Pearl Witherington

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Cecile Pearl Witherington Cornioley (born June 24, 1914 in Paris , † February 24, 2008 in Châteauvieux ) was an agent of the Special Operations Executive in occupied France during the Second World War . As the commander of a unit of a total of 3,000 Maquis , she carried out targeted sabotage and guerrilla fights against the German Wehrmacht . It was so successful that all in all around 18,000 soldiers of the Wehrmacht surrendered in their area of ​​operation and the Germans put a bounty of 1 million francs on them. For her services, she was honored with the Order of the British Empire and accepted into the Légion d'honneur .

Life

Family and youth

Pearl Witherington was born the eldest of four daughters. Four brothers died as babies. Her parents Wallace Seckham Witherington and his wife Gertrude (née Hearn) were British and members of the gentry . On her marriage certificate, Witherington referred to her father as an architect, while the New York Times reports that he was traveling for a Swedish company that supplied paper for banknotes. However, the family was in financial difficulties due to his alcoholic illness and lived in Paris to save money, so Pearl was fluent in French. She later said that because of her family's situation, she did not have a childhood. There was at least one eviction . She was only able to attend school when she was thirteen and had to drop out at the age of 17 in order to support the family financially.

After learning to write on the typewriter , she first worked as a secretary and gave English classes in the evenings. According to her own information, she was a member of the Girl Guides . Her parents eventually separated, and Pearl and her sisters subsequently lived with her mother. At an unspecified point in time before the war began, she met her future husband, Henri Charles Willy Cornioley, a pharmaceutical chemist . The two got engaged, but the families were against marriage. The Cornioleys were financially better off than the Witheringtons and did not want a Protestant daughter-in-law, while the Witheringtons thought Cornioley was not a true gentleman. Pearl and Henri would later work together in the Resistance against the German occupation.

Second World War

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Pearl volunteered at the British Embassy for war work. She was assigned to an air attaché within the embassy , an officer who represented the British Air Force in France . She worked there until June 1940, only to find one day in front of the locked embassy. In view of the approaching German Wehrmacht, the employees of the embassy had fled to Tours and had forgotten to inform Pearl. When she heard that the Germans were marching on Paris, she smuggled her mother and sisters across the border into unoccupied France and after a short stay in Marseille , the family fled to England via Gibraltar in Spain . Pearl quickly found work in the Air Ministry , but was not satisfied with the role. She was angry with the occupation and wanted to take action to liberate France. “And besides, I didn't like the Germans. I never liked her. I am a child of the war 1914-18. "

Through an acquaintance she found her way to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), who was happy to fall back on women, as they were less likely to be suspected of espionage than men. In addition, Pearl was an excellent spy in France because she grew up there and was fluent in the language. On June 8, 1943, she joined the organization at the age of 29 and completed a seven-week training course. a. in armed and unarmed combat, sabotage, use of explosives and Morse code . While she never fully mastered the latter, she excelled in the other areas and became a member of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force . Her instructors called her “extremely capable, very brave” and “one of the best shooters (male or female) we have ever had.” She commented on her training with the words: “It turned out to be very helpful with the girl scouts Her code name, which the SOE gave her, was wrestler , in France she later used the fighting name Pauline and in radio messages to England she was called Marie.

Maquisards in August 1944

On the night of September 22nd to 23rd, 1943, she landed by parachute in France, near Châteauroux , but lost her two suitcases due to a strong wind. Her assignment was to join the Stationer resistance group, led by Maurice Southgate and operating in an area of ​​approximately 777 m² between Orléans and Toulouse . Here she met Henri Cornioley again, who also worked for the resistance. At first, Pearl worked as a courier for encrypted messages. Under the false identity of Genevieve Touzalin, representative of a cosmetics company, Pearl traveled through France for seven months with messages or weapons in her luggage, both by train, by bicycle or on foot. She was in danger of being arrested several times. For example, the Gestapo showed up at the house where Pearl's group was broadcasting radio messages to England, and Pearl only escaped because she was at a picnic. Another time, a bridge that she had to cross to deliver a message was guarded by soldiers. Pearl, who had already ridden 50 miles by bike, then shouldered her bike and waded through the icy Cher River . However, these exertions took their toll and in February 1944 Pearl was sick with neuralgic rheumatism , from which she had to recover for a month.

On May 1, 1944, Maurice Southgate was arrested by the Germans. Pearl then took over the leadership of the then 1500 Maquis (the number was later to increase to 3000) and trained them militarily to hold the Sologne for the Allies and to prepare the landing in Normandy . The group was responsible for sabotage on the railway line that connected southern France with Normandy. In June 1944 alone, they sabotaged the route more than 800 times. They also interrupted supply lines, ambushed convoys and prevented the German soldiers from returning to the Reich. In total, around 18,000 Wehrmacht soldiers surrendered under their command. Her successes made Pearl a serious threat to the Germans, who offered her a reward of 1 million francs; however, it was never betrayed.

Just five days after the Allies landed in Normandy, Pearl and her resistance fighters found themselves in a firefight with the Germans, which lasted 14 hours and claimed 86 victims on the German side and 24 dead among the Maquis. She told:

“At 8 a.m. on the morning of June 11th, we were attacked by 2,000 Germans, and the few Maquis, who numbered perhaps 40 men, poorly armed and untrained, gave them an unprecedented battle, along with the neighboring Communist Maquis, who were about 100 men counted. "

Cornioley and Pearl were separated during the fight but managed to escape. Pearl hid in a grain field into which the Germans fired shots and moved with the surging ears of wheat in order to remain undetected. At night she finally managed to escape from the field, although the Wehrmacht had taken hostages who were never seen again. A little later, Pearl returned to England, together with Henri. They were married on October 26, 1944 in Kensington .

post war period

After the liberation of France, Pearl was sent on a propaganda mission to the United States . However, it did not match the glamorous image the American public had of a secret agent and the trip was relatively unsuccessful. After the end of the war she was proposed for her services for the award of the Military Cross . As a woman, however, according to the rules of the time, she was not allowed to receive this award, as no active military service was intended for women. Instead, she was offered the civilian Order of the British Empire . This injustice led Pearl to reply angrily:

“What I did was not in the least civil. The work I took up was of a purely military nature in an enemy-occupied country. I was personally responsible for training and organizing nearly 3,000 men for sabotage and guerrilla warfare. "

The Valençay SOE Memorial, Memorial to the Fallen of the SOE, in 2011

With this reason she rejected the civil order, but finally received the military Order of the British Empire through the Air Ministry . She and her husband Henri moved back to Paris in 1946, where they bought a small apartment on rue Pergolèse . Henri worked as a pharmacist while Pearl accepted a position as a secretary in the World Bank's Paris office . The marriage produced a daughter named Claire. After her retirement, Pearl sold the apartment and moved to Châteauvieux with Henri in a retirement home . Nevertheless, she did not remain idle and campaigned for the erection of a memorial for fallen SOE agents in Valençay , which was unveiled in 1991 in the presence of Queen Mother Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon . In 1997 she published her autobiography under the title Pauline .

Henri died in a nursing home in 1999. In 2004, Pearl Witherington was for her services by Queen Elizabeth II. Won the third stage of the Order of the British Empire and two years later she received to her great joy, finally, the badge of the Parachute Regiment . During her training at the SOE, she was not qualified due to the different treatment of men and women. As was required for women, she completed three training jumps and one jump in action with the parachute. “But the boys did four training jumps and the fifth was in action - and you only got your wings after a total of five jumps. I was not entitled to them - and for 63 years I complained to anyone who wanted to listen to me because I found it unfair. "

She died in the home on February 24, 2008 at the age of 93.

Awards

literature

  • Pearl Witherington Cornioley: Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent (Women of Action) . Chicago Review Press 2013, ISBN 978-1-61374-487-1
  • EH Cookridge: Set Europe Ablaze. The Inside Story of Special Operations Executive - Churchill's daring plan to Defeat Germany through Sabotage, Espionage, and Subversion . Thomas Y. Crowell 1967
  • Marcus Binney: The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Agents of the Special Operations Executive . William Morrow 2002, ISBN 978-0-340-81839-8

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g M. RD Foot: Witherington, (Cecile) Pearl (1914-2008) . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Online Edition , accessed October 26, 2016
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Douglas Martin: Pearl Cornioley, Resistance Fighter Who Opposed the Nazis, Is Dead at 93 . The New York Times March 11, 2008. Accessed March 6, 2017
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g Pearl Cornioley . The Telegraph February 26, 2008. Accessed March 6, 2017
  4. ↑ a b c David Pallister: Sharpshooter, paratrooper, hero: the woman who set France ablaze . The Guardian April 1, 2008. Accessed March 28, 2017
  5. ↑ a b Was heroine honored 63 years on . BBC NEWS 2006, accessed March 28, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Witherington, Pearl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Witherington, Cecile Pearl; Witherington Cornioley, Cecile Pearl; Cornioley, Pearl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British spy
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH February 24, 2008
Place of death Châteauvieux (Loir-et-Cher)