Ticket 2 Ride

When I first read a short bio of Pippa Latour on a Facebook post, I was amazed at the risk that she took to gather and send information from France to London during World War II. A good many people, who assisted the underground or worked to support the war effort were caught, tortured and executed. That included women.

For example:

Kate Bonnefous and Etta Shiber were two civilians who helped downed and escaped allied soldiers to get to England. Both were captured and their stories were the stuff that nightmares are made. Here’s my review of the book about them Paris Underground .

Back to Pippa Latour.

Born PHYLLIS ADA LATOUR, for decades, Latour kept her war experience to herself, that was required by law, but it was such a harrowing number of months of covert action, she buried the ordeal and moved on with her life.

Recruited by British intelligence, he trained in the same parachuting, fighting, shooting and survival skills as male operatives and was dropped into occupied France in 1944. “Churchill instructed those, like me, tasked with the work across the English Channel to go forth and ‘set Europe ablaze.’” She would work with the Underground to collect and send information back to England on German troop movements and other sensitive information. Based on her intelligence, bomber crews and the Underground attacked and destroyed German operations. In a broader mission, the SOE was to “conduct espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance in occupied Europe (and, later, also in occupied Southeast Asia), as well as aiding local resistance movements.” Location information would also lead to the deaths of civilians, a realization she that came after a bombing incident that killed several people including children. War toughened her, it had to for her to survive.

The SS and Gestapo put a lot of effort into tracking down, capturing and killing those responsible for sabotage and German military deaths. She was a twenty-three year old woman who was posing as a fourteen year old farm girl who traveled around the area on her bicycle selling soap to others including German soldiers. She had wireless sets and guns hidden in multiple locations so she could quickly send off Morse Code messages, while dodging the Gestapo’s direction-finder mobile units.

The book was constructed from a series of interviews with Latour with writer Jude Dobson, and other sources about the Secret Operations Executive (SOE) that Latour worked for. It was only after one of her sons stumbled across information on the internet about Latour that she felt compelled to reveal her past. Latour was the last living member of the SOE, who died at age 102, prior to this book’s publication.

Latour was told that the life expectancy of a radio operator behind enemy lines was six weeks. She evaded numerous attempts to capture her, living mostly in the forests and scavenging food and water. “Of the 430 SOE agents in France, only 39 of us were women and 14 of our group never returned. We were women of various descent, among them British, French, Polish, Finnish, American, and South African, like me.”

The book is a detailed story of her early life, the months undercover in France, and briefly her life after the war. Her early life, mostly in Africa, was quite interesting as it explains acquiring the knowledge and skills that would help to keep her live. What I realize from her story was the razor thin line between freedom and capture, and how luck and circumstance literally meant life and death. many of her colleagues did not return.

• Yvonne Rudellat died in captivity of typhus, on April 24, 1945, in Bergen-Belsen, eight days after the liberation of the camp. She had been captured almost two years previously, in June 1943, at Bracieux.
• And lastly there was Cecily Lefort, who was captured at Montéli-mar in September 1943. She died in the gas chamber at the Ucker-mark Youth Camp, adjacent to Ravensbrück, on May I, 1945. The day after Hitler killed himself.
• I learned later that, while I was in Falaise, four more of my SOE F Section female compatriots were executed in Germany. Yolande Beckman, Madeleine Damerment, Noor Inayat-Khan, and Eliane Plewman were shot in the back of the head at Dachau concentration camp on September 13, I944. Noor had survived in captivity the longest, having been arrested in October 1943 in Paris. Yolande, Madeleine, and Eliane had been captured, respectively, in January (St. Quentin), February (Chartres), and March (Marseilles) of 1944.
• Andrée Bor-rel, Vera Leigh, and Sonia Olschanezky had all been arrested in Paris-Andrée in June 1943, Vera in November 1943, and Sonia in January 1944-and Diana Rowden was captured near Clairsus les-Lacs in November 1943. Andrée, Vera, Sonia, and Diana were killed on the same day they arrived at the camp—injected with phenol, which was supposedly lethal, then incinerated in the ovens at the crematorium.

Her cover as a child helped in her cover, and prevented her from being sent to forced labor camps. It did not prevent her from being sexually assaulted by two German soldiers near the end of her time undercover. As she was being assaulted, her friend found an SS officer, who declined to intervene, “Leave her,” he said, before brushing her aside and walking on. “They will give her good strong German sons.” Her friend found a different officer, who did intervene. He shot and killed the two attackers, then gave her a scarf to wipe her tears and said, “Go home,” before leaving. Latour realized that her cover as a fourteen year old girl was what saved her.

World War II is now just a piece of history we see in movies and textbooks, those who lived it are no longer here. Stories like Pippa Latour serve to tell us about the sacrifices made for our freedom. I cannot imagine doing what her and the others in the SOE and other branches courageously did, risking and many giving their lives. These are stories we should all read.