Category: War
There were forty-one female agents who worked for Section F of the British Special Operations Executive during World War 2. They ranged in age from 20 to 53. These exceptional women were aggressively trained in spycraft and covertly deployed into Axis-occupied territory. Their missions typically involved intelligence gathering and coordinating resistance operations. The Germans despised them.
Twenty-six survived the war. Of those who were lost, a dozen were captured and executed by the Germans, two perished from disease while imprisoned, one drowned when her ship was sunk, and another died of natural causes. I once met one of the survivors. Her name was Eve Gordon. She was the most compelling speaker I have ever heard.
Arguably the best-documented of the lot was Violette Szabo. A hero of the highest order, Violette’s story reads like an adventure novel. She ultimately gave her life for the cause of freedom.
Origin Story Of Violette Szabo
Violette was born on 26 June 1921, in Paris. Her father was English, and her mother was French. She was the second of five children and the only girl. She lived in France until age 11. Surrounded as she was by boys, she grew up shooting, ice-skating, and long-distance bike riding. Once she moved to England she had to relearn English.
Violette was cursed with a hyperdeveloped sense of patriotism. With the onset of war, she volunteered for the Women’s Land Army and was dispatched to pick strawberries in support of the war effort. From there she transferred to an armaments factory in Acton where she met her future husband, Etienne Szabo. Etienne was Hungarian but served as an NCO in the French Foreign Legion. They dated for 42 days and were married. At the time Violette was 19, and Etienne was 31. After a one-week honeymoon, Etienne deployed to fight the Vichy French in Senegal, South Africa, Eritrea, and Syria. War is hell.
Violette bounced through a couple of jobs before enlisting with the Auxiliary Territorial Service. Hers was the first coeducational antiaircraft battery in the British military. She was posted to Frodsham, Cheshire, near Warrington. Etienne returned home briefly on leave before deploying yet again, this time to North Africa to face Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Soon after he left, Violette discovered she was pregnant.
On 8 June 1942, Violette gave birth to a daughter, Tania. Once the child was old enough, Violette sent her away to be raised in safety by childminders while she took a job in an aircraft factory. On 24 October of that year, Etienne was killed during the Second Battle of El Alamein. Tania never met her father. The rage that Etienne’s death ignited in Violette led her to F-section of the British Special Operations Executive.
The Girl Becomes a Spy
F-section oversaw a series of clandestine underground networks in occupied Europe. 470 SOE agents served in France. 104 of them died. Of the fifty individual networks operating during the war, thirty-one were broken by the Germans.
Little is known of Violette’s recruitment to the Dark Side. Those records, if ever they existed, were eventually lost. Her mastery of the French language and French customs no doubt played a large part as did her service with the 481st Heavy (Mixed) Antiaircraft Battery. She trained in spycraft for several months in 1944. There she mastered weapons, demolitions, cryptography, communications, parachuting, navigation, and fieldcraft. Her classmates adored her for her courage and good humor. Her instructors passed her but only just.
The master cryptographer Leo Marks described her as, “A dark-haired slip of mischief….She had a Cockney accent which added to her impishness.”
One of her instructors said, “She lacks ruse, stability, and the finesse which is required and…she is too easily influenced…[but] she set an example to the whole party by her cheerfulness and eagerness to please.” Regardless, by the Spring of 1944, Violette was declared ready to go to war.
Seeing the Elephant
On the night of 5 April 1944, Violette and another SOE operative named Philippe Liewer parachuted into France near Cherbourg from a British Halifax bomber. Violette was cute, gregarious, and small at only five foot three inches tall. As such, she could move more freely than might a more intimidating military-age man. She travelled along the coast prior to the invasion assessing the state of Resistance cells and the local war industry. Her reports aided Allied planners in establishing pre-invasion bombing targets.
Three and one-half weeks after her insertion, Violette was extracted by an RAF Lysander piloted by Bob Large. The plane was badly damaged by antiaircraft fire on the trip back to England, losing a tire in the process. The plane was dark, the ride rough, and the landing without one tire all the more so. Tucked away as she was in the belly of the plane, Violette thought they had gone down in occupied France. When Large, who had bright blonde hair, went back to check on her after landing, Violette thought he was a German and attacked him. When she realized her mistake he earned a kiss.
Playing for Keeps
After two attempts aborted due to foul weather, Szabo and three other agents parachuted out of an American B-24 Liberator bomber into a landing zone near Limoges on 8 June. It is suspected that Szabo exacerbated her old ankle injury on this jump. Finding the local Maquis cells in poor shape to fight, the SOE commander dispatched Szabo to make contact with a better organized Resistance cell in the Correze and Dordogne.
Szabo had 62 miles to traverse, and the area behind the invasion front was frenetic with enemy activity. Specifically, the 2d SS Panzer Division was gradually making its way forward through the same area while being continually harassed by Allied air assets. Despite a general prohibition by the Germans against the use of automobiles by French civilians, one of her Maquis contacts insisted upon taking a Citroen rather than a bicycle given the distances involved. This was a terrible mistake.
Szabo was dressed in light clothing and wore flat-heeled shoes. She carried a Sten submachine gun and eight 32-round magazines. Violette found herself in the small car with two members of the French Resistance when they encountered an SS roadblock outside Salon-la-Tour.
The Firefight
Local Resistance fighters had previously captured Sturmbannfuhrer Helmut Kampfe, a battalion commander in the 2d SS Panzer. The SS troopers were out for blood. Kampfe was eventually executed, sparking a brutal crackdown that resulted in the deaths of 643 innocent French men, women, and children.
The details of what came next have been disputed. Some historians claim it didn’t happen at all. However, SOE personnel who were there alleged that one of the Maquis fighters leapt from the moving car and escaped to warn his comrades. It was claimed that Szabo and the remaining fighter, a young man named Dufour, exited opposite sides of the vehicle. In the ensuing gun battle, an innocent French woman was cut down by the Germans as she peeked out of a nearby barn.
With German armored vehicles and reinforcements arriving quickly, Dufour and Szabo vaulted a gate and sprinted toward a nearby copse of trees. Along the way, Szabo badly twisted her already injured ankle. Now unable to run, Violette refused assistance and directed Dufour to flee to safety. She then dragged herself to cover behind an apple tree at the edge of a cornfield. In this position, she held the attacking SS troopers at bay for a full half an hour until she ran out of ammunition. According to SOE sources, her sacrifice allowed Dufour to escape.
Nazis Just Suck
SS Sturmbannfuhrer Kowatch of the Sicherheitsdienst or SD, the SS Security Service, tortured the captured girl mercilessly for four days in an unsuccessful effort to extract details about her resistance cells. Eve Gordon’s description of her experience with the SD was enough to make me vaguely ill when I heard her speak of it back in 1989. Eventually, with Patton’s 3d Army rapidly approaching, the Germans shipped Szabo and the rest of her captured female SOE counterparts to Ravensbruck concentration camp.
In an environment dominated by Allied air power, the trip by rail took eighteen days. During this time Violette and her comrades were given little to no food or water. During one air attack, the Germans temporarily abandoned the train, allowing Violette to retrieve some water from a lavatory for herself and her friends.
Violette and her female counterparts were assigned to work as slave labor building Heinkel bombers. When she refused to work on German munitions she was remanded to digging potatoes. Eventually, she was put to work felling trees in the winter of 1944 without proper clothing. Many of her comrades literally froze to death. With minimal food and bone-breaking work, Violette grew steadily weaker. Throughout it all, she still schemed ways to escape.
Violette’s Story Comes To An End
Around 5 February 1945, SS-Rottenfuhrer Schult dragged Violette Szabo out of her cell to a spot known as Execution Alley at the Ravensbruck camp. There he forced her to kneel and shot the pretty girl in the back of the head. Her body was burned in the camp crematorium. Szabo was 23 when she died.
Violette Szabo was only the second woman ever awarded the George Cross for gallantry. Some of the details were clearly confused in the interim, but here is the citation—
St. James’s Palace, S.W.1. 17 December 1946
The KING has been graciously pleased to award the GEORGE CROSS to: —Violette, Madame SZABO (deceased), Women’s Transport Service (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry).
Madame Szabo volunteered to undertake a particularly dangerous mission in France. She was parachuted into France in April 1944 and undertook the task with enthusiasm. In her execution of the delicate researches entailed she showed great presence of mind and astuteness. She was twice arrested by the German security authorities but each time managed to get away.
Eventually, however, with other members of her group, she was surrounded by the Gestapo in a house in the south-west of France. Resistance appeared hopeless but Madame Szabo, seizing a Sten gun and as much ammunition as she could carry, barricaded herself in part of the house and, exchanging shot for shot with the enemy, killed or wounded several of them.
By constant movement, she avoided being cornered and fought until she dropped exhausted. She was arrested and had to undergo solitary confinement. She was then continuously and atrociously tortured but never by word or deed gave away any of her acquaintances or told the enemy anything of any value. She was ultimately executed. Madame Szabo gave a magnificent example of courage and steadfastness.
Violette Szabo was a rare patriot. She could have just left well enough alone and whiled away the war years picking strawberries. Instead, she volunteered to parachute deep into enemy-held territory to take the fight to the hated Nazis.
Amidst a veritable ocean of tragedy and pain, the Nazis brutally stole one little girl’s parents. The orphan Tania Szabo subsequently devoted herself to telling her mother’s amazing story. Violette’s inspiring tale of selfless sacrifice in the face of unimaginable hardship should inspire all of us today. Violette Szabo was indeed a true hero.
After years in the making, the National Museum of the United States Army opened its doors on Veterans Day 2020. Located in Ft. Belvoir, Va., off Liberty Drive, the museum spans 185,000 square feet and represents the effort of more than 30 different organizations led by the U.S. Army and the Army Historical Foundation.
The five-story structure sits on 84 acres of ground and contains nearly 1,400 artifacts spread across 11 galleries that tell the story of the U.S. Army from its founding to its position in the modern world. The heart of the museum and where most artifacts are found lie in seven large galleries that span the history of the Army and highlight key roles it played in the development of the United States.
American Rifleman staff had a chance to view the museum during a media event a week prior to the museum opening its doors. Here are five amazing artifacts you can see when you come down to the National Museum of the United States Army:
George Washington’s Newburgh Address
In March 1783, the fledgling United States faced a moment of crisis that almost ended the American experiment before it began. While the nation engaged in peace talks with Great Britain, the soldiers and officers of the Continental Army were reaching a breaking point. They hadn’t been paid in more than a year, and the promise of a lifetime pension for the officers still had no source of funding. An anonymous letter circulated the army camp in Newburgh, NY, which stirred talk of rebellion and a possible military coup against the Continental Congress.
When George Washington heard these rumblings, he knew immediate action was required. What followed on March 15 was one of Washington’s finest hours and a defining moment in the early history of the nation. Washington told his men to be patient, saying that doing so would prove their “unexampled patriotism…rising superior to the pressure of the most complicated sufferings.” After the address, Washington stirred the emotions of his men as he struggled to read a letter from Congress. After faltering, he paused and said, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.”
Sgt. Alvin York’s Helmet
In October 1918, then-Corporal Alvin York of the 82nd Division of the U.S. Army joined a group of American soldiers with a mission to take out a machine-gun position in the German lines during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. While wearing the helmet pictured above, York and his men suddenly came under fire from a German machine gun while dealing with a group of captured German soldiers. To deal with this threat, York embarked on a series of incredible actions that would see him awarded the Medal of Honor.
Likely armed with an M1903 Springfield rifle, York lowered himself and began “touching off” the German machine gunners as quickly as he could. Then, six German soldiers with bayonets fixed charged York, who had expended all the rounds in his rifle. York then drew his M1911 pistol and shot each German soldier, from back to front. Ultimately, through his individual actions, York silenced all the machine-gun positions in the area and captured 132 German soldiers. French Marshal Ferdinand Foch remarked that it “was the greatest thing accomplished by any soldier in all the armies of Europe.”
D-Day LCVP
As part of Operation Overlord, the beach landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, represented one of the largest seaborne invasions in human history. More than 150,000 soldiers supported by nearly 200,000 naval personnel aligned themselves off the northern Channel coast with the aim of cracking Hitler’s Atlantic Wall and establishing a beachhead. The Allied invasion assembled the largest fleet of ships ever gathered.
Nearly 7,000 vessels from eight different navies made up the fleet, and 4,126 landing craft were the largest part of the assemblage, all designed to ferry fighting men from the ships to the five invasion beaches. Of these landing craft, one of the most famous is the “Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel” (LCVP), more popularly known as the “Higgins boat” after its designer, Andrew Higgins. More than 23,000 Higgins boats were produced during the war for use in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. Few survive today, and even fewer are known to have been used in the Normandy landings. The Higgins boat at the National Museum of the U.S. Army is one of six known survivors from D-Day.
Pvt. Martin J. Teahan’s M1 Garand
At 2:15 a.m. on June 6, 1944, the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR) of the 82nd Airborne took part in the opening phase of Operation Overlord, jumping behind German lines. The 508th PIR’s objectives were to capture the French town of Sainte-Mère-Église, secure Merderet River crossings and establish defensive positions in preparation for the Normandy landings. Among those who jumped from the skies that morning was 21-year-old Pvt. Martin J. Teahan.
He joined his comrades in the heavy fighting on D-Day, and while scouting near Picauville, France, Pvt. Teahan was shot in the leg, captured and later killed by a German soldier. Several days after the landing, a French farmer found an M1 Garand engraved with the name “M. Teahan” and held onto it for 72 years until its discovery in 2016. Pvt. Teahan is one of 9,388 American soldiers who lie in the Normandy American cemetery near Colleville-sur-Mer, France, but the rifle he fought with has an honored place in the U.S. Army’s National Museum.
The Sherman tank “Cobra King” is shown painted in its wartime finish in a winter display that highlights its role during the Battle of the Bulge.
M4A3E2 Sherman “Cobra King”
During the winter of 1944, Allied armies were making significant progress against the Nazi war machine. The combined forces of the British and Americans on the Western Front of World War II had brought them nearly to the border of Germany itself. Hitler and his command staff had only enough men and materiel to mount one last offensive. Known today as the “Battle of the Bulge,” the German blow pushed through the Ardennes Forest with the aim of splitting the Allied lines. The Germans hoped this would destroy the Allied armies in northwestern France and prevent the use of the Antwerp port, forcing them into a surrender settlement.
While the German advance accomplished none of its aims, the assaulting force managed to surround the 101st Airborne in the Belgian town of Bastogne. With heavy cloud cover preventing any reliable means of air support or resupply, the men of the 101st Airborne held out against the odds during five days of heavy fighting. On Dec. 26, 1944, lead elements of the 37th Tank Battalion of the 4th Armored Division broke through German lines, effectively ending the siege of Bastogne. At the head of the column was “Cobra King,” an M4A3E2 Sherman tank that held the honor of being the first unit through the lines.
These are just five of the nearly 1,400 artifacts visitors can see in the National Museum of the U.S. Army, and there are many more priceless artifacts that tell the story of the nation through the eyes of its soldiers. From the rifles of the American Revolution to an engine recovered from one of the helicopters immortalized in “Blackhawk Down,” there’s something for everyone to see.
Museum entry is free, but timed-entry tickets are required and can be reserved on the museum’s website. The museum is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and is closed Christmas Day. Parking is free, and the museum is located 25 minutes from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. For more information, visit thenmusa.org.
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