Rose, Sarah D-Day Girls. Saboteuses, Espionnes, Résistante

L’histoire vraie des combattantes de l'ombre de Churchill

1942: The Allies are losing the war, Germany seems invincible. Churchill, convinced that Britain is facing an existential threat, establishes a secret agency, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), whose spies are trained in all kinds of techniques, from sabotage to precision shooting. Their mission: Set Europe on fire. With most men fighting at the front, the SOE dares to do something completely new: it recruits women. Thirty-nine women answer the call, leaving their lives and families behind to fight as saboteurs in France. Half of them are captured, and a third never return. American journalist Sarah Rose draws on archive documents, diaries and witness accounts to tell the story of three of these women. Odette Sansom, a young mother who sees the war as a way out of her suffocating life as a housewife; Lise de Baissac, an unshakeable aristocrat and leader; and Andrée Borrel, who uses her knowledge of the streets to organise the Paris Resistance. They will derail trains, organise weapons caches, destroy telephone lines, sabotage high-voltage power lines and gather vital information to fulfil the SOE's most important mission: preparing the operation that will finally turn the tide of the war, the Normandy landings. Carefully researched, this story of British female spies in France paints a picture of women who are willing to sacrifice everything to fight a corrupt ideology.