Resistant #59264919 🇫🇷 #D

November 14, 1944. In the cold and rain of eastern France, the French First Army launches an offensive through the Belfort Gap, and within days French soldiers will stand on the bank of the Rhine, the first Allied troops of the entire western campaign to reach Germany's great river barrier. For the French, fighting to liberate their own soil, it is a moment of enormous pride. The French First Army was one of the great stories of the war's later phase, the rebirth of the French army. After the catastrophe of 1940 and the years of occupation, a new French army had been rebuilt, around the Free French forces and, above all, the troops of the French empire, the North African divisions, Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, and the colonial forces from across the French territories, along with men of the resistance who flocked to the colors as France was liberated. This army, under General de Lattre de Tassigny, had landed in southern France in August 1944 and driven north up the Rhône valley, and now it held the southern end of the Allied line in the Vosges mountains and Alsace, fighting toward the German border. The Belfort Gap was the key to the south. It is a corridor of lower ground between the Vosges mountains to the north and the Jura mountains to the south, the natural gateway from France into the upper Rhine plain and on toward Germany. If the French could force the Gap, they could break out of the mountains and reach the Rhine. On the 14th, de Lattre launched his offensive, in miserable late-autumn weather, cold, rain, and mud, against determined German defenses. The attack went well. The French drove through the Belfort Gap, broke the German defenses, and pushed on down toward the Rhine. And within less than a week, around the 19th and 20th of November, French armored units reached the Rhine itself, at the Swiss border near Basel. It was a landmark: French troops were the first of all the Western Allied armies to reach the Rhine, Germany's historic western moat, the great river that was the last major barrier before the heart of the Reich. For an army that had been destroyed and humiliated in 1940, to be the first to the Rhine was a triumph of deep symbolic power, the French restored, back on the offensive, standing on the frontier of Germany. The French went on to liberate the city of Mulhouse and much of southern Alsace, and to join in the long, hard fighting to clear the Germans from the rest of Alsace over the difficult winter that followed, including the grim battles around the Colmar Pocket, where the Germans clung to a bridgehead on the west bank into early 1945. The fighting in Alsace was bitter, and it was fought partly by Frenchmen for French soil that had been German for part of its history and was fiercely contested, with all the emotional weight that carried. The offensive on the 14th, and the dash to the Rhine that followed, is one of the proud chapters of the French army's war, the reborn army of liberation, built largely on the soldiers of the empire, forcing the gateway into the Rhine plain and reaching the great river first. It was a long way from the disaster of 1940, and it was a reminder that France, defeated and occupied, had come back to help liberate itself and to stand, in arms, on the threshold of Germany.

In 1942, the Gestapo was hunting a woman they described as one of the most dangerous Allied agents in France. They didn't know her name. They had one clue. She walked with a limp. Her name was Virginia Hall, and she was from Baltimore. She had a wooden leg. She named it Cuthbert. In the 1930s she dreamed of becoming an American diplomat. While working at a US consulate in Turkey, she went bird hunting, tripped climbing over a fence, and accidentally shot herself in the foot. Gangrene set in. Doctors amputated her left leg below the knee. When she applied to become a diplomat, the State Department turned her down. Partly because of the leg. So she found another way to serve. When the war began, she was living in Europe and drove ambulances in France. When France fell, she made her way to Britain and was recruited by the Special Operations Executive, the British secret service that sent agents behind enemy lines. In 1941, she went back into France undercover, posing as a reporter for an American newspaper. She was the first female agent SOE sent into France. She set up her base in Lyon. She recruited contacts everywhere. Doctors, nuns, police officers, farmers, brothel owners. She found safe houses, arranged supply drops, and helped downed Allied airmen escape. She helped break a group of captured agents out of a French prison. The Germans figured out someone was running a network. They figured out it was a woman. They figured out she limped. In November 1942, the Germans took over all of France. Her network was compromised. She had to get out. The only escape route was over the Pyrenees mountains into Spain. In winter. On foot. With a wooden leg. She made the crossing. Before she left, she sent a radio message to London saying that Cuthbert was giving her trouble. London, not realizing Cuthbert was her leg, reportedly replied that if Cuthbert was giving her trouble, she should have him eliminated. She made it to Spain, was arrested for crossing illegally, spent weeks in jail, and eventually got out. Most people would have stayed safe after that. She asked to go back. The British said no. She was too well known. So she joined the Americans instead, in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA. In 1944 she went back into France. She dyed her hair gray, wore baggy clothes, and changed the way she walked to hide the limp. She posed as an old peasant woman herding goats and selling cheese. She was actually a radio operator, organizing resistance fighters. She arranged weapons drops, trained fighters, and helped sabotage German forces in the run up to and after D-Day. In 1945, she was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. She was the only civilian woman in World War Two to receive it. President Truman wanted a public ceremony. She declined, saying she was still working undercover. After the war, she joined the CIA, where she worked for years and was often overlooked by the men around her. She died in 1982. For decades almost nobody outside the intelligence world knew who she was. The State Department said a woman with a wooden leg couldn't be a diplomat. She became a spy instead.