Shadow Warriors of World War II : The Daring Women of the Oss and Soe (9781613730898) by Thomas Gordon; Lewis Greg

Author:Thomas, Gordon; Lewis, Greg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent Pub Group
Published: 2016-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

After a five-day voyage across the Atlantic, the OSS women disembarked at Southampton in their Women’s Army Corps uniforms and had the first sight of bomb damage as they were taken by train to Paddington Station in London. They arrived as the all-clear siren sounded across the city.

Priscilla Symington, whose father worked in the State Department, recalled she was “impressed by the buoyant good mood of the station porters as they stacked our luggage in waiting trucks, and Red Cross women offered us tea and coffee.”

Waiting on the platform was Evangeline Bell, who had arrived earlier and had helped to set up OSS London. On her clipboard she checked off their names, next to which she had written the department to which they would be assigned. They included secretaries, filing clerks, interpreters, and translators.

From the list provided by Eleanor Grecay Weis in New York, in charge of vetting recruits for London, Bell had selected a number of them to work with her in the Document Branch of Counterintelligence. The department provided identification documents and suitable clothing from the countries where agents would work in Europe. Their lives would depend on the cover stories she would produce with the help of her staff.

Donovan described Evangeline Bell as “intelligent, beautiful, mysterious, and ethereal.” The daughter of an American career diplomat, who was posted to Peking, she and her nanny used to take walks along the Great Wall of China. She was still a child when her father died and her mother married the British diplomat Sir James Dodd in 1927.

Already word perfect in French, she went to Radcliffe in 1937. Her history teacher, Arthur Schlesinger, saw her as “charmingly seductive and quietly amusing; she knows what she wants.” In 1942 she met Donovan and was recruited into the OSS to work in London. She was given the demanding responsibility of ensuring there were no inconsistencies in the forged documents that retouch artists, photographers, and printers produced.

When finally checking the documents, Bell would pore over the French permits embossed on them. A permit was needed to own a bicycle, to possess a food ration book, or to purchase a rail ticket. Sometimes an engraving plate would be made for a hospital certificate to be attached to a cover story to explain why its holder was not at work. A forged letter from a friend would feature condolences for a death in a family and details of a funeral, and so could explain why someone needed to travel to a particular area.

She made regular visits to the clothes unit in the headquarters attic to complete cover stories. For an agent posing as a French farmer she would select patched blue work clothes, heavy hand-knit socks, and a beret. She checked that buttons had been sewn with parallel threading, not the usual British cross-stitch style. Teams of women did the sewing. Others crumpled French notes in small denominations, the way many workers carried their money.

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