07/30/2026
Patriotic women in history
She wrapped 2,000 secret codes around a knitting needle, threaded it through a shoelace, and tied it into her hair.
If the N***s discovered what she was carrying, she would be executed.
Her name was Phyllis Latour.
She was just 23 years old.
Every coded message she transmitted took about 30 minutes to send.
German radio operators could locate a transmitter in roughly 90 minutes.
So after every transmission, she packed up her wireless set and disappeared.
Barns.
Farmhouses.
Forests.
She stayed one step ahead by constantly moving.
She hid six bicycles across the countryside.
She used seventeen different radios.
To German soldiers, she looked harmless.
A small teenage girl selling soap from village to village.
She smiled.
She chatted.
She listened.
And she gathered intelligence.
Born in South Africa in 1921 to a French father and British mother, Latour volunteered for Britain's Special Operations Executive after people she loved were killed by the N***s.
When offered three days to think about becoming a secret agent, she answered immediately.
"I didn't need three days."
She trained to parachute behind enemy lines, transmit Morse code at remarkable speed, evade capture, and survive alone.
On May 1, 1944, she parachuted into occupied France.
Her mission was simple.
Build contacts.
Gather intelligence.
Transmit everything back to London.
Over the next four months, she sent 135 coded messages from behind enemy lines.
Those reports helped guide Allied bombing raids and provided intelligence during the preparations for D-Day.
The average life expectancy of a wireless operator in occupied France was about six weeks.
Phyllis survived four months.
Not because she was lucky.
Because she was resourceful.
Once, two German soldiers entered while she was transmitting.
She calmly closed the radio and told them she had scarlet fever.
They quickly left.
Another time, German soldiers unknowingly hung wet laundry on what they thought was a clothesline.
It was her radio antenna.
Perhaps the closest call came when the Gestapo searched her.
A female officer became suspicious of the lace holding back her hair.
Inside that lace were her secret codes.
Phyllis removed it, shook out her hair, and casually tied it back up.
The officer let her go.
She often slept outdoors.
Accepted food from families who had almost nothing.
Years later, she admitted one meal she believed was squirrel turned out to be rat.
"I was half-starved," she said. "I didn't care."
The war never fully left her.
One bombing raid she helped coordinate also killed a German mother and her children.
That memory stayed with her for the rest of her life.
After the war, she married, moved to New Zealand, raised four children, and rarely spoke about what she had done.
Her own family didn't learn the full story until decades later.
In 2014, at the age of 93, France awarded her the Legion of Honor.
She was surprised anyone still remembered.
Phyllis Latour Doyle died in 2023 at 102 years old.
She was the last surviving female Special Operations Executive agent who had served in occupied France during World War II.
For eighty years, she carried her secrets quietly.
She once explained why she accepted one of the most dangerous assignments of the war.
"I did it for revenge."
