Feisty Female Friday: Phyllis “Pippa” Latour

This week’s FFF is Phyllis “Pippa” Latour.

Phyllis was born in Africa and moved to Europe. When she was 23 years old, she was recruited by Winston Churchill's SOE which was desperate as D-Day was coming. The largest military invasion in history would succeed or fail based on intelligence from occupied France. They needed to know German positions, troop movements, and fortifications. Male spies had been being captured, tortured, or executed. The SOE needed someone the Germans wouldn't suspect and they chose Phyllis.

For months, she was trained in Morse code, hand-to-hand combat, weapons training, lock picking, and how to resist torture if captured, absorbing it all with cold determination because the Nazis had murdered her godfather. Phyllis, code named Genevieve, spoke 5 languages, parachuted into occupied Normandy, and posed as a poor farm girl selling soap traveling from village to village on a beat-up bicycle. It was her cover for 135 days as she cycled through Nazi-occupied territory, on a reconnaissance and intelligence gathering mission. As she approached German checkpoints, she played the harmless peasant, giggling, complimenting soldiers, asking silly questions, and acting star-struck.

While the soldiers dismissed her as a foolish child, she was memorizing everything: numbers of soldiers, weapons, roads they traveled, and ammunition storage locations. Phyllis then disappeared into the woods, set up her wireless radio, and transmitted coded intelligence to London. The codes were written on silk fabric inside her hair ribbon and transmitted from many different locations. These daily transmissions guided Allied bombers to their targets, revealing troop movements, and defensive positions. Her messages helped ensure D-Day's success, saved Allied lives, and shortened the war. In 1944, Paris was liberated and her mission completed as she survived behind enemy lines, much longer than most male agents.

After the war, she married, moved to New Zealand, raised four children, and never mentioned what she'd done. Her children grew up knowing their mother had been in the war, but when her eldest son discovered the truth, Phyllis simply confirmed that she'd been a spy, parachuted behind enemy lines, and helped win the war. To her, it was simply what needed to be done.

Phyllis has been awarded the Legion of Honor, MBOE, War, and Defense Medals. She died in 2023, outliving the Nazi regime and almost everyone who knew what she'd done. Phyllis did see her story finally told to a world that she thought had forgotten her in the book, The Last Secret Agent, which detailed her WWII story as an Allied forces spy.