Virginia Hall: The Most Dangerous of Allied Spies (Part 2)

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Madigan (1:00)

Hi, I'm Madigan, and you're listening to Your Angry Neighborhood Feminist, a podcast that explores the world through a personal feminist perspective.

Welcome back and welcome to part two of the Virginia Hall story. You have waited long enough. I took an extra day because I wanted to try to condense my notes a little bit because I had over 60 pages of notes. And I think I really only ended up getting rid of like one page total. So this is going to be a very, very long episode. So let's just get into it right away.

Where we left off, Klaus Barbie, who worked for the Nazis, was trying incredibly hard to track down Virginia Hall, screaming, I'd give anything to get my hands on that limping Canadian bitch, even though she was not, in fact, Canadian. Wanted posters went up of Virginia with the caption below her depiction, the enemy's most dangerous spy. We must find and destroy her.

But Virginia was going to escape. Unfortunately, the only way to do so was by scaling the Pyrenees Mountains, and that is where we are starting this episode today.

Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French colonized North Africa, began on November 8th, 1942 100,000 troops under the command of American General Dwight D. Eisenhower landed in Algiers, Oran and Casablanca in the first joint mass-allied offensive of the war. The French troops were ordered to fight back, but the Allies eventually won out. After this, French military officer Marshall Petain broke off all diplomatic relations with the United States and fired the most senior officer at the US. Embassy in France. Now, nothing would stop Hitler from flooding southern France with his Nazi troops and tanks. Within hours, Virginia and her friends would be under the complete power and control of a full Nazi state, and the resistance would surely be pulverized. On top of that, the Germans were well aware of the limping lady of Lyon and Virginia had a target on her back. Upon hearing this news, Virginia woke early and dashed to tie some loose ends, packing up the rest of her money and a bag of clothes before lugging it as quickly as she could, with good old Cuthbert tagging along on a two-mile walk to the train station. She got on the last train south out of Lyon, leaving at 11 p.m. After a sleepless night, she arrived in Perpignan, 20 minutes away from the Spanish border, near the eastern edge of the Pyrenees Mountains. A reminder that my primary source material for Virginia's story was the book, A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purcell, and from that book, Virginia's only chance of escape lay over one of the cruelest mountain passes in the Pyrenees, 8,000 feet above them, past the glaciers and sharp flanks of the Kanigou Massif. Treacherous and sometimes impassable even in the summer months, few would expect an escapee to try negotiating the narrow rocky trail, where the snow could reach waist-high in winter, and the freezing wind, called the tramontane, stole the breath from your lungs.

The area was also listed as a forbidden zone, and it was illegal to cross without a pass. Anyone spotted would be stopped and arrested. But there was no other way to safety. Taking a boat or train would be incredibly risky for Virginia, as the border would be heavily patrolled, and there would surely be checking along the easier routes over the mountain. They'd also have sniffer dogs with them, able to follow tracks in the snow or find a lost item of clothing. A friend of Virginia's named Gilbert agreed to find her a mountain guide, but warned her that he wasn't likely to succeed as the stakes were so high.