Hell Hath No Fury (50 page)

After a series of meetings with Fuchs in Banbury, Sonya passed a stream of information on the British atomic program either to her Soviet controllers in London or directly by radio to Moscow. In late 1943, Fuchs joined the Manhattan Project in the United States and thereafter passed into the hands of other controllers.

At the end of the war, Sonya's brother, now a lieutenant colonel in the US Army, supplied her with details of the results of the Strategic Bombing Survey, the American assessment of the air campaign against the Third Reich.

In 1946 Moscow mysteriously and abruptly broke off all contact with Sonya. Within a year both her own and her husband's cover had been exposed by Foote, and she was paid a visit by British Special Branch officers. Sonya later recalled, “They left us calmly and politely but empty-handed.” Sonya and her husband kept their nerve, and British intelligence did not return.

In 1950 Sonya and two of her children left Britain for East Germany on the day before Fuchs stood trial for betraying the West's atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. In her autobiography she reflected, “Either it was complete stupidity on the part of MI5 never to have connected me to Klaus, or they may have let me get away with it, since every further discovery would have increased their disgrace.”

Subsequently suspicion fell on Roger Hollis, then head of MI5's F Division and responsible for the surveillance of Soviet agents. In the late 1920s Hollis had worked as a journalist in Shanghai and may have met Sonya at this early stage in their careers. He was later to become director-general of MI5. It has never been conclusively demonstrated that Hollis was a Soviet agent.

In 1969 Sonya received her second Order of the Red Banner. She lived long enough to see the Berlin Wall come down, a small white-haired woman with a prominent nose, peering intently through heavy spectacles. In an interview shortly before her death, she fondly remembered England and English friends but had no regrets about her fight against fascism and few reservations about Stalinism. Her pen-name was Werner and in her autobiography she observed, “I had not worked those 20 years with Stalin in mind. We wanted to help the people of the Soviet Union in their efforts to prevent war, and when war broke out against German fascism, to win it.” She dismissed German reunification, referring to it as an “annexation.” She was one of the last of the generation who had dedicated their lives to Communism in the belief that they were striving for a more just and humane society.

Reference: Ruth Werner,
Sonya's Report: The Fascinating Autobiography of One of Russia's Most Remarkable Secret Agents,
1991.

WITHERINGTON, PEARL

“Marie” and “Pauline,” British SOE Agent, b. 1914

Witherington was born in Paris, the eldest of four daughters of an expatriate British couple. In 1940, during the Battle of France, she was working as a shorthand typist in the British embassy. In 1941 she made her way to England, where she found a job in the Air Ministry before joining the
Special Operations Executive
(SOE, see Chapter 11).

Code-named “Marie,” but subsequently known to the French as “Pauline,” Witherington was parachuted into occupied France on September 22, 1943. There was no one to meet her, and she spent the night on top of twenty tons of ammunition disguised as a haystack. Witherington subsequently joined the Stationer network, run by Maurice Southgate and covering a substantial part of central France, and for the next eight months worked as his courier.

In April 1944, Stationer brought the Dunlop tire factory at Montluçon to a halt with two pounds of well-placed explosive. Shortly afterward Southgate was captured and Stationer split into two new circuits, Wrestler and Shipwright, which were run respectively by Witherington and Southgate's principal wireless operator.

As the head of Wrestler, Witherington now controlled a private army of two thousand Resistance fighters in the Valencay-Issoudun-Châteauroux triangle of France. One of their primary achievements was to ensure that the main railway line from Paris to Bordeaux was almost permanently cut in the run-up to D-Day. The Germans were so infuriated by Witherington's activities that they placed a bounty of a million francs on her head. Later she admitted to being terrified on occasion but insisted that the worst part of her time with SOE was grueling journeys in unheated trains during the harsh winter of 1943–44. In October 1944, Witherington married a Resistance colleague, Henri Cornioley.

At the end of the war Witherington was recommended for the Military Cross but was offered only a civilian MBE, as women were not eligible for the former decoration. She returned the MBE with the observation that during the war she had done nothing civil, shaming the authorities into giving her a military MBE. It took a little longer for Witherington to receive her parachute wings, but her persistence paid off. She finally received them in the spring of 2006 at the age of ninety-two.

Reference: Pearl Witherington, with Herve Laroque,
Pauline,
1997.

AFTERWORD

W
e conclude our work on women and war with a sense of infinite regret. Pressure of space meant that we have not been able to do justice to all the women who have suffered, fought, and died in the world's endless conflicts: Nothing but a work of far vaster scope could contain all the names we wanted to include. For every individual or group who has made their way into these pages, there are countless others with an equal right to be present and to receive the honor that is their due.

We also wish to pay tribute to the female victims of war. Their contribution to its annals has not been merely to perish, often in unimaginable horror or pain, and to end their lives in some forgotten grave. We are conscious that there is much more to be said on this subject, but that must be for another book.

We acknowledge, too, the constant support and interest that this project has aroused from colleagues and contacts, friends and family, fighting men and women, and the veterans of former wars. In particular, the editorial team at Crown Publishing has had faith in the book from the start. We thank you all, and hope the result is in some way worthy of you and of our extraordinary subjects.

Despite all our efforts and those of our tireless editors, this book must contain omissions and errors that we would be only too pleased to correct. Any communication will be gratefully received at [email protected], and we thank readers in advance for their participation.

We hope to have stirred readers' interest in these outstanding women, and the citations at the end of each entry indicate our suggestions for further reading on these varied topics.

Finally we are left to contemplate the futility and the grandeur, the unthinkable horror, and the inevitability, of war itself. As long as war remains a fact of life, may women take their part in it, for better and for worse. A growing female participation both in the worlds' armies and in the governments that send their fighting forces to war, may be our only hope of reducing, if not ending, the calamitous conflicts that mark the history of the human race.

—Rosalind Miles and Robin Cross

Copyright © 2008 by Rosalind Miles and Robin Cross

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miles, Rosalind.

Hell hath no fury: true stories of women at war from antiquity to Iraq /by Rosalind Miles and Robin Cross.—1st ed.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Women and war—History. 2. Women in war—History. I. Cross, Robin. II. Title.

JZ6405.W66M55 2008

355.0082—dc22

2007027905

eISBN: 978-0-307-40994-2

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