KEY POINTS:
Pearl Cornioley's training officer in Britain's wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE) had plenty of doubts about her potential as a secret agent.
In 1943, he wrote: "She is so cautious that she seems to lack initiative and drive. She is loyal but has not the personality to act as a leader, nor is she temperamentally suited to work alone."
The officer could not have been more wrong about a woman who would later become known as Agent Wrestler.
Within 18 months Cornioley, then 29, was in sole command of 1500 Resistance fighters in western France, which later swelled to 3000. In that role she masterminded a campaign of sabotage and guerrilla warfare so effective that the German military put a price on her head of a million francs (equivalent to $1.2 million today).
The Agent Wrestler story has been revealed in government documents released at the National Archives in London. They detail her transformation from the daughter of an alcoholic who did not go to school until she was 13 into one of Britain's most formidable operatives behind enemy lines at the height of World War II.
Pearl, who was born in Paris before escaping to Britain with her mother and sisters in 1941, became bored with her wartime desk job and persuaded SOE commanders to recruit her for training and send her back to France.
After parachuting into the Loire region in September 1943, she worked as a courier for one of the British-backed networks of "maquis" (Resistance fighters), while posing as a cosmetics saleswoman, before assuming command of fighters in the Indre region.
By the end of her service following the Allied liberation of France in 1944, the opinion of her superiors could not have been more different. Major-General Colin Gubbins, who led SOE, wrote: "Her control over the maquis group to which she was attached, complicated by political disagreements among the French, was accomplished through her remarkable personality, her courage, steadfastness and tact."
After Pearl was reassigned to train and lead the maquis groups in the Sologne area of the Loire Valley, her "resistants" blew up the Tours-Vierzon railway line, destroyed 60 armoured trains, and carried out ambushes on German troops.
The documents also detail how Pearl was fighting beside a young French lieutenant, Henri Cornioley.
The couple married in October 1944.
One of her SOE commanders later remarked: "Her story is a true romance and our pride and esteem for this gallant girl is very great."
Sadly they were not sentiments shared elsewhere in the hierarchy. Despite being recommended for a Military Cross, it was decided she should be offered a civilian MBE.
In a letter to the War Office, she rejected the honour, saying: "The work which I undertook was of a purely military nature in enemy-occupied country. When the time for open warfare came we planned and executed open attacks on the enemy. I spent a year in the field and had I been caught I would have been shot, or worse still, sent to concentration camp. I consider it most unjust to be given a civilian decoration.
"The men received military decorations. Why this discrimination with women when they put the best of themselves into the accomplishment of their duties?"
She died in February, aged 93, at her Loire Valley home.
- INDEPENDENT
