Arrest and execution awaited almost one in two members of the British Special Operations Executive F Section (France). Those were the odds that Odette Sansom faced when she joined the SOE in 1942.
Designed as a guerilla campaign against the Axis, SOE soldiers operated outside the typical chain of command and were directed to inflict as much damage as possible — by any means necessary — to enemy forces.
SOE agents accepted almost assured death, but signing on to be an SOE courier was even more hazardous. Female couriers operating in occupied France had the second-highest Allied fatality rate of the war — 42 percent, behind only Bomber Command’s 45 percent, according to Larry Loftis, author of CODE NAME: LISE.
Born in Amiens, France, in 1912, Sansom later emigrated to the island nation after her marriage to an Englishman. She was living in Somerset with their three children at the outbreak of WWII when the housewife answered the appeal of the Royal Navy in the spring of 1942 for images of the French coastline.
