INTERVIEW – CAL THOMAS -SYNDICATED COLUMNIST – reflected on D-Day and his family’s involvement in the war.
- D-Day’s ‘forgotten’ woman. (By Cal Thomas) — Observances of the 75th anniversary of D-Day are properly focusing on the troops and the architect of Operation Overlord, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who freed Europe from Hitler and his Nazi hordes. One person — a woman — has not received the credit she deserves for her efforts with the French Resistance. Without her daring and heroism, the war would most assuredly been prolonged and many more lives would have been lost. Her name was Virginia Hall and her story is told in a new book by Sonia Purnell titled “A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II.” The title does not exaggerate Virginia’s contributions to the Allied victory. Saying that one can’t put down a book has become a cliché, but Purnell’s work, pieced together from meticulous research and bridging lost or destroyed records, exceeds in drama any spy novel you have ever read. Virginia was from a family of Baltimore socialites. Her mother expected her to do what most women in that class did in the ’20s and ’30s — get married, have children and attend parties. Encouraged by her father, who discovered she had other goals, Virginia talked her way into the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the British spy organization Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.” She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and this with a prosthetic leg she was forced to wear after a hunting accident. She had her gender (sexism was rife in intelligence services and the military in those days), as well as her “handicap” working against her and yet she helped ignite the French Resistance and revolutionized modern secret warfare.
