Brave and Fearless: WWII Unsung Heroines

Every year, in March, television, newspapers and magazines fall over themselves to release news on women’s achievements.  It has become a ritual ahead of the celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8.  Like a flash in the pan, interest falls soon after.  But in an era of #MeToo, #balancetonporc and Times’Up, there seems to be a flutter of momentum for women to achieve some of their goals and get recognition.  This year businesses and governments are taking notice.

In the past, women were prevented from striving outside their narrow female ambit.  Likewise, women’s important accomplishments were overlooked because they were women.  It has been a wish of mine for some time to have a look at some of the women who changed history and share their stories.  Here are the stories of three amazing women who risked their life for France and the Allies during WWII: Margot Duhalde, Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens and Susan Travers.  They were not selected at random; their personalities and stories moved me.  Just three among the thousands of unpretentious heroines who possessed grit, courage and resourcefulness.  They are all dead now; two passed away recently and their obituaries dust off their contributions.  The third one is being rediscovered because it has become socially correct and popular to dig up heroines left behind by history written by men.

                                                                             Clockwise: Margot, Jeannie and Susan

Margot Duhalde (1920-2018)

In 1941, driven by her determination to join the Free French Air Force, Margot a Chilean national of French descent sailed from Argentina to England with other Chilean and French diaspora volunteers[1].  Even short of pilots, de Gaulle would not accept women in the cockpit, so she was sent to the mess kitchen to peel potatoes and the hangars to help the mechanics.  At the end of the war, a seasoned pilot, she finally achieved her goal and became the only Free French female pilot. 

Undeterred by this initial setback with the Free French and speaking no English, she nonetheless managed to become a ferry pilot with the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA) of Royal Air Force (RAF).  ATA recruited those regarded as physically unfit to join the RAF, and women fell into this category.  However, to join women had to log 500 hours of solo flying, twice that of a man!  In spite of this initial handicap, 164 women were employed by ATA[2].  With only basic instructions and the help of factory manuals, Margot flew 70 different types of planes, including Spitfires and bombers from the factory to the bases and to combat zones in France, Holland and Belgium, but she did not fly combat missions.  In three years, she logged over 1000 flights and had ten crash landings and assorted accidents.

In 1945, Margot got her reward: she was finally admitted into the French Air Force and flew warplanes as the first female combat pilot.  Back in Chile in 1947, she was determined to fly but was once more confronted by the “no female” policy, this time that of the national commercial airline.  Frustrated, she became a private pilot and later joined a small regional airline.  She became a flight instructor and the first female air traffic controller.  She had taken her first flying class at 16 and was 86 the last time she sat in the cockpit.  She was awarded the UK Veteran badge and two Legions of Honor awards, first as a Knight and in 2007 as a Commander with a thank you note from French president Jacques Chirac.  She was a colonel in the Chilean air force.  Margot’s love story was with planes not men, she had more patience with the former than the latter!  She married three times briefly and admitted that her husbands had a hard time understanding her.  She is survived by a son.

Trailblazer Margot must have passed away very frustrated because only four women now fly for Latam, the largest Latin American airline based in Chile.  One pilot recently resigned because cockpit machismo made her life unbearable, and another one was reinstated by a court order after having been laid off by the management.  Last, but not least, a large number of Latino passengers still resent the presence of a woman in the cockpit.  The friendly skies: not yet for Chilean female pilots!

                                                                             ATA female pilots.  Margot, left in the cockpit.

Jeannie Rousseau de Clarens (1919-2017)

She was a doll of a woman, petite, with a lovely face and a warm smile.  This is how her male peers used to describe her.  She was a charmer and a listener, but her most valuable assets were her fluency in German and her photographic memory.  Thanks to these skills, she became one of the most remarkable spies in occupied France.   She was no rocket bomb scientist but nonetheless delivered to the Allies critical information on the German V1 and V2 rocket programs.  Spying was part one of her resistance activities.  Part two was spent in horrendous conditions in Ravensbrűck’s women’s concentration camp and in two forced labor camps in Germany.

She was 21 in 1941 and had been one of the few women to graduate from the prestigious school of Sciences Politiques in Paris.  Her flawless German allowed her to be in the right spot at the right time.  She started her informal spying career in Brittany as an interpreter for the German occupation forces.  Suspected of passing confidential information gathered from gullible and smitten German officers to London, she was briefly jailed.  She was released because the Germans believed she was too cute to be a spy.  She moved to Paris where she got a job as an interpreter for the French Chamber of Commerce and Industry where she became a full-fledged spy.   Amniatrix was her alias.  

Several times she travelled to Germany with French industry officials, and during interactions with Nazi counterparts, she uncovered information on the Nazi long-range rocket development and launching program in Peeneműnde on the Baltic Sea.  Werner von Braun was part of the scientific team.  Twenty-five hundred concentration camp prisoners mainly from France, Belgium and the Netherlands also toiled in horrific conditions, knowing that lethal weapons were built to destroy their countries.  Thanks to Jeannie’s information the site was partially bombed during the summer of 1943.  Hitler had to move the plant to a less exposed underground site elsewhere in Germany.

Jeannie’s discoveries were so thrilling that in Spring 1944, the Allies planned her debriefing in England.  Her transfer was ill-conceived and she was caught by the Gestapo and sent to Ravensbrűck.  Thanks to an identity mix-up, the Nazis never found out why she had been sent to the camp.  She regarded herself as a POW and refused to work.  Fed-up, the camp management dispatched her to a harsher labor camp in Konigsberg, East Prussia.  It was winter and the punitive outdoor work was killing her.  She had caught tuberculosis and with two friends escaped back to Ravensbrűck which offered less cruel conditions.  They fled in a truck carrying prisoners debilitated by typhoid on their way to the newly built gas chambers.  Jeannie sneaked out and hid in the Polish prisoners’ barrack until early April 1945 when luckily, she was handed over to the Swedish Red Cross with other French prisoners[3]. 

In a Swedish sanatorium, she met her future husband Henri de Clarens, a former Buchenwald concentration camp prisoner. They returned to France, had two children and tried to forget their ordeal.  She worked as an interpreter for the United Nations and other international agencies.  She was awarded the Legion of Honor in 1955 and became grand officer in 2009.  Even the Central Intelligence Agency acknowledged her heroic spying achievements.  In 1993, director R. James Woosley presented her the Seal medallion for her contribution to the Allied war effort.  Until 2018, few students in Sciences Po knew who she was until an amphitheater was named after her.

Susan Travers (1909-2003) is an old acquaintance of mine[4].  Like Margot’s and Jeannie’s, Susan’s WWII achievements were dismissed and forgotten, but worse Susan was purposely erased from history!  She had been the paramour of a married, up-and-coming general, and his reputation could not be tarnished by an affair.  Susan was the driver-cum-lover of General Marie-Pierre Koenig, the commanding officer of a Free French Brigade.  She had saved his life when breaking out of General Erwin Rommel’s circle in Bir Hakeim in the Libyan desert in June 1942.  Apparently, Koenig and Travers’ liaison had been discovered by the Italian press (desert paparazzi in action), and there was fear of blackmail.  Subsequently, the US military command requested de Gaulle to forbid his generals from using the services of female drivers.  For me, it is a case of American hypocrisy and abuse of power because during the same period General Dwight Eisenhower enjoyed the services of a female driver Kay Summersby, with whom many think he was romantically involved. 

Susan’s other claim to fame is having been the only female to serve in the famed French Foreign Legion.  Recognition came late for La Miss, her nickname in the legion: she was 86 when she was awarded the prestigious Légion d’honneur.  Susan could have pinned on her chest the many military medals she received, but, even belatedly, the Legion of Honor was a special acknowledgment.  In early March, a French television documentary was released with the aim of restoring her honor for posterity. 

Susan a British subject, had enjoying the perks of the French Riviera before the war, foot-loose and fancy-free, playing tennis and partying with the well-heeled.  Because the war was going to put her playground off limit, in 1940 when in London, she decided to join the Red Cross for the Free French forces.  General de Gaulle’s burgeoning army was then regarded as a passport for adventure.  She reluctantly trained as a nurse in order to drive an ambulance, a car being the ultimate means of freedom.  She was always more in her element handling a spanner than making a wound dressing.  Norway and Finland provided her first war experience, and she was then shipped to Dakar, North Africa and the Middle East with troops of the Foreign Legion. 

The siege of the Bir Hakeim pocket by the “Desert Fox” Rommel at the end of May 1942, was the climax of her military career.  She was the only women there and had to take refuge in a narrow dugout during the harrowing two-week siege under bombs and artillery fire.  The unexpected Free French resistance not only allowed British troop’s to regroup but slowed Rommel’s panzer advance.  On the night of 10 June, Koenig ordered a heroic evacuation, and she drove him out towards the British lines, forcing their way through land mines and artillery fire.  After the escape, she found eleven bullet holes in their car! Out of 3,600 men, some 2,700 escaped.  British Susan was one foreigner among many others. The Free French troops were a medley of races and nationalities; only about 30% were actually born in France.  The daredevil Free French were praised by both sides, Winston Churchill renamed them The Fighting French and Hitler called them the second-best fighters after the Germans.

It was a bitter victory for La Miss.  Without her general, heart-broken she continued the war in Italy and France, often driving gun-pulling tractors.  After the war, as a full-fledged legionnaire, number 22166 she was sent to Indochina.  Her sole family was the legion and she married another legionnaire.  In 1947, she retired (without a pension) and started a family.  She had spent seven years on the front line and retired in obscurity in a small French village.  Koenig went on to have a brilliant military and political career.  She decided to write her memoirs after all her contemporaries had passed away.

These are very imperfect snapshots of three extraordinary lives.  Susan remains my preferred brave woman, having loved the wrong man, she was punished for it and thus a true romantic heroine.

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[1] Over 10,000 Chileans of French ancestry joined the Free French.

[2] Remarkably, a large number of ATA female pilots received equal pay with their male colleagues! A first in the UK.  On the other hand, the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASP) of the United States were receiving as little as 65% of their male colleagues’ pay.

[3] The gas chambers were only in operation for two months and were destroyed by the SS before the liberation of the camp by the Soviet army on 30 April 1945.

[4] In 2001, I read her candid memoir Tomorrow to be Brave.