Violette Szabo - World War Two Spy and Hero

by Read Listen Learn

It is 10th June, 1944, in Nazi-occupied France. An SS patrol has just set up a surprise roadblock, waiting to see who will come along. They are especially alert because, just a few days earlier, their British and American enemies invaded along the north coast. The fight will be here in France now and, like the first few drops of rain suggesting a great storm, resistance activity has begun among the local French. Very inactive up to now, the invasion to the North has given them the courage to snatch an SS officer. This sudden roadblock is part of the search for him.

Before long, a car comes around the corner and then brakes quickly when the driver sees the German soldiers up ahead. The Germans, of course, are immediately suspicious and, in seconds, there is a fire-fight between the occupants of the car, two French resistance men and one British spy, and the Germans manning the roadblock.

It does not last long: the two resistance fighters fire a few bursts with their sub-machine guns to keep the Germans’ heads down for a moment, then they escape into the nearby fields before the dozen or so SS soldiers can surround and kill them. They leave the British spy, a woman, behind. The SS men approach the car carefully and, as they do, the woman stands up and raises her hands in the air. She is Violette Szabo, codename (and nickname) Louise.

Her mother was French and her father English, and they met during the First World War. Violette was their second child, born in the French capital, Paris, in 1921. During her childhood, the family moved to London where she finished school at 14 and then got a job at a department store in London She was a taxi-driver’s daughter and a shop girl but she just happened to be completely bi-lingual in English and French.

In 1940, when she was nineteen, and the Second World War had been going for about a year, she met a French officer of Hungarian descent, 31-year-old Etienne Szabo. They were introduced at a party in London to celebrate French National Day (14th July) and a whirlwind romance soon followed. Exactly six weeks later, they got married. They quickly had a little girl, Tania, but not long after she was born, her father, Etienne, died of terrible chest wounds while fighting against the Germans in Libya.

Violette was already a volunteer in an auxiliary women’s service but now she put her name forward for the most dangerous missions, deep inside enemy-occupied France, helping to establish resistance groups and locating German targets for the British bomber planes to attack. She was an excellent choice for the job: a native French speaker familiar with French society, young and physically fit and, after the death of her husband, very motivated to attack the Germans the best way she could.

She went through the special training, learning to use radios and codes to send information back to London. She also learnt how to handle guns and some unarmed combat techniques. She was taught how to resist giving information under torture. At no time was she in any doubt about the enormous danger of the work she wanted to do but she also knew how important it was to winning the war for Britain and so liberating France from the Germans.

The final training was in parachute jumping. This was the way most secret agents were sent into France. She twisted her ankle quite badly and this delayed the beginning of her active service but, with her leg now better, she parachuted into the most dangerous part of France on 5th April, 1944. Her mission was a great success: she organised and inspired the local resistance fighters. She also made a very good job of identifying and locating certain German military bases and important factories and they were successfully bombed by British aeroplanes. A couple of months later, she returned to Britain where she received the highest praise from her bosses. This young woman, still in her early twenties, could be relied on to organise and fight against the Germans in France and to organise others. This was extremely important for the coming invasion of France by U.S. and British armies.

She had not been back in Britain long when that invasion came on 6th June, 1944. Now, the need for good spies was so great that Violette was sent back to France on 7th June. If it had been risky before the invasion, now it was deadly dangerous at every moment. Three days after she landed, she surrendered to the German soldiers.

What followed was horrible but quite expected by everyone: she was tortured for weeks by the German secret police. Then, she was sent to a concentration camp in Germany and, when the Germans understood that she would never give them any information and, anyway, they were weeks away from losing the war, they shot her some time around 5th February, 1945. Less than three months later, the war was over.

Violette Szabo is honoured as a war hero in both France and England and she holds the highest medal from both countries. She is the subject of a film and several books, including one by her only child, Tania Szabo, who lost both her mother and father in the war.