The Limping Lady - Virginia Hall and the Resistance the Gestapo Could Not Catch.

Episode Title: The Limping Lady — Virginia Hall and the Resistance the Gestapo Could Not Catch

Season 1, Episode 5 — The Spies & Secret Wars

The Gestapo in Lyon called her the most dangerous of all Allied spies. They circulated wanted posters across occupied France. Their chief — Klaus Barbie, the man who would become known as the Butcher of Lyon — said he would give anything to lay his hands on her.

He never did.

Virginia Hall was an American from Baltimore who had been turned away from the U.S. Foreign Service because of a hunting accident that had cost her her left leg below the knee. She walked on a seven-pound wooden prosthetic she had nicknamed Cuthbert. In 1941, the British Special Operations Executive sent her into occupied France under cover as a journalist for the New York Post — and told their colleagues privately she wasn't expected to last more than a few days.

She stayed for fifteen months. She built one of the most productive SOE resistance networks in France. When the net finally closed around her in Lyon, she escaped over the Pyrenees into Spain — on foot, in winter, on that wooden leg — rather than be taken.

And then she went back.

In 1944, Virginia Hall returned to occupied France disguised as an elderly French peasant woman, organized and armed fifteen hundred Resistance fighters in the Haute-Loire, and helped destroy bridges, rail lines and German supply routes ahead of D-Day. She received the Distinguished Service Cross — the only one awarded to a civilian woman in the entire war.

In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind one of the most remarkable true stories of the Second World War.

Send your thoughts and story ideas to BestStoryPublishing@gmail.com

Visit us at www.beststorypublishing.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome back to World War II Unwound, here on the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network, where every story matters, every truth deserves to be told, and every question is worth asking. I'm Alan Best. We have told you about Juan Puhol Garcia, who invented a spy network from nothing. We have told you about Eddie Chapman, the safe cracker who became one of the most effective double agents of the war. We have told you about Bletchley Park and the silent army of codebreakers who shortened the war by years. We also told you about the decision makers, the planners of D-Day. Today's story is about a woman the Gestapo called the most dangerous of all Allied spies, and who they pursued for years without ever learning her real name, her real nationality, or what she actually looked like underneath the disguises. She did all of it on a wooden leg she had named after a medieval saint. Her name was Virginia Hall. By the time the Gestapo in Lyon put her face, or what they thought was her face, on wanted posters across occupied France, she had already vanished. By the time the war ended, she had helped build and arm thousands of resistance fighters, organize sabotage networks that tore apart German supply lines ahead of D-Day, and become the only civilian woman ever awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. This is the story of the limping lady. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Thanks, Alan. In 1942, the Gestapo in Lyon, France, circulated a wanted poster. It did not have a photograph. It did not have a real name. What it had was a description, a woman who walked with a pronounced limp, and a warning. The poster read, She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her. The man who issued that warning was Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief who would become known as the Butcher of Lyon, a man responsible for the torture and death of thousands of resistance fighters and Jewish civilians, including, a year later, the resistance leader Jean Moulin. Barbie believed the woman he was hunting was Canadian. He was wrong about that, as he was wrong about almost everything else he thought he knew about her. He told his subordinates, more than once, that he would give anything to lay his hands on her. He never did. The woman he was hunting was an American from Baltimore, Maryland. She had lost her left leg below the knee in a hunting accident nearly a decade earlier. She walked on a seven-pound wooden prosthetic she had nicknamed Cuthbert, after a medieval English saint. She had been turned away from the American Foreign Service because of her disability. She had built, almost entirely from nothing, one of the most effective resistance networks in occupied France, and when the net finally closed around her in Lyon, she escaped on foot over the Pyrenees in winter, on that wooden leg. Her name was Virginia Hall. This is her story.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Harry, before we get into Lyon and the Gestapo and all of it, I want to understand who Virginia Hall was before the war. Because an American woman from Baltimore ending up as the most wanted Allied spy in France is not exactly the obvious career path.

SPEAKER_02 3:19

It is not, and that is really where this story has to begin, because almost everything that made Virginia Hall extraordinary as an agent came from things that were originally meant to keep her out of that world entirely. She was born in 1906 to a wealthy Baltimore family. She was clever, restless, fluent in multiple languages, and from a young age she wanted nothing to do with the quiet life of dinner parties and respectable marriages that her social class expected of her. She studied at Radcliffe and Barnard, then continued her education in Europe and set her sights on the U.S. Foreign Service, a path that, for a woman in the 1930s, was already an uphill climb. She took a clerical post at the American Consulate in Warsaw, and then a posting in Izmir, Turkey, and it was in Turkey in 1933, on a hunting trip, that everything changed. Her shotgun discharged accidentally, the wound became infected, her left leg was amputated below the knee, she was 27 years old.

SPEAKER_00 4:23

And that's the injury that becomes Cuthbert?

SPEAKER_02 4:26

Eventually, yes, though that name comes later, and we will get to it. What matters first is what she did immediately afterward, which was almost nothing in terms of slowing down. She was fitted with a wooden prosthetic and went straight back to work, this time at the consulate in Venice. And there she ran directly into the wall that would define the next phase of her life. When she applied to sit the Foreign Service exam, she was told that current regulations did not permit the appointment of an amputee to a diplomatic post. The doors that her education, her languages, and her ambition should have opened were closed to her because of her leg. By the late 1930s, she had left the Foreign Service track and was living in France. When the Germans invaded in 1940, she joined the French army as an ambulance driver. When France fell, she made her way to Britain, and there, in 1941, she came to the attention of a brand new organization that Winston Churchill had just created with explicit, almost theatrical instructions, to set Europe ablaze. The Special Operations Executive, the SOE.

SPEAKER_00 5:38

And the SOE was willing to take her on, even though Churchill's own war cabinet had explicitly forbidden women from frontline roles?

SPEAKER_02 5:46

Willing is a strong word, it would be more accurate to say the SOE was desperate enough, and Hall was qualified enough, that the contradiction got quietly set aside. She spoke fluent French, she had lived in France. She understood the country at a level that very few British operatives could match, and Occupied and Vichy France in 1941 was not yet considered a frontline in the conventional sense, which gave the SOE just enough cover to send her in. In August 1941, Virginia Hall arrived in Lyon, in the nominally unoccupied Vichy zone of France, undercover as a reporter for the New York Post. By her own supervisor's private assessment, she was not expected to last more than a few days in a region already crawling with German intelligence. They sent her anyway. She would stay for 15 months.

SPEAKER_00 6:36

Tell me about Lyon. What did Virginia Hall actually build there?

SPEAKER_02 6:40

She built, essentially from scratch, one of the most productive SOE networks in France, codenamed Heckler. Working under the cover of her journalist credentials, with the codename Marie Monin and later Diane, she set up safe houses, organized money and false documents for incoming agents, coordinated parachute drops of weapons and supplies, and built an escape line for downed Allied airmen and SOE agents who needed to get out of France. An American diplomat at the U.S. Consulate in Lyon allowed her to use the consulate's diplomatic bag to relay messages to London. Escaping airmen were told simply to make for the consulate and ask for a contact named Olivier, which was Hall herself. Lyon, at this point, was the de facto capital of the French resistance, which meant it was also the primary target of German and Vichy intelligence. And in November 1941, disaster struck the wider SOE operation in the region. A meeting of resistance organizers was raided by the Gestapo, and twelve SOE agents and resistance leaders were captured in a single stroke. After that raid, Virginia Hall was, for a period, the only SOE agent still at liberty in the area, and the only one with a working radio link to London. Everything ran through her.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

And that's when the limping lady nickname starts.

SPEAKER_02 8:08

The French resistance had already started calling her La Dame qui boit, the limping lady, simply because of how she walked. The Germans picked up the same description, neither the French nor the Germans knew her real name, her real nationality, or anything else about her. All they had was the limp. Hall, for her part, was scrupulous about security in a way that her survival depended on. She moved constantly. She used multiple identities. By one account, she could be four different women in a single afternoon, with four different codenames changing her appearance, her papers, and her manner each time. But the pressure on Lyon kept increasing. Her central preoccupation through much of 1942 became the captured agents from that November raid who had been transferred to a prison at Mauzac. She worked to try to engineer their escape, and meanwhile, the Gestapo presence in Lyon kept intensifying. By the autumn of 1942, Hall sent a message to London.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Walk me through the escape. Because crossing the Pyrenees on foot, in winter, on a wooden leg, I genuinely cannot picture how that is physically possible.

SPEAKER_02 9:22

It is one of the most remarkable physical feats of the entire war, and it happened almost entirely without fanfare. In November 1942, with the Germans extending their occupation into the previously unoccupied Vichy zone and the net closing fast, Hall made for the south of France and arranged a guide to lead her on foot across the Pyrenees into neutral Spain, a journey of roughly 50 miles through mountain passes, in heavy winter snow, over the course of about three days. She did this on a seven-pound wooden prosthetic leg that had not been designed for anything resembling that kind of terrain. Partway through the crossing, exhausted and in serious pain, she sent a radio message back to SOE headquarters in London, a routine check-in, using her usual operational language, saying that she was having trouble with Cuthbert. The operator receiving the message in London had no idea Cuthbert was the nickname for her prosthetic leg. They thought Cuthbert was a person, possibly an informant or a contact who had become a liability. The reply that came back read, If Cuthbert is giving you difficulty, have him eliminated. Hall, by all accounts, found this absolutely hilarious, even in the middle of a three-day mountain crossing on a wooden leg. She made it across. She made it to Spain, and from there, eventually, back to Britain.

SPEAKER_00 10:50

And the SOE then wouldn't send her back to France.

SPEAKER_02 10:54

Correct, and this is the moment that defines the second half of her war. The British SOE judged that Hall was now too well known, too marked, to be sent back into occupied France as an SOE agent without an unacceptable risk of immediate identification and capture. From their perspective, this was almost certainly the responsible call. From Hall's perspective, it was completely unacceptable. She had not finished, so she did something that, in hindsight, is one of the more consequential career moves of the war. She transferred to the newly formed American Intelligence Service, the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the organization that would eventually become the CIA, and asked to be sent back into France. The OSS barely needed to train her. She already knew the terrain, the tradecraft and the stakes better than almost anyone they had. In March 1944, just months before D-Day, Virginia Hall went back into occupied France, this time landing by boat on the Brittany coast, in disguise as an elderly French peasant woman, complete with filed-down teeth, grey-dyed hair, and a deliberately altered shuffling gait, designed to bury her already famous limp inside an old woman's walk. Hall established herself in the Haute-Loire, a mountainous region of central France, operating as an observer and radio operator under yet another set of identities and codenames. The Germans, who still believed they were dealing with a Canadian, now referred to her by the codename Artemis. From March 1944 onward, she coordinated parachute drops of arms and supplies to resistance groups, reported German troop movements back to London, and helped organize escape routes for downed airmen, all while moving constantly between barns, attics, and safehouses to stay ahead of German radio detection. She was the first agent to report that the German High Command was relocating its regional headquarters from Lyon to Le Puy, in her own area of operations, intelligence of direct strategic value in the run-up to and aftermath of D-Day. In mid-August 1944, shortly after the Allied invasion of southern France, a three-man Jedberg team, a joint American, British, and French special operations unit, parachuted in to reinforce her. Among them was a U.S. Army lieutenant named Paul Guello. Together, Hall and the Jedberg team organized, armed and trained three battalions of French forces of the interior, roughly 1,500 resistance fighters, for sabotage and guerrilla operations against the retreating Germans.

SPEAKER_00 13:45

What did those battalions actually accomplish?

SPEAKER_02 13:47

In the weeks around D-Day and through the following two months, Hall transmitted dozens of intelligence reports, by one account, 37 messages between mid-July and mid-August alone, and the forces she had helped train and arm destroyed four bridges, derailed multiple freight trains, cut a key rail line in several places, and brought down telephone lines across the region, all aimed at slowing the German retreat. They were credited with killing roughly 150 German soldiers and capturing around 500 more. By September 1944, advancing American troops had pushed through the area, and Hall's time as a field operative in occupied France came to an end. Klaus Barby, the man who had spent years hunting the limping lady and never found her, was captured by the Allies after the war, escaped, was eventually recaptured decades later, tried in France, and convicted of crimes against humanity, including, as we will return to in a later episode, his role in the death of the resistance leader, Jean Moulin, in 1943, the year after Hall slipped through his fingers in the Pyrenees.

SPEAKER_00 14:59

And the recognition came after the war?

SPEAKER_02 15:01

It did, though characteristically for Hall, with as little ceremony as she could manage. For her SOE work, King George VI presented her with the Order of the British Empire. From the Americans, she received the Distinguished Service Cross, the only one awarded to a civilian woman in the entire war, pinned on personally by OSS Chief Major General William Donovan. She reportedly tried to avoid the public ceremony altogether, and the medal was eventually presented in a quiet, private setting. After the war, she married Paul Guyot, the Jedberg Lieutenant she had served alongside in the Haute-Loire, and in 1951 she joined the newly formed Central Intelligence Agency, where she worked for 15 years, one of only a handful of women in the agency's clandestine service at the time, supporting resistance operations behind the Iron Curtain until her mandatory retirement in 1966, at age 60. Virginia Hall died in 1982, at 76. For most of those final decades, almost no one outside a small circle of intelligence professionals knew what she had done.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Okay. So, a few things I keep coming back to with this one. First, she was turned away from the job she actually wanted, a diplomatic career, because of her leg. And the leg never stopped her from doing something far more dangerous than any diplomatic posting would ever have been. The thing that was supposed to disqualify her from a desk job did not disqualify her from crossing the Pyrenees on foot in winter. Second, the Cuthbert Exchange. I love that story. But I think what I love about it is what it says about her. She is exhausted, in pain, halfway across a mountain range with a Gestapo behind her, and she still has enough presence of mind to find the mix-up funny. That is not Bravado. That is just who she was. And third, Klaus Barbie hunted her for years and never knew her name, her nationality, or her face. And a year after she got away from him, he caught and killed Jean Moulin instead. We are going to come back to Barbie later this season, and when we do, I want you to remember this episode. Because the woman he never caught is part of that story too. Even though she's not in it. Virginia Hall, the limping lady. The most dangerous of all Allied spies, and they never even knew what she looked like. Okay. So a few things I keep coming back to with this one. Before Alan wraps us up, Virginia Hall was told in writing that her disability disqualified her from the career she wanted. She went on to do something far harder than that career would ever have asked of her. What part of her story stands out to you the most? Send your thoughts to beststorypublishing at gmail.com. We read everything, and your responses make this show better.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

And that's a wrap on today's episode of World War II Unwound here on the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. It genuinely means everything to this team. If today's episode sparked something in you, visit us at beststorypublishing.com and send your thoughts, your reactions, and your show ideas to Beststorypublishing at gmail.com. We read every single one. Next week on World War II Unwound, we go back to 1943 to a plan so strange that if it had appeared in a novel, nobody would have believed it. A dead body, a fake identity, a briefcase full of love letters and unpaid bills, and a deception so successful that German High Command moved entire divisions based on the life story of a man who never existed. Operation Mincemeat, the spy who never lived. Until then, keep asking questions, keep digging deeper, and never stop being curious. I'm Alan Best, and this is the Best Story Publishing Podcast Network.