A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 19

This is the eighth year in a row I’ve run this series in April.

Today’s story: Special Agents: The Women of SOE.

They ranged from girls barely out of high school to mature mothers, from working-class women to aristocrats, from the plain to the beautiful, from the prim and proper to wild high-lifers. The only women from the Western Allies to bear arms in action during the Second World War, they suffered torture, the misery of the concentration camps, and death at the hands of Nazi butchers. They were a band of sisters such as has not been seen before or since, and the only thing they had in common was language — they all spoke French. Now, sixty-seven years after peace broke out in Europe, all but one or two are dead. They are the women agents of the Special Operations Executive, the special force founded in 1940 on the explicit orders of Winston Churchill to “set Europe ablaze.”

Ironically, one of the first of these women was not even British; she was a feisty American redhead named Virginia Hall. A graduate of Radcliffe and Barnard and a failed applicant to the U.S. State Department, she was living in France when Germany invaded in 1940. As a result of a prewar hunting accident, Hall had an artificial foot, an injury that would have been enough to get any man out of front-line duty. It didn’t keep Hall back: she made her way to London and, despite being a citizen of a neutral country, was recruited by the SOE. Once back in France she worked for fourteen months posing as a journalist for the New York Post. When Germany finally took over the Vichy zone in 1942, the incoming head of the Lyons Gestapo, the infamous Klaus Barbie, declared, “I would give anything to get hold of that Canadian [sic] bitch.” Artificial foot or not, his quarry escaped over the Pyrenees into Spain before he could act. Returning to London, Hall attached herself to the nascent American equivalent of SOE, the Office of Strategic Services, and was once again put ashore in France in 1944 to liaise with resistance groups in the months leading up to the D-Day landings. After the war, she served in the organization that grew out of the OSS — the CIA.

If Virginia Hall’s story is remarkable, Noor Inayat Khan’s is almost incredible. The product of an unlikely marriage between an Indian prince and a distant relative of Mary Baker Eddy, Inayat Khan was largely brought up in Paris, where her father instructed fashionable French ladies in the ways of Sufi mysticism. Ethereal and beautiful, she was a poet, a considerable musician, and a published writer of fairy stories for children; but when her family found refuge in London in 1940, Inayat Khan joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and became a wireless operator. Fluent French and training as a wireless operator was an irresistible combination of skills for the SOE recruiters. So it was that in 1943 this unlikely agent — she seemed incapable of telling a lie — was landed by light aircraft in France, to work with the ill-fated PROSPER network in Paris. While her colleagues were being arrested, Inayat Khan remained at large for months, the only active SOE radio operator in the Paris area. Changing addresses on a daily basis, lugging her wireless from one safe house to another, she evaded capture by a mixture of luck and native cunning. The end came when she was betrayed in October 1943. At first imprisoned in the Gestapo HQ in Paris, Noor was later kept shackled and in solitary confinement in a prison in Germany; in September 1944, in the company of three other captured SOE women, she was moved to Dachau. There, after being stripped and hideously beaten, she was shot. Inayat Khan died, so one of the witnesses reported, with a single word, liberté, on her lips.

With the success of female-centric historically based movies like Hidden Figures and the continued interest World War II projects (Allie, Hacksaw Ridge, Dunkirk), I figure there’s has to be at least one Women of SOE stories worth telling. I’d start with Noor Inayat Khan, not only because her saga is a remarkable one, the fact she was of Indian descent widens the potential audience to include one of the largest movie audiences in the world.

There you go: My nineteenth story idea for the month. And it’s yours. Free!

Each day this month, I invite you to click on RESPONSES and join me to do some further brainstorming. Take each day’s story idea and see what it can become when you play around with it. These are all valuable skills for a writer to develop.

See you in comments. And come back tomorrow for another Story Idea Each Day For A Month.

For other posts in my A Story Idea Each Day for a Month (2017) series, go here.