The Darkest Hour(82)
To Ellen Oh, thank you for the many lunch dates and writing sessions we’ve had over the years. I thank my lucky stars for our friendship.
To Robin Talley, thank you for reading an early excerpt of this manuscript and for offering your encouragement. I needed to hear it!
To Dr. Paul Kerry, Julia Cain, Monte Fairbanks, Andrew Whitlock, and Franziska Patterson, thank you for helping me with the French and German translations in this novel. All mistakes are my own.
To Kristy Tung, thank you for being the perfect sister. I look forward to our adventures eating cheese and pastries across France one day!
To Aimee Rose Richmond, thank you for sharing the first twenty months of your life with this book. It has been a true joy watching you grow, and maybe one day we will read this novel together—although first I need to teach you the alphabet.
To Justin Richmond, thank you for being you: my first reader, my other half, my best friend. I love you very much.
The three female agents at the heart of The Darkest Hour and their stories are fictional, but they were inspired by real-life World War II heroines. There were countless unsung women who helped fight against the Axis Powers, and as I researched their lives, I was awed by their bravery. There was Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, a young Frenchwoman who took command of 3,000 spies after her superior was arrested by the Nazis. Or Hannie Schaft, an auburn-haired spitfire in the Dutch Resistance who, when facing her own botched execution, shouted at the German SS officer who misfired, “I am a much better shot!” Then there was Virginia Hall, an American woman who spied for both the SOE and OSS, and whom the Nazis called the “limping lady.” Little did the Germans know that the source of Hall’s limp was her prosthetic leg, which she had nicknamed Cuthbert.
Virginia Hall served as a major inspiration for Lucie’s character in particular. An expert in disguises, Hall helped build the French Resistance and avoided capture for years, despite Wanted posters bearing her face plastered around Vichy, France. But when the Nazis seized all of France in November 1942, she was forced to flee to Spain via the Pyrenees. I wove details of her escape into Lucie and Tilly’s flight out of France, although Hall left in November, when the conditions were much harsher.
For further reading on these brave women and others, I recommend The Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America’s Greatest Female Spy by Judith L. Pearson, a biography of Hall; Code Name Pauline: Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent by Pearl Witherington Cornioley, an autobiography that details the exploits of an SOE spy in France; and Women Heroes of World War II: 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance, and Rescue by Kathryn J. Atwood, which profiles numerous daring women who fought the Nazis throughout Europe.
Both the SOE and OSS recruited, trained, and deployed female agents during WWII. The British SOE was formed in July 1940, while the American OSS followed less than two years later in June 1942 under official military order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The OSS was divided into several branches, including Secret Intelligence, X-2 Counter Espionage, and a Maritime Unit that specialized in sabotage-by-sea. However, the Covert Operations branch exists solely in the pages of this book.
There was another OSS branch—called Research and Development—that created many of the spy gadgets that Covert Ops employs, from silenced pistols to the L pill to the Aunt Jemima explosive. Aunt Jemima could actually be eaten and baked if necessary, although it wasn’t recommended. (A military cook unknowingly ate a muffin made from the substance and nearly died.) Sodium pentothal, or “truth serum,” wasn’t developed by the OSS, but it was tested by its successor, the Central Intelligence Agency. The reliability of this chemical, however, is disputed.
Operation Zerfall is another fictional detail in this novel, but the Wunderwaffe program was very much real. The Third Reich hoped that their various “wonder weapons” would crush their enemies, such as a massive tank that towered four stories tall and a “sun gun” that would use solar rays to scorch Allied cities from space. Many of these ideas, understandably, never made it past the design stage. Additionally, while the Nazis (as well as some other Axis powers) did the unthinkable and experimented on humans during the war, Dr. Nacht’s program to create sleeper agents and infiltrate the U.S. government is fiction.
The wartime French government has a unique and controversial place in the history of WWII. After the Nazi takeover in 1940, Paris remained the official French capital, but the government itself moved to the spa town of Vichy, where its leaders willingly collaborated with the Germans. On paper the Vichy regime oversaw all of France, but in reality the country was split into two halves: the southern zone libre, or “Free Zone,” led by Vichy leaders, and the northern zone occupée, or “Occupied Zone,” which was run by the Nazis. But after the Allies launched Operation Torch in 1942, the Germans decided to seize authority of the Free Zone as well.
Life in wartime France was very difficult for most people, which I’ve tried to show through Lucie’s eyes. Rationing abounded and blackouts were widespread and inconsistent. Able-bodied French workers were transported to Germany and forced into hard labor, while French “undesirables” like Jews and Communists were sent to internment camps—where many awaited deportation to death camps like Auschwitz. Books that capture what life was like in Nazi-occupied France include When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940–1944 by Ronald C. Rosbottom, and Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation by Charles Glass. The latter introduced me to Sylvia Beach, an American expat who opened a bookstore in Paris called Shakespeare and Company. That shop was closed in 1940 and—alas—it never had a hidden basement where the OSS could set up shop. Yet the spirit of Sylvia Beach lives on. In 1964, another American expat in Paris renamed his bookstore Shakespeare and Company in honor of Beach. You can visit the shop at 37 rue de la B?cherie.