Madame Fourcade's Secret War

Madame Fourcade's Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France's Largest Spy Network Against Hitler by Lynne Olson. This is the story of the french underground and the workings of its spy network. A fascinating story that I knew pieces of, but this tells the entire story from before the war to its end about the braze people who passed on vital information on the workings of the Nazis to the Allies. The impact they had on the direction and outcome of the war is tremendous, and the number of them who did not survive is sobering. Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was a native Parisian of the upper class, raised partly in Shanghai in the 1930s, when that city was more sophisticated than Paris. Tall, pretty and fashionable, she was the last person that the Germans would think would be a spy, which worked to her advantage. The fact that a women was the leader of the french underground was another factor. They passed on information to MI6, the British spy organization who then passed it on to military strategists. MI6 did not know that Fourcade was a women until well into the war, which again was to her advantage, as she assumed correctly that if the British knew she was a women they would have dismissed her information as invalid. The information that was passed to the Allies helped to delay the deployment of the V-1 and V-2 rockets by the Germans, which would have possibly won them the war if they were deployed sooner. Information from the resistance also directed the planning for D-Day in Normandy. This is a great true story that is finally being told.