The Spy Who Wouldn't Lie | The Unsung Heroines Of WW2 | 5

The Spy Who

Wondery

History

4.6 • 669 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2024

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The endeavors of the women of the Special Operatives Executive were vital to many of Britain's successes during WW2. But the secretive nature of their work meant that many of their heroic feats have been lost to time.

Anita Anand discusses how exactly they waged a secret war for freedom, with Rick Stroud, author of Lonely Courage: The true story of the SOE Heroines who fought to free Nazi occupied France.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Wonderry plus subscribers can binge full seasons of the Spy Who early and add free on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app.
0:15.6	From Wondery, I'm Anita Arnand, and this is The Spy Who.
0:22.5	Now as a historian, I've always been fascinated by the stories that slip through the cracks,
0:28.7	you know, those elusive ones.
0:30.5	And I adore the stories of women who, until you reach back in history and pull them out,
0:36.7	people haven't heard of.
0:37.8	You know, the lives of great men are routinely picked and poured over, sometimes, frankly,
0:43.8	to the point of exhaustion. But just because a story is less familiar to us, it really doesn't
0:49.4	mean it had any less of an impact on our present-day reality. Nour's story is one such example.
0:59.4	This is a tale of courage and sacrifice. Now, as we've learned in the preceding four episodes,
1:07.2	Noor was raised as Sufi. She grew up in a largely pacifist household. She was artistic, she was creative,
1:13.6	she was someone who held honesty as the highest virtue. Really, she is the last person you might have expected to become a spy.
1:22.6	Yet, in some ways, her decision to become a special operations executive and SOE wasn't quite as unusual as it first seems.
1:33.3	At the time, Nor joined the war effort, thousands of women were signing up to play their part in one of Europe's most deadly conflicts.
1:41.7	It was a decision motivated by necessity as much as by patriotism.
1:47.8	And even though women like Noor were willing to put their lives on the line, they still couldn't
1:52.6	escape the prejudice facing women in the 1940s. What's really extraordinary to me is that
1:58.4	these women, they were part of a society which had only deemed women
2:03.7	recently worthy of getting the vote at all. You know, until 1928, women weren't special enough,
2:11.7	clever enough, capable enough of deciding what the future should look like. And yet here you have
2:16.8	Noor and other women like her who want her hand in shaping the future should look like. And yet here you have Noor and other women like her
2:18.4	who want her hand in shaping the future. And they are willing to put everything their very lives
	...

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