. Foot, said that "her irrepressible, infectious, high spirits were a joy to everyone who worked with her".
Wake was living in Marseille with her French industrialist husband, Henri Fiocca, when the war broke out. After the fall of France in 1940, she became a courier for the Pat O'Leary escape network led by Ian Garrow and, later, Albert Guérisse. As a member of the escape network, she helped Allied airmen evade capture by the Germans and escape to neutral Spain. In 1943, when the Germans became aware of her, she escaped to Spain and continued on to the United Kingdom. Her husband was captured and executed.
After reaching Britain, Wake joined the SOE under the code name "Hélène". On 29–30 April 1944 as a member of a three-person SOE team code-named "Freelance", Wake parachuted into the Allier department of occupied France to liaise between the SOE and several Maquis groups in the Auvergne region, which were loosely overseen by Emile Coulaudon (code name "Gaspard"). She participated in a battle between the Maquis and a large German force in June 1944. In the aftermath of the battle, a defeat for the maquis, she claimed to have bicycled 500 kilometers to send a situation report to SOE in London.
From the same source, Virginia Hall was an American who worked with the United Kingdom's clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in France during World War II. Hall was a pioneering agent for the SOE, arriving in France in August 1941, the first female agent to take up residence in France. She created the Heckler network in Lyon. Over the next 15 months, she "became an expert at support operations – organizing resistance movements; supplying agents with money, weapons, and supplies; helping downed airmen to escape; offering safe houses and medical assistance to wounded agents and pilots." She fled France in November 1942 to avoid capture by the Germans. She returned in 1944 as an OSS agent. After World War II Hall worked for the Special Activities Division of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The Germans gave her the nickname Artemis, and the Gestapo reportedly considered her "the most dangerous of all Allied spies." Having lost part of her leg in a hunting accident, Hall used a prosthesis she named "Cuthbert." She was also known as "the limping lady" by the Germans and as "Marie of Lyon" by many of the SOE agents she assisted.
Here is a rear view of the two minis.
As usual, there are excellent sculpts and casts and were a joy to paint. Nancy, in particular is clearly going to feature in all manner of Pulp games as well as WW2 ones. In Pulp games, she is an obvious femme fatale with a dangerous streak, hence the large knife concealed behind her back.
Nicely done! My old Secondary school headmaster was in the SOE. He was a tough old sod.
ReplyDeleteYou've done a cracking job with them. The hobby owes Annie a huge debt for bringing women's history to our attention, as you've done, thank you.
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