KENNETH WINTERNATIONAL MUSEUM OF. RENDELL,
WORLD WAR IICOLT PISTOL IN A
SHOULDER HOLSTER
USED BY JEDBURGH
AGENTSFueling French
Resistance
IN HARM’S WAY
All Allied agents were at risk of
being executed if seized behind
German lines, whether they
operated in civilian dress like
Virginia Hall—pictured (above
left) on a driver’s license she
obtained in Estonia in 1938—or in
uniforms like the Jedburgh team
members (above), about to take
off from England in a B-24 that
would drop them into France.Before and after D-Day, agents of the OSS,
its British counterpart the SOE, and the
French government-in-exile armed French
Resistance groups and organized
attacks to hinder German
opposition to the invasion.AMONG THOSE AGENTS was American-
born Virginia Hall (above left), who
had aided Resistance groups in France
for the SOE before fleeing to Spain in late
1942 to evade the Gestapo, whose officers
knew she had a wooden leg, which made
her conspicuous. In early 1944 she trans-
ferred to the OSS, dyed her hair gray, and
returned furtively to France disguised as a
lame old peasant woman to arrange by ra-
dio air drops of weapons to French guerrillas
known as the maquis—a perilous assignment
because Germans monitored radio transmis-
sions and could trace them to their source.
Although the Gestapo was on the lookout
for Hall and considered her “one of the most
dangerous Allied agents in France,” she avoided
arrest and linked up after D-Day with one of the
many Jedburgh teams, consisting of OSS, SOE, and
Free French operatives who parachuted behind enemy
lines to coordinate assaults by partisans on German
troops and their lines of communication. Trained for
combat, Jedburgh teams carried weapons, includ-
ing pistols concealed about their persons and smallblades that could be held in the
hand. Like the Allied agents
who aided them, French parti-
sans defied German forces at
great risk. On June 10, troops
of the Second SS Panzer Di-
vision (“Das Reich”), which
was redeployed from south-
ern France to Normandy right
after D-Day, retaliated for
assaults that slowed them by
slaughtering nearly the entire
population of the small town
of Oradour-sur-Glane in central
France. Among the victims were
more than 400 women and children,
locked in a church into which troops
tossed grenades. Expected to reach
Normandy within a few days, that SS
division did not arrive there
for a few weeks, too late to
repulse the invasion.88 MAY/JUNE 2019CIA IMAGING AND PUBLISHING SERVICES, CIA MUSEUM (PHOTO), COURTESY LORNA CATLING (LICENSE)
U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES