Knitting with a code
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In May 1944, a 23-year-old British secret agent named Phyllis Latour Doyle parachuted into occupied Normandy to gather intelligence on Nazi positions in preparation for D-Day. As an agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), Doyle – who is celebrating her 99th birthday this week – secretly relayed 135 coded messages to the British military before France's liberation in August. She took advantage of the fact that the Nazi occupiers and their French collaborators were generally less suspicious of women, using the knitting she carried as a way to hide her codes. For seventy years, Doyle's contributions to the war effort were largely unheralded, but she was finally given her due in 2014 when she was awarded France's highest honor, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour.
LOL, she hid her secrets in her knitting. God bless her and happy birthday!
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Very cool story!!!
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The link gives more information about her work as a spy, which was exceedingly dangerous. It's the kind of thing that would make an outstanding movie.
After the war, she married and raised four children. It wasn't until they were older that she told them of her wartime activities. Imagine finding out that mom was a spy during the war, sometimes living in the woods and foraging to survive.
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I love this.
