ramblingmads

“My name is Phyllis Ada Latour, known to many in my later years as Pippa, and I am 102 years old. I am also known by other names — code names and alias names — because I was a World War II secret operative agent. This is my memoir, which finally tells the story of my life working behind enemy lines in France 80 years ago. It is a part of my life that, until now, I have intentionally never revealed to anybody. Not my husband (when I had one), nor my children — even when they became adults. This book tells the truth about my war. I’m the last living female special operative from F Section and I need to record what happened before I die. I would like to leave my story behind so that, perhaps, young women in particular might know what it was like for me back then”. – Pippa Latour

‘Vivid, honest, inspiring and sometimes shocking, Pippa Latour’s memoir shows how right the SOE were to assess her as having ‘”tons of guts”‘ – CLARE MULLEY, author of Agent Zo

The Last Secret Agent, by Pippa Latour is the extraordinary untold story of Latour, who parachuted into occupied France in 1944 as an undercover agent and sent secret messages back to Britain.

In June 1940, a covert new force – the Special Operations Executive (SOE) – was set up to wage a secret war. Its agents were tasked with sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines, and over the course of the next five years, 470 special agents would be sent into France. Only 26 female SOE agents, including Pippa, would return. Pippa had an extraordinary life – born in 1921 she lived in Congo, Kenya and France before eventually landing in London. In 1943, aged 23, she was parachuted into France, where she travelled around the occupied countryside, concealing her codes in a hair tie and her Morse key underneath her bicycle seat, and sending crucial information back to Britain in the lead-up to D-Day. More than once, she came frighteningly close to being discovered. For decades, Pippa told no one – not even her family – of her incredible feats.

Now for the first time, her story can be told in full. It is an incredibly rare first-person story. Although there are several biographies of female WW2 spies, there are no other first-person memoirs of this kind. And as the last female WW2 SOE agent to die, Pippa’s story will be the first and last to be told in this way. It is a rare and privileged glimpse into her life, and in many ways, it is Pippa’s last public service, her last contribution to freedom. It is a remarkable testament to a remarkable and brave woman.

THE AUTHOR PIPPA LATOUR – following the war, Pippa settled in New Zealand where she raised four children. For decades, Pippa told no one – not even her family – of her incredible feats during WWII. For seventy years, Pippa’s contributions to the war effort were largely unheralded, but she was finally given her due in 2014 when she was awarded France’s highest order of merit, the Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. Pippa was the last surviving F (France) Section Special Operations (SOE) agent from World War II. In the final months of her life, Pippa finally decided to tell her remarkable story, written with the assistance of award-winning historical documentary producer and writer Jude Dobson. Pippa died in 2023, at the age of 102.

My thoughts: This was incredible, Pippa Latour lived a heck of a life, born in South Africa, raised in the Congo, orphaned but with a wonderful extended family who love her, sent to finishing school in Paris just before the war and then after joining the WAAF, she’s recruited by SOE to go to France undercover as a spy.

Her life behind enemy lines is incredibly dangerous, terrifying and yet there’s something a little bit magical about it. Pretending to be a teenage girl selling her French grandparents soap, she snoops around the Normandy countryside, relaying troop movements and locations by radio, in Morse code, to London, as D-Day preparations ramp up.

Shocking, terrible things happen, some of them because of her intel, and her own life is on the line several times. She mentions the other female SOE operatives in France, many of whom sadly did not survive, incredibly brave women all.

Pippa lived to be 102, having lived and extraordinary life, but her war years were largely unknown, even to her family, for a long time. This memoir is full of brave, courageous, ordinary men and women opposing the massed forces of the Nazis and fighting for freedom. It stands as a wonderful tribute to those people and also to the magnificent Pippa herself, who did something few could and help influence the course of the Second World War. Genuinely inspiring, heart pounding, mind boggling stuff.

*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.