29. The Gestapo’s Quest to Find the “Limping Lady”
Virginia Hall attended Radcliffe and Barnard colleges, her era’s female counterparts of Harvard and Columbia universities. There, she studied French, German, and Italian. She liked to travel, and liked public service. So she tried to combine the two and become a US diplomat. Unfortunately, the only career track open for women in the State Department back then was clerical. So she became a clerk at the American consulate in Turkey. There, she accidentally shot herself in the leg while hunting, and the limb had to be amputated. She got a wooden prosthetic, which she nicknamed “Cuthbert”. Because of her gender, she was repeatedly denied promotion to diplomat, and tons of red tape was thrown her way. So she resigned in 1939. Hall was in France when the Germans invaded, and volunteered to drive an ambulance for the French Army. When France fell in 1940, she fled to Britain.
There, she got into the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine organization tasked with espionage and sabotage in occupied Europe. Hall became one of the first spies infiltrated into France. It was hazardous duty: over a third of female SOE agents sent to France did not survive. She established an espionage network named Heckler that gathered valuable information and coordinated with the Resistance. The Gestapo got wind that a “Limping Lady” was operating on their turf, and circulated bulletins – along with sketches – to be on the lookout for her. However, Hall used a variety of aliases and disguises that allowed her to continue her clandestine work under the Nazis’ noses despite her tell-tale limp. Along the way, she recruited a brothel owner, and used his establishment in Lyon as a kind of headquarters. She also had a sixth sense for danger, which allowed her to evade capture time after time.