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Elizabeth Wein. Disney-Hyperion, $16.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-4231-5219-4

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Wein (The Empty Kingdom) serves up a riveting and often brutal tale of WWII action and espionage with a powerful friendship at its core. Captured Scottish spy Queenie has agreed to tell her tale-and reveal any confidential information she knows-in exchange for relief from being tortured by Nazis. Her story, which alternates between her early friendship with a pilot named Maddie and her recent sufferings in prison, works both as a story of cross-class friendship (from an upper-crust family, Queenie realizes that she would likely never have met Maddie under other circumstances) and as a harrowing spy story (Queenie's captor, von Loewe, is humanized without losing his menace). Queenie's deliberately rambling and unreliable narration keeps the story engaging, and there are enough action sequences and well-delivered twists (including a gut-wrenching climax and late revelations that will have readers returning to reread the first half of the book) to please readers of all stripes. Wein balances the horrors of war against genuine heroics, delivering a well-researched and expertly crafted adventure. Ages 14-up. Agent: Ginger Clark, Curtis Brown. (May)

Hardcover - 352 pages - 978-0-385-67654-0

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Children's Book Review: Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein. Disney-Hyperion, $16.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-4231-5219-4

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Elizabeth Wein. Disney-Hyperion, $16.99 (352p) ISBN 978-1-4231-5219-4 More By and About This Author Wein (The Empty Kingdom) serves up a riveting and often brutal tale of WWII action and espionage with a powerful friendship at its core. Captured Scottish spy Queenie has agreed to tell her tale-and reveal any confidential information she knows-in exchange for relief from being tortured by Nazis.

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When "Verity" is arrested by the Gestapo, she's sure she doesn't stand a chance.

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Classic Aircraft: Westland Lysander | Defense Media Network

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The British Westland Lysander stands out as one of the great special mission aircraft of World War II, excelling in its clandestine missions.

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"Nacht und Nebel" ("Night and Fog") was the codename given to a decree of December 7, 1941, issued by Adolf Hitler and signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the German Armed Forces High Command.

The decree was directed against persons in occupied territories engaging in activities intended to undermine the security of German troops. They were, upon capture, to be brought to Germany "by night and fog" for trial by special courts. This circumvented military procedure and various conventions governing the treatment of prisoners. The code name stemmed from Germany's most acclaimed poet and playwright, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who used the phrase to describe clandestine actions often concealed by fog and the darkness of night.

During the summer of 1941, a large number of German troops withdrew from occupied France to participate in the invasion of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the entry of the Soviet Union into the war generated increased Communist resistance activity throughout German-occupied Europe, including France. Consequently, the number of efforts aimed against occupation units and, in particular, acts of sabotage to destroy communication lines, steadily increased. In response, German counter-intelligence redoubled its efforts, capturing large numbers of resistance members and saboteurs. This in turn meant an increased number of trials by overburdened military courts. In addition to a large number of death sentences, these courts also handed down many prison sentences.

Hitler believed that the process of managing resistance and sabotage through the system of military justice was far too cumbersome and often too lenient. He declared it to be an ineffective means of suppressing resistance. Instead, he ordered directives aimed at immediate, effective, and enduring intimidation of the population. Keitel objected that it was impossible to sentence every potential resister to death and that military courts would, in any case, refuse to co-operate.

Hitler responded by dictating that military courts would continue to adjudge those offences found sufficiently grave to impose capital punishment without lengthy proceedings. If not, suspected persons were to be brought to Germany, where special courts would decide their fate. To deter local resistance, the decree forbade these prisoners to have contact with loved ones and family members in their homeland. Keitel's implementation letter states that "efficient intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know [the prisoner's] fate."

The decree replaced the policy of long prison sentences, "re-education" efforts, and the taking of hostages in order to suppress underground activities. It allowed German authorities to abduct those individuals "endangering German security" by night, so that they effectively vanished without a trace. German authorities applied the decree principally in German-occupied western Europe: Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands. German occupation authorities and their collaborators arrested approximately 7, 000 individuals under the provisions of this decree, nearly 5,000 of them in France.

After capture, interrogation, and, frequently, torture, Night and Fog prisoners might face special courts ( Sondergerichte) which handed down death and prison sentences. After acquittal or the termination of the sentence, German authorities often transferred these prisoners directly to concentration camps, typically to Gross-Rosen and Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camps. Once registered in the concentration camp, "Nacht und Nebel" ("Night and Fog") prisoners wore uniform jackets marked with the acronym "N.N." to explicitly identify their status. The death rate among "N.N" prisoners was very high .

On July 30, 1944, Hitler issued the "Terror and Sabotage" decree that expanded and extended the provisions of the "Night and Fog" decree. Now, German authorities would treat all violent acts perpetrated by non-German citizens in the occupied territories as acts of terror. They would transfer real and perceived offenders who were not summarily executed to the custody of the Security Police and Security Service ( Sicherheitspolizei und SD). Within a month, Keitel extended the decree to cover all persons endangering German interests by any means, even if their actions did not endanger troop security or war preparedness.

Keitel also ordered that these decrees were to be the subject of regular "emphatic" instruction of all armed forces personnel, SS, and police. Further, new regulations could be made by the agreement of armed forces commanders and the SS leadership. In short, any offence by any person in the occupied territories could be dealt with under these decrees.

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"Nacht und Nebel" ("Night and Fog") was the codename given to a decree of December 7, 1941, issued by Adolf Hitler and signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the German Armed Forces High Command. The decree was directed against persons in occupied territories engaging in activities intended to undermine the security of German troops.

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In World War II Britain, a new group of pilots answered the call to serve.

Years ahead of the United States in recruiting women to fly military aircraft from factory to base, the United Kingdom was also-decades later-a year ahead in awarding them medals for their efforts. When the accolades finally came, government officials in both countries called their missions crucial to achieving victory in World War II.

For the United Kingdom, the effort began in 1938, when Sir Gerard John Regis Leo d'Erlanger, a member of a renowned banking family and an accomplished pilot, became convinced that Great Britain urgently needed the help of its amateur pilots to wage a war he saw coming. He wrote to Air Ministry officials suggesting that Royal Air Force pilots could better focus their efforts on combat and defense if non-military pilots aided in the delivery of light aircraft, mail, and light supplies. His plan: recruit pilots who were ineligible for the RAF for one reason or another, such as being too old, color-blind, having a single arm or, in one case, a single eye.

D'Erlanger's idea drew only lukewarm interest, but when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the plan was suddenly taken seriously. D'Erlanger was by then the director of British Airways, so the company was asked to oversee the initiative. Letters were sent to about 1,000 male pilots asking if they wanted to serve their country by ferrying airplanes. About 100 replies came back, and after interviews and flight tests, the first 30 men were picked that September for what became the Air Transport Auxiliary, or ATA (which d'Erlanger joked stood for Ancient and Tattered Airmen). But what was most unusual-even radical-was the decision two months later to satisfy the increasing demand for ferry services by including female pilots. It was the first time in British history that women were hired to fly military aircraft.

Women, of course, had already shown that they could be skilled and daring aviators. In the 1930s, England's Amy Johnson became the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia and set record times flying her de Havilland Puss Moth from London to both Tokyo and Cape Town, South Africa. In the United States, Louise Thaden and copilot Blanche Noyes won the 1936 Bendix Trophy race in the first year women were allowed to compete with men. But the demands of World War II caused the ranks of female pilots to swell on both sides of the ocean. (The Soviet Union, which had a tradition of enlisting women in combat, had all-female fighter and bomber squadrons; in Germany, women served as test pilots.)

Pauline Gower, daughter of a parliamentarian, Sir Robert Gower, was asked to organize the ATA's women's division. As a girl, Gower had been a star pupil at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Tunbridge Wells, England. She was, according to Giles Whittell, author of Spitfire Women of World War II, the Mother Superior's pet: "bright, bouncy, diligent and fizzy with ideas." But at 17 she contracted an infection and underwent surgery that left her unable to participate in activities that required physical strength. Being in the cockpit, writes Whittell, was for her "the perfect, sedentary occupation." By the time Gower took over at the ATA, she was a commercial pilot with about 2,000 flying hours and a commissioner in the Civil Air Guard.

In January 1940, Gower was given the authority to recruit eight experienced female pilots to transport two-seat Tiger Moth trainers from the de Havilland factory in Hatfield, north of London, to bases in the United Kingdom. The team members came from a wide range of backgrounds: Rosemary Rees was a former ballet dancer; Mona Friedlander, an international ice hockey player; and Winifred Crossley, the daughter of a doctor. Marian Wilberface was a pilot with her own Gipsy Moth. Joan Hughes had been Britain's youngest pilot; she started flying at 15, before age restrictions were established. Margaret Cunnison and Gabrielle Patterson were both flight instructors (the first woman to instruct, Patterson also was a member of the National Women's Air Reserve, a group that provided aid in national emergencies).

Some of the later recruits, such as Diana Barnato Walker, came from privileged backgrounds. Heiress to the DeBeers mining fortune, Walker grew up riding horses and attending lavish parties hosted by her father, race-car driver Woolf Barnato. At her debutante ball, she was introduced to the Prince of Wales, and for her 21st birthday, she got a Bentley. In her 2003 memoir, Spreading My Wings, she recounts that she took up flying mainly to escape the constant scrutiny of the "nannies, governesses, companions, and chaperones." In the cockpit, they "wouldn't be able to come along."

One recruit, Molly Rose, had taken her first flight from her own back yard. One of her older brothers, Arthur, had learned to fly at Cambridge and used the fields behind their house to take off and land his Tiger Moth. Sometimes he would ask Rose to join him. "I remember how cold it was," she says, "but when your big brother invites you on a flight, you don't run back to the house to get a cardigan!" When she was almost 17, Arthur offered her flying lessons at a flight school he had opened in 1926 at the Aerodrome in Cambridge. She got her pilot license the same year she got her driver's license. After a stint in a Paris finishing school, she returned to airplanes and became an apprentice engineer. In 1942, the call came from the government to join the ATA.

Even though Rose knew how to fly, ATA instructors gave her extensive training, teaching her to fly light twin-engine airplanes, like the Airspeed Oxford and the Avro Anson, as well as heavy twins, like the Lockheed Hudson light bomber. "That one needed an engineer to help with the landing gear," Rose recalls. The Supermarine Spitfire was her favorite because of its maneuverability. "It was a thrilling moment," she said. "The takeoff was fairly easy. And then suddenly you were up in the air and the sky was all yours."

Was she ever scared? "When you are 21 or 22, you feel very capable, very sure of yourself," she says. "You think you know all the answers and if you think you know the answers, you simply get on with the job. I don't like the over-glamourization of what we did back then. It was a job, and we did it as well as we could. But everyone was doing their part for the war. Ours was just a more interesting job than most."

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Years ahead of the United States in recruiting women to fly military aircraft from factory to base, the United Kingdom was also-decades later-a year ahead in awarding them medals for their efforts. When the accolades finally came, government officials in both countries called their missions crucial to achieving victory in World War II.

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In May of 1940 Germany invaded France, and within a month it had occupied the northern and western parts of the country. France was now ruled by a nationalistic and antisemitic puppet government, which collaborated with the Germans - the "Vichy regime".

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Espionage has always held a certain fascination. Derring-do, cloak-and-dagger, betrayal, violence and death have always made good entertainment. But, as is often the case, truth can be far more exciting than fiction. With that in mind, here are six truly remarkable female spies from World War II.

Warsaw-born Krystyna Skarbek is often overlooked. Initially, British intelligence refused her services because she was female. That attitude didn't last long. Having initially approached the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), she later found a home with its paramilitary rival, the Special Operations Executive (SOE). Around this time, she adopted the fair more British-sounding name Christine Granville, to allow her to blend in more easily.

Returned to her native Poland, Skarbek was arrested while running a network of couriers delivering information. Feigning tuberculosis, Skarbek secured her release in January 1941. Her exploits in France were even bolder, including saving two SOE agents from execution, threatening the German officer responsible that if they died he'd soon join them.
Related: 15 Important Women in History You May Not Have Heard of
For her work, Skarbek was awarded with the George Medal and made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In 1946, she was naturalized as a British citizen and officially took the name Christine Granville for good. Supposedly, Vesper Lynd of Casino Royalewas based on Granville, although Ian Fleming never met the Polish spy.

Sadly, Granville's end wasn't as noble. In June 1952, she was murdered in a London hotel by an obsessed suitor, Dennis Muldowney. Muldowney pled guilty and was hanged that September.

Codenamed 'Madeleine,' Noor Inayat Khan remains an SOE legend. Born to wealthy Indian parents, Noor fled France for England aboard the last ship leaving Bordeaux in 1940. Originally a radio operator with the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, Noor transferred when SOE radio operators (nicknamed 'pianists') were desperately needed. The most dangerous job for SOE agents, the average life expectancy for a pianist was six weeks.

Soon, Noor was sent to Paris, thanks to her French language skills. Within a week, she was the only pianist left in Paris. Offered emergency evacuation, Noor declined. She would do the work of multiple pianists for nearly four months. As SOE's only Parisian pianist, she knew her worth-and so did the Nazis. After the destruction of SOE's 'Prosper' network Noor insisted on trying to rebuild SOE's Parisian network.

The Nazis offered a million francs to anyone willing to betray her. Although still unconfirmed, it is believed that Renée Garry, sister of Noor's head agent, sold her out for only 100,000. After being captured and making multiple escape attempts, Noor was murdered at Dachau. Some reports say she was shot once. Others say she was brutally beaten and shot multiple times. Emile Garry was later captured and killed at Buchenwald, also betrayed by his own sister.
Related: 15 Biographies of Remarkable Women That You Need to Read
Lise de Baissac was one of SOE's first female agents, applying as soon as female agents were permitted. Younger brother Claude also joined. De Baissac and fellow agent Andrée Borrel were the first women to parachute into France on the SOE's behalf. De Baissac was bold and clever, choosing an apartment near the local Gestapo headquarters while organizing airdrops of arms and supplies for the local Resistance. Further strengthening her cover, she became friendly with local Gestapo chief Grabowitz.

On her second mission, she was even bolder. To assist in readying British troops for the Normandy invasion, de Baissac gathered information on beaches, posing as an amateur archaeologist. After D-Day, she monitored local German troop movements. Taking an even bigger risk, she rented a room in the local German commander's house. While he warned his troops to keep constant watch for Allied agents, he was actually sheltering one. De Baissac kept her friends close and enemies closer.

Remarkably, considering her many high-risk tactics, Lise de Baissac survived the war. She died in 2004, aged 98. Brother Claude also survived the war, dying in 1974.

SOE spymistress Vera Atkins was actually a Romanian Jew named Vera Rosenberg. Active with MI6 before the war started, Atkins became the deputy of Maurice Buckmaster, head of SOE's French section. She selected and prepared agents to infiltrate France, taking particular interest in what she often called 'My girls.

It's been suggested that she was the inspiration for Miss Moneypenny, James Bond's secretary. Although Ian Fleming was active in intelligence, there's no evidence (once again) he ever actually met her. Nor does her biography A Life in Secretsportray her as a flirtatious or especially warm person in real life.
Related: Marita Lorenz: The Spy Who Loved Castro ... and Almost Assassinated Him
After the war she began unofficial investigations into agents still missing in action. Working with other investigators like SAS Major Bill Barkworth, she painstakingly tracked almost all the French section's missing agents. Some 25% of the approximately 400 agents dropped into France had perished. Atkins was instrumental in seeing some of their murderers brought to justice.

New Zealand-born Nancy Wake is another SOE legend. Married to a wealthy Frenchman later tortured to death by the Gestapo, she became their most wanted enemy with a 5-million franc price on her head. Known as the 'White Mouse,' she initially stayed in France when the war began, running an underground escape line for fugitives and escaped prisoners of war.

When finally arrested, she managed to escape, making her way to England and the welcoming arms of SOE. Returning to France by parachute, she began organising her enormous private army, arranging deliveries of supplies, weapons and ammunition for some 7000 resisters. She also insisted on fighting alongside them.

As one former comrade described her;

"The most feminine woman I know-until the fighting starts. And then she is like five men."

Odette Hallowes is perhaps one of SOE's less-famous female agents, though no less brave. Even her joining SOE is unusual in that she did it by accident. Her offer to help the British war effort wasn't intended to reach SOE, but reach them it did and she was prepared to take the risk.
Created on 06 Mar 2018
Odette worked in Paris with Peter Churchill until 1943 when they were both caught by the Gestapo. Tortured and interrogated, they survived by telling their captors that Peter was Winston's nephew and Odette his wife. Peter was no relation whatsoever to Winston and he would not marry Odette after the war, but their plan worked. Both avoided execution.

Odette was sent to the women's camp at Ravensbruck where thousands died including some of SOE's female agents. Camp commandant Fritz Suhren, responsible for thousands of prisoners deaths, including numerous SOE agents, brought her with him when he surrendered. If Suhren thought that might help him, it didn't: Odette testified against him. Suhren was hanged in 1950.

Since the days of Samson and Delilah (although Delilah's haircut was more sabotage than spying), female agents accomplished far more than is often acknowledged. It's time that changed. These six women represent a mere sliver of the women who spied in World War II, and only those who spied for the U.K. Far more worked on both sides of the war, for the main powers of both the Allies and the Axis. Without their contributions, the war would have been very different.

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6 Incredible Female Spies of World War II

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Espionage has always held a certain fascination. Derring-do, cloak-and-dagger, betrayal, violence and death have always made good entertainment. But, as is often the case, truth can be far more exciting than fiction. With that in mind, here are six truly remarkable female spies from World War II. Warsaw-born Krystyna Skarbek is often overlooked.

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World War II’s ‘Most Dangerous’ Allied Spy Was a Woman With a Wooden Leg | HISTORY

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Virginia Hall, a.k.a. the ‘Limping Lady,’ organized sabotage and rescue operations across Vichy France, paving the way for the Allied invasion.