Violette Szabo

This time let's flash-forward to World War II. Violette Szabo was a British spy who aided the French resistance against Nazi domination. She had courage, spirit, an infectious laugh, and a cute Cockney accent. She also spoke fluent French, was good-looking, and an expert marksman. Although her superiors thought she wasn't smart enough, and too driven by revenge to be an effective spy, she proved them wrong and received the George Cross after the war. Unfortunately, she was not alive to collect it personally. She paid the ultimate price to stop Nazi aggression.

She was born in Paris in 1921, but grew up mostly in London. She did return to France briefly to live with in-laws because her parents were having trouble making ends meet during the Great Depression. However, by the time she was 11 she was back in London. The only girl among four brothers and multiple male cousins, Violette was considered a "tomboy," and she excelled at sports--particularly biking, skating and gymnastics. Her father, although he was a strict disciplinarian, was devoted to her. He enjoyed sport-shooting, and taught Violette to be an excellent marksman. This would come in handy later. However, she was headstrong, and rebelled against her father's authority. She even ran away to France once when she was a teenager. By the time she was 14 she'd left school and was working at Woolworth's selling perfume.

When World War II began, she joined the Women's Land Army, which was a group that did agricultural work to replace men who had been called into military service. After spending some time picking fruit in the country, she was bored enough to return to London and get a job in an armaments factory.

France had fallen to the Nazis quickly, and many French refugees crowded London. The city fathers honored them with a Bastille Day celebration and parade. Violette's mother (who, along with Violette, spoke fluent French), sent her to the parade to find a homesick French soldier and invite him to dinner where he could speak in his native tongue. Violette took one look at the dashing French officer Etienne Szabo and decided it had to be him. She was 19 and he was over 30, but the two were married only 42 days later. Almost immediately, he left for Africa to fight with Free French units alongside the British.

Violette got a job as a telephone operator, and worked through the Blitz in London. But she wanted to do more. With her good looks and charm, she managed to talk her way into an anti-aircraft gun unit in a job called "director," which meant she used trigonometry to help gunners hit moving targets (specifically, German bombers). But almost as soon as she started, she found out she was pregnant, and returned to London to give birth to a daughter, Talia. When the baby was born, Violette sent her to the country, out of harm's way, and worked at an aircraft factory alongside her father.

Meanwhile, her husband was in North Africa, fighting with Free French and English troops against the feared Afrika Korps of Erwin Rommel. He barely escaped with his life after a battle with the 15th Panzer Division, and a few months later personally led an attack at the Second Battle of El Alamein. He was shot in the chest and killed in action.

When she heard this, Violette was filled with rage and vowed revenge. After a seemingly innocuous conversation with a recruiter who realized she spoke fluent French, she was invited to train as a secret agent with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), with an eye toward assigning her to the so-called "F Section" in France. She could speak French and was attractive. The SOE had learned that Nazi troops tended to give good-looking women more leniency than men, when it came to searches and curfews. F Section was in desperate need of female couriers and intelligence-gatherers. Violette was sent to Scotland to train in paramilitary and commando warfare. She was also trained in "silent killing," escape and evasion tactics, demolitions (for sabotage work) and cryptography.

But her superior officers were reluctant to use her in the field, primarily because of her "fatalistic" attitude. One wrote that she "seems perfectly willing to die" as long as she could get revenge for her husband's death. They also thought she was too impulsive. Furthermore, her training course grades were somewhat mediocre (she received the equivalent of a "D"), and it was determined that she had "only average intelligence." But the need outweighed the risks, and partially because she was the best female marksman they had, they decided to activate her. She was trained in parachuting, but on her first jump, she landed badly and wound up with a terribly sprained ankle. As it turned out, this injury would later have tragic consequences.

After healing, she passed the course and was sent to join a spy unit operating in France under the code name SALESMAN. She was popular among both the men and women she worked with. Her Cockney accent and infectious laughter endeared her to her cohorts. She had high spirits and enjoyed playing practical jokes. One contemporary called her "a dark-haired slip of mischief." When it came time for her to go on her first mission, her commanders gave her one last chance to refuse, saying she had only a 1 in 4 chance of survival. She went anyway.

In 1944, Violette and spy-organizer Phillippe Liewer parachuted out of a B-24 Liberator bomber into Nazi-occupied France. Her cover was that she was a secretary who was a resident of Le Havre - this ruse got around Nazi rules and allowed her to go to her "home" in the so-called "Restricted Zone" along the French coast. Her code name was Louise. She traveled the countryside and collected intelligence about arrested spies. This intelligence convinced Liewer that the SALESMAN unit was compromised beyond repair. In fact, she learned that the Nazis already knew Liewer's identity and code name. She also figured out which factories were making war material for the Nazis, which helped the Allies determine targets to bomb.

After this, it was deemed prudent for her to return to England, but on the way, the plane she was in was hit by anti-aircraft guns. She'd not yet gotten a look at her blonde-haired, blue-eyed pilot, so when he made an emergency landing and opened the door, she thought  he was a Nazi. Screaming curses at him, she tried to physically attack him, but soon realized her mistake. Instead of hitting the pilot, she kissed him.

Her service wasn't over, however. Just after D-Day (on June 8 1944) she parachuted into France again, this time near the village of Sussac. She was part of a four-person team of British and Americans. This time, her cover was that she was the widow of an antiques dealer. What she was really doing was sabotaging Nazi communication lines.

Then a new mission came: she and a French associate, Dufour, were to travel to organize resistance fighters in Correze and Dordogne. Violette was an avid cyclist and wanted to take a bike, especially because the Nazis had banned the French from driving cars. But partially because of the need for speed, and partially because of her bad ankle, Liewer insisted on her taking a small Citroen. Violette, at her own request, was armed with a submachine gun and eight clips of ammunition. On the way, they picked up another resistance fighter called Bariaud. He told them something they didn't know: that the 2nd SS Panzer Division was in the area, searching for a commander that had been captured. They soon came upon a roadblock, and Dufour, the commander of the mission, wasn't taking any chances. He slowed the car so that Bariaud could jump out and warn resistance fighters elsewhere of the Panzer division's presence.

Dufour stopped the car some way before the roadblock, but within sight of the Nazis. He and Violette ran from the car in opposite directions - he into a cornfield, she into a stand of trees. A gun battle ensued in which one innocent farmer's wife was killed. Szabo crossed the road under fire to join Dufour in the cornfield. Still under fire, they ran through the field, across a stream, and up a hill toward a large apple tree. But her old ankle injury came back to haunt her: she fell, badly twisting the ankle, and could barely walk, let alone run. Dufour chivalrously attempted to carry her, but she demanded that he save himself while she provided covering fire. She literally dragged herself to the apple tree, and started shooting at the Nazis while Dufour escaped to hide in the barn of a resistance-friendly fighter.

For a full half-hour, Violette single-handedly held off the Nazi pursuit. She killed at least one Nazi officer, and it's possible she killed a few more. She wounded nearly a dozen. But eventually, she ran out of ammunition. Two Nazis dragged her to an armored car, where she spit in the face of a Nazi officer. Defiantly, she demanded that they untie her so she could smoke a cigarette.

Violette was interrogated for four days at a local SS Security Service building, but they couldn't get anything out of her. Meanwhile, Dufour was desperately making plans to try to free her, and he may have succeeded, had she not been transferred first. The Gestapo stepped in, and informed the SS that since she was fighting behind enemy lines in civilian clothes, the Geneva Convention did not apply to her. She was transferred to the French Gestapo headquarters. There, she was interrogated under torture. She didn't give up anything, and gave them a false name, but German intelligence eventually deduced her identity as the agent code-named Louise.

She and other prisoners were transferred to Germany by train. On the way, an allied air strike caused the Nazis to abandon the train for a time; chained to another female prisoner, Violette brought water to the male prisoners, who were kept in cages, which encouraged them so much they sang patriotic songs once the train got going again, to the irritation of the Nazi officers, who issued a few beatings to shut them up.

Eventually, kept on starvation rations in squalid conditions, she was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, a place specifically for women prisoners. It was notorious for the brutality of its guards. Violette and other women were place in a hard labor gang, forced to work outside cutting trees in the dead of winter - while obliged to wear only summer clothes. They were given barely-digestible bread crusts and forced to sleep in unheated huts with no blankets. Many froze or starved to death.

Not Violette. She kept making plans to escape. Survivors who knew her said she was upbeat and confident of either liberation by the Allies or that her escape plans would work out. She even managed to construct a makeshift transmitter on the sly and tried to send coded messages back to England, but it's unknown whether she succeeded. When this was discovered, the Nazi guards brutally beat her and sexually assaulted her, then threw her into solitary confinement. Weeks later, she and two other similarly treated female prisoners were led to the grounds of the crematorium. The other two were too badly beaten to walk, but Violette managed to hold her head high. Her morale had suffered, but she remained defiant, refusing a blindfold and demanding a cigarette, which the amused guards gave her. After that, they shot her in the head three times and cremated her body. Violette was only 23 years old.

No one knew what happened to her until 1946. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross, as well as numerous French medals. Her five-year old daughter Talia solemnly accepted the George Cross from King George IV personally. Today, there are no less than seven monuments to her in England and France. She was the subject of multiple books at one 1958 film starring Virginia McKenna.

And she wasn't the only one. Women played a huge part in SOE operations during World War II, and very few of them survived to tell the tale. Said one, Odette Hallowes, of Violette: "She was the bravest of us all."

I think it's time for another movie, personally, to introduce this hero to a new generation - because without a doubt, Violette Szabo was truly a Badass Chick of History.