Virginia Hall receives the Distinguished Service Cross from OSS Director William J. Donovan, September 1945. Hall was the only civilian woman to receive the award during the Second World War.
Central Intelligence Agency. Public domain.
The American Office of Strategic Services and the British Special Operations Executive sent women behind the lines in occupied Europe and the Pacific to gather intelligence, arm and organize resistance, work the wireless, and carry out sabotage. They were sister services that often worked the same ground, and a few women, like Virginia Hall, served both. They lived for months under the constant risk of capture, and the ones who were caught faced torture, the camps, and the firing squad.
1906 to 1982
Special Operations Executive agent, then OSS Special Operations officer; France.
Hall, an American with a prosthetic leg she called Cuthbert, ran the Heckler resistance network from Lyon for SOE beginning August 1941 and returned with OSS in 1944 to arm and train Maquis in the Haute-Loire. She received the Distinguished Service Cross, the only one awarded to a civilian woman in the war.
1914 to 1944
Special Operations Executive wireless operator; code name Madeleine.
The British-Indian Khan was the first female SOE wireless operator infiltrated into occupied France, arriving in June 1943 and working in Paris for months as the sole British radio link in the area after the rest of her network was rolled up. She refused orders to come home to safety. Betrayed and arrested in October 1943, she was interrogated and gave nothing away, and was executed at Dachau on 13 September 1944. She received the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre.
1912 to 2011
Special Operations Executive agent; the Gestapo's 'White Mouse.'
Raised in Sydney and working as a journalist in Europe when the war began, Wake first ran couriers and escape routes for downed Allied airmen out of occupied France, slipping the Gestapo so often that they called her the White Mouse and put a price on her head. She escaped to Britain, trained with SOE, and parachuted into the Auvergne in April 1944, where she helped arm and lead thousands of Maquis fighters against German forces before and after D-Day, once cycling some five hundred kilometers through checkpoints to replace lost wireless codes. She became one of the most decorated servicewomen of the war.
1912 to 2004
OSS clerk and administrative officer; Washington, Ceylon, and China.
Child joined the OSS in 1942 and was posted to Kandy, Ceylon, in 1944, where she registered and routed highly classified communications for the Southeast Asia Command, later transferring to Kunming, China. She received the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service in 1945.
1915 to 2015
OSS Morale Operations officer; India and China.
McIntosh, a journalist fluent in Japanese, joined the OSS in 1943 and served with Detachment 303 in New Delhi and Detachment 202 in Kunming, producing black propaganda, forged Japanese letters, and disinformation broadcasts. She continued in intelligence after the war and served for years in the Central Intelligence Agency.
1921 to 2009
OSS interpreter and guide; Slovakia.
A Slovak schoolteacher recruited during the Slovak National Uprising, Gulovich guided American and British agents through the Low Tatra mountains for nine weeks in the winter of 1944 to 1945. She was awarded the U.S. Bronze Star in 1946.
Researched and written by Erin Faith Allen · Fortitude Research