D-Day Girls: The Spies Who Armed the Resistance, Sabotaged the Nazis, and Helped Win World War II

Lise was on only the first day of what would be a three-day bicycle ride over small back roads “through thick enemy formations” to the combat zone. She slept in ditches when she tired, then picked up her vélo and began traveling again to her headquarters. She was nowhere near a radio when the communiqué from General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied forces, aired for the people of Normandy: The lives of many of you depend on the speed with which you obey. Leave your towns at once—stay off the roads—go on foot and take nothing with you that is difficult to carry. Do not gather in groups which may be mistaken for enemy troops. The largest armada the world had ever known was minutes away from landing on the northern beaches of France. The hour of your liberation is approaching.

She was very much ahead of her fellow students and, had she been with others as mentally mature as herself, she would have shown herself even more capable.

In total, Allied-backed resistance forces were counted as worth fifteen divisions in France, or about 200,000 troops.

Where regular forces provide martial muscle, the special forces are surgical and skilled, trained to be “the most potent weapons one can use”: Attacking the means of production and communication—disabling factories that made the machines that fought the war, annihilating the ability to communicate troop movements over distances—was the most advanced thinking in military planning.

They were not hired for their looks or their sophistication; the most competent ones specialized in puzzles, music, and foreign languages.

Buck regarded his two agents, Andrée and Lise, certain he was dropping his two most competent, most capable. Each was a girl who kept her head when all about were losing theirs, as Kipling might have said.

Few thought violent resistance was sensible; there was a broad nationwide fear of young men living in the woods, with neither jobs nor families, clamoring for guns and revenge. What reasonable person would support lawless adolescents with bombs?

Winston Churchill’s own daughter Mary served on a gun site in Hyde Park, about which the prime minister remarked, “A gunner is a gunner.