[Daily Beast] The year is 1942, and World War II is raging. Odette Sansom decides to follow in her war hero father’s footsteps by becoming an SOE agent to aid Britain and her beloved homeland, France. Five failed attempts and one plane crash later, she finally lands in occupied France to begin her mission. It is here that she meets her commanding officer, Captain Peter Churchill.As they successfully complete mission after mission, Peter and Odette fall in love. All the while, they are being hunted by the cunning German secret police sergeant, Hugo Bleicher, who finally succeeds in capturing them. They are sent to Paris’s Fresnes prison, and from there to concentration camps in Germany where they are starved, beaten, and tortured. But in the face of despair, they never give up hope, their love for each other, or the whereabouts of their colleagues. Larry Loftis recounts this fascinating story of resistance and romance in Code Name Lise: The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII’s Most Highly Decorated Spy, from which the following is excerpted:
LONDON
The morning of April 15 Col. Maurice Buckmaster [director of the Special Operations Executive] called Peter into his office. Arnaud had sent coordinates of the drop zone, he said. They retrieved a Michelin map and Peter paused when he saw where he would be landing: atop a mountain of more than 5,500 feet.
"Struth!" He rubbed a hand over his face. "They certainly took you at your word when you said I’d land anywhere."
A parachute drop was simpler than being tossed in a canoe 800 yards off the coast of Cannes, but this was different. His submarine insertion into France on New Year’s Day was controllable; if he capsized, he could always swim. Throwing yourself out of a plane at 200 miles an hour into sheer darkness to hit the head of a pin‐that was a mild form of suicide.
Buckmaster laughed, looking again at the summit. "An Alp all to yourself."