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Episode Title: The Limping Lady — Virginia Hall and the Resistance the Gestapo Could Not Catch

Season 1, Episode 5 — The Spies & Secret Wars

The Gestapo in Lyon called her the most dangerous of all Allied spies. They circulated wanted posters across occupied France. Their chief — Klaus Barbie, the man who would become known as the Butcher of Lyon — said he would give anything to lay his hands on her.

He never did.

Virginia Hall was an American from Baltimore who had been turned away from the U.S. Foreign Service because of a hunting accident that had cost her her left leg below the knee. She walked on a seven-pound wooden prosthetic she had nicknamed Cuthbert. In 1941, the British Special Operations Executive sent her into occupied France under cover as a journalist for the New York Post — and told their colleagues privately she wasn't expected to last more than a few days.

She stayed for fifteen months. She built one of the most productive SOE resistance networks in France. When the net finally closed around her in Lyon, she escaped over the Pyrenees into Spain — on foot, in winter, on that wooden leg — rather than be taken.

And then she went back.

In 1944, Virginia Hall returned to occupied France disguised as an elderly French peasant woman, organized and armed fifteen hundred Resistance fighters in the Haute-Loire, and helped destroy bridges, rail lines and German supply routes ahead of D-Day. She received the Distinguished Service Cross — the only one awarded to a civilian woman in the entire war.

In this episode, Amanda and Harry unwind one of the most remarkable true stories of the Second World War.

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