Secrets in Silk

Half a world away in England, in 1941, when pretty, petite “Pippa” Latour joined the RAF for training as a flight mechanic, authorities challenged her documents. She looked like a middle-school girl. It wasn’t long though before other facts about her background came to the attention of Britain’s SOE—the Special Operations Executive. The offspring of an English mother and a French-born doctor, Pippa spoke French like a native, had vacationed and traveled in France—and bore a grudge against the Nazis. Her godmother’s father was shot and killed by the Germans, and her godmother committed suicide after being taken prisoner as a spy. She jumped at the chance for some payback.

After training with some strange characters, including an ex-convict cat burglar who taught her skills like using drainpipes and rooftops as her personal highways, she was smuggled into Vichy, France in 1942. Under three code names—Genevieve, Lampooner and Plus Fours—Pippa gathered invaluable intelligence and established a support network for further operations. She returned to England for rest and more training, then parachuted into Normandy alone on May 1, 1944.

Under the code name Paulette, the 23-year-old successfully posed as a poor 14-year-old French girl selling homemade soap to German soldiers—while learning all about the Normandy defenses. She slept in forests, foraged for food—including rat on occasion—and sent 135 coded radio messages back to England, all while keeping one step ahead of German radio-triangulation teams. Others didn’t. Sixteen of her sister British female spies were killed in action, summarily executed, or sent to concentration camps where they died.

Even after the Allies landed, she soldiered on, moving inland with the German Army for months, still sending out updates on troop concentrations and German movements. Pippa was awarded the MBE—Member, Order of the British Empire—and the Croix de Guerre, but she didn’t even stick around to formally receive them.

At war’s end she immediately moved to Kenya, where she married, becoming Phyllis Latour Doyle, then on to Fiji and finally New Zealand, where she lives today. She never breathed a word of her wartime service until one of her children stumbled across a footnote about her on the Internet 15 years ago. They petitioned Britain for her medals.

Finally, just last year, France’s government was given her full war records. On November 25th, Laurent Contini, the French ambassador to New Zealand presented Pippa, 93, with the Legion of Honour, France’s highest decoration.