Posted on 05/30/2005 9:32:57 PM PDT by CHARLITE
The final item in the Sept. 30, 1944 "Activity Report of Virginia Hall," American intelligence agent, was No. XV: "Were you decorated in the Field?"
"No," she had typed, "nor any reason to be."
The answer was typical of her matter-of-fact sense of duty. But William J. Donovan, known to a generation of spies as "Wild Bill," begged to differ.
On May 12, 1945, Maj. Gen. Donovan, director of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, informed President Harry Truman that Hall was, for her extraordinary heroism, to receive the Distinguished Service Cross -- second only to the Medal of Honor. Truman, Donovan suggested, "may wish to make the presentation personally."
Hall had volunteered to go to Nazi-occupied France even though she was known to the Gestapo. She organized, armed and trained French resistance forces that demolished bridges, destroyed supply trains and disrupted enemy communications. "As a result of the demolition of one bridge, a German convoy was ambushed and during a bitter struggle 150 Germans were killed and 500 were captured," Donovan wrote in his memo to Truman. Hall -- nicknamed La Dame Qui Boite, the Limping Lady -- displayed "indomitable physical endurance" despite having lost a leg in a prewar hunting accident.
A native of Baltimore and educated at Radcliffe, she had a talent for languages. But she had been told a U.S. Foreign Service career was closed to her because of the amputated limb.
So she became a British agent. She posed, as CIA historian Gerald K. Haines reveals, as a New York Post stringer in France. King George VI named her a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
By 1944, she was working for the Americans with the OSS, forerunner of the CIA. Code-named "Diane," she arrived on the Brittany coast March 21, by way of a British torpedo boat, as Haines tells it. The Allied invasion of the French coast -- D-Day -- would come June 6.
She got off that boat with an American agent code-named Aramis, but reported that a Madam Long -- who provided her a Paris safe house -- found him "too talkative and indiscrete (sic)." She left him to his own work in Paris and moved south into the countryside, where she was employed as a cook for "farmer Lepinat, his old mother and his hired hand." She also tended the cows -- enabling her to do reconnaissance by day.
Her activity report from the months immediately preceding and following D-Day -- now in the collection of the National Archives -- was declassified May 6, 1991. It outlines engagements with the enemy, sabotage, forces killed in action, prisoners captured, names of collaborators.
In September of 1945, Hall got her Distinguished Service Cross, but from "Wild Bill" and not at the White House -- she was still undercover.
She retired from the CIA in 1966, at the age of 60. Her niece Lorna Catling, who remembers her as "Aunt Dindy," says she lived her remaining 16 years in rural Maryland, where she grew a hillside full of gladiolas, fed her French poodles with a silver spoon and read widely.
Spy novels, actually.
A sampling of the billions of artifacts and documents in the National Archives is on view in the Public Vaults exhibit. See http://www.archives.gov/national_archives_experience/visit/public_vaults_2.html
(Delia M. Rios can be contacted at delia.rios@newhouse.com)
Char :)
Fascinating...I'd love to read more about her. I read "Sisterhood of Spies" a few years ago and enjoyed it. That truely was the greatest generation, no question.
ping
one tough broad. thanks for the ping.
A good read is , A man called Intrepid. Virginia is mention in it
Don't get me wrong. I love the WWII generation and everything the did, but some of these other Americans may question ....
Benjamin Franklin
James Madison
Alexander Hamilton
John Hancock
John Adams
Samuel Adams
Paul Revere
John Marshall
Robert Morris
Samuel Chase
Let's see. Who else?
Oh, yeah!
Thomas Jefferson
George Washington ….
Thanks for the interesting ping! Hope you had a Happy Memorial Day! :-)
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