Happy 115th to One of the Greatest SOE/Resistance Leaders of WWII!
Lise de Baissac was youngest of three born to a French family of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean; they moved to Paris in 1919. Paris was occupied by the Germans in 1940 and Lise’s brother Jean joined the British Army. Lise and her other brother, Claude, escaped through Spain and made their way to Britain, where Claude joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
As soon as the SOE began recruiting women, Lise was accepted to set up her own small circuit. Her training took place in Hampshire, and she was commissioned in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) in July 1942. The SOE school commandant wrote that De Baissac was “quite imperturbable and would remain cool and collected in any situation. She is very much ahead of her fellow students.”
On 24 September 1942, she and Andrée Borrel were the first female SOE agents to be parachuted into France, flying from RAF Tempsford in a Whitley bomber, and landing in the village of Boisrenard near the town of Mer. Their mission was to establish a safe house in Poitiers where new agents could be settled into the secret life.
Lise’s role was to be a liaison officer on various SOE networks with the mission “to form a new circuit and to provide a center where agents could go with complete security for material help and information on local details” and to organize the pick-up of arms drops from the UK to assist the French resistance Her cover story was that she was a poor widow from Paris, Madame Irene Brisse, seeking refuge from the tension of life and food shortages of the capital. She moved into an apartment on a busy street near the Gestapo HQ, and became acquainted with the Gestapo chief, Herr Grabowski.
She also used the role of an amateur archaeologist looking for rock specimens to bicycle around the Loire countryside to recon possible parachute drop-zones and landing areas. Having no radio to send and receive messages, she had to travel to Paris or Bordeaux; the latter location being where her brother Claude was developing another network, organizing sabotage missions and gathering information on ship and submarine movements. In June 1943, the network collapsed, and another was penetrated by the Gestapo. On the night of 16 August Lise and Claude escaped back to England.
In new training she broke a leg. Once healed, she returned to France (dropped by Lysander near Villers-les-Ormes on the night of 9 April 1944). Shortly after Lise’s arrival, two French schoolgirls of her network helped cripple eighty-two tank carriers of the Das Reich, Deutschland, and Der Führer SS Panzer divisions around Montauban.
Lise rejoined her brother Claude, who had been dropped in February and made his way to Normandy to recon possible large areas which airborne troops could hold for 48 hours while they got themselves established. After D-Day, she gathered information on German dispositions and passed it to the Allies, even renting a room in a house occupied by the local commander of the German Forces.
On one occasion, “the Germans arrived and threw me out of my room. I arrived to take my clothes and found they had opened the parachute I had made into a sleeping bag and were sitting on it. Fortunately, they had no idea what it was.” She continued her activities until the liberation, providing the Allied forces with information. When US troops arrived to liberate the area, she met them wearing her FANY uniform, which she had kept hidden.
Lise de Baissac passed in 2004 at age 98. She held the Order of the British Empire, the Croix de Guerre and was a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
#ehe #essentialhistoryexpeditions #travelwithapurpose #letsgoonanadventuretoday
