Phyllis Latour obituary

Phyllis Latour, who has died aged 102, was the last remaining female member of F Section, the branch of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in the second world war that organised resistance operations in France.

Codenamed Geneviève, she parachuted into Normandy on 2 May 1944, a month before D-day, to be a wireless operator for the Scientist 2 network run by Claude de Baissac (codenamed Scientist), who was coordinating operations by the communist Maquis resistance in support of the allied invasion.

De Baissac put Latour to work in the north of the region between Caen and the Cotentin Peninsula in a team led by Jean Renaud-Dandicolle (codenamed Verger) and including his sister Lise de Baissac (Odile) and a second wireless operator, Maurice Larcher (Vladimir).

Posing as Paulette Latour, a teenage girl whose family had moved to the countryside to escape the allied bombing, she cycled around the area, attempting to sell soap to German soldiers while chatting to them to find out what they were doing and where their units were based.

“The men who had been sent just before me were caught and executed,” she later said. “I was told I was chosen for that area because I would arouse less suspicion.”

She and the other members of the Verger team were involved in organising the Maquis for operations against the German troops, sending daily reports to London that were encrypted using one-time ciphers to help allied commanders plan their operations. Latour sent a total of 135 messages between May and August 1944, when she was pulled out.

“I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece of silk,” Latour said. “I had about 2,000 I could use. When I used a code, I would just pinprick it to indicate it had gone. I wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it in a flat shoelace which I used to tie my hair up.”

Because the Germans were able to track their communications using direction-finding equipment, they were constantly on the move, sometimes staying in houses of people allied to the resistance but often spending nights outside in forests, foraging for food.

When the allied forces landed on 6 June, the team were operating between the Cotentin Peninsula and the Les Loges area, cutting the railway line from Caen to Vire and ambushing German officers travelling between their various headquarters.

Over the next week they cut the main railway line running east to west through Normandy between Paris and Granville on the coast and reported the location of the headquarters of an SS Panzer division, enabling allied aircraft to attack it.

They also cut underground telegraph cables, forcing the Germans to send their high-grade teleprinter messages between Hitler and the German frontline commander Field Marshal Erwin Rommel over the airwaves, allowing them to be deciphered at Bletchley Park. Over the next few months, the Maquis working with the Scientist 2 network destroyed around 500 enemy vehicles.

With fighting going on across Normandy, it was a perilous existence, with many close encounters with German troops, and in early July Renaud-Dandicolle and Larcher were killed in a shootout.

Latour was arrested twice but managed to fool her captors into believing her cover story. “I can remember being taken to the station and a female soldier made us take our clothes off to see if we were hiding anything,” she said.

“She was looking suspiciously at my hair, so I just pulled my lace off and shook my head. That seemed to satisfy her. I tied my hair back up with the lace – it was a nerve-racking moment.”

Phyllis, always known as Pippa, was born in Durban, South Africa. Her French father, Phillipe Latour, a doctor in a part of what was then Equatorial French Africa and is now the Republic of the Congo, was killed in tribal conflict when Pippa was three months old.

Her mother, Louise (nee Bentley), subsequently remarried, but died in 1925. After growing up in the care of an aunt and uncle in the Belgian Congo, Pippa went first to Kenya to complete her education and then to the UK.

She joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in November 1941 as a mechanic, but her fluency in French led to her being recruited into the SOE two years later to serve with F Section. She was taught how to encipher messages and send them in Morse code as well as how to fix a broken wireless set.

She was also given extensive training in parachute jumping, in how to fire a Sten gun and in escape and evasion. “A cat burglar was taken out of prison to train us,” she said. “We learned how to get in a high window and down drainpipes and how to climb over roofs without being caught.”

At the end of the war, she was made an MBE, and awarded the Croix de Guerre Avec Palme. She subsequently married Patrick Doyle, an Australian engineer and they lived in Kenya, Fiji and Australia. They had two daughters and two sons.

Following their divorce in 1975, Latour moved to Auckland in New Zealand. She never told anybody about her exploits in wartime France, and did not collect her medals until her children read about her on the internet and insisted she do so. “I didn’t have good memories of the war, so I didn’t bother telling anyone what I did,” she said. The French government awarded her the Légion d’Honneur in 2014.

One of her daughters predeceased her, and she is survived by her three other children.

Phyllis “Pippa” Ada Latour Doyle, wartime agent, born 8 April 1921; died 7 October 2023

This article was amended on 16 October 2023 to remove a reference to Phyllis Latour’s mother as having died in a motor racing accident, which was not the case.

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