The Darkest Hour(83)

The North African front of WWII is often overshadowed by the histories of the European and Pacific theaters, but the battles fought in these campaigns (from Egypt and Libya to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) swung the war in the Allies’ favor. On November 8, 1942, Allied forces launched Operation Torch, a major attack on Vichy-held French North Africa. The Allied generals expected little resistance, but the Vichy French forces initially pushed back. However, after a few days of fighting, they ultimately aligned with the Allies. After Operation Torch concluded, the North African campaign stretched into Tunisia and lasted until May 1943, ending with the surrender of 250,000 Axis troops. This final victory allowed for the Allied invasion of Sicily that summer, which marked the beginning of the end of the Axis Powers. Rick Atkinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943, is the seminal work on this period, and I consulted it often to understand what a soldier like Theo would’ve experienced.

At the close of the war, many Allied spies returned to ordinary lives. Some married and raised children. Others wrote books (like Roald Dahl, former British Security Coordination) or took up the culinary arts (like Julia Child, former OSS). Then there were others, like Virginia Hall, who continued their work in the intelligence community. The OSS may have been shuttered at the war’s end, but in its place sprang the CIA, for which Hall worked as an intelligence analyst. I’d like to think that Lucie would’ve followed a similar path, serving her country and making Theo proud and breaking the notions of what a woman could or couldn’t do.