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WOW2: May 2023 – Women Trailblazers and Activists, 5-17 through 5-24 [1]

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Date: 2023-05-20

May 23, 1898 – Blanche Charlet born in London; she was managing an art gallery in Brussels when the Nazis invaded Belgium in May 1940. She fled to England, and joined the Women’s Transport Service, but was soon recruited by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) because she was fluent in French, and was in the first training program for F Section (F for France) female agents. At age 44, she was one of the oldest SOE agents sent to France. Covertly landed on the French Riviera in Vichy France in September 1942, she reached Cannes, but her contact had been arrested, so she went on to Lyon, because she had been sent to replace Virginia Hall, an American who worked with both the OSS and the SOE there. However, Hall directed her to the Ventriloquist Network in the Sologne region of central France. Charlet's first task was to find a safe house where wireless operator Brian Stonehouse could transmit and receive messages. She found a rental house in a suburb of Lyon, then served as a courier between Ventriloquist’s leader, Philippe de Vomécourt, and Stonehouse. Charlet and Stonehouse were arrested in October 1942 as he was sending a wireless message to SOE headquarters in London. Many SOE agents were tortured and executed after their arrests, but Charlet under interrogation proved adept at portraying herself as a vacuous woman ignorant of politics, concocting elaborate stories about lovers and fainting when under pressure from her interrogators. In November 1942, she was sentenced to incarceration in Castres prison in southern France. The French-run prison was lax about security. In September 1943, Charlet was one of at least 37 prisoners who escaped, after stealing pistols and cell keys, and locking up or tricking the guards. Charlet and Suzanne Warenghem, a young French woman who had been a courier for the Pat O'Leary Escape Line, reached open country and a local farmer helped them reach a Benedictine monastery. They were hidden in the monastery’s guest house for two months before the monks could take them to an escape line which took refugees over the Pyrénées mountains to Spain, but heavy snow prevented them from crossing. Unable to reach Spain, Charlet and Warenghem, now in touch with SOE headquarters in London, went to Paris and then Lyon. Charlet was worried she might be recognized in Lyon, and traveled to the Jura Mountains near the border of Switzerland to work as a courier and guide for SOE. In April 1944, SOE arranged for Charlet and Warenghem to escape from France. They had to cross France again, to Brittany, where they were picked up on a beach by a small boat, and rowed offshore to a motor torpedo boat, a dangerous operation as the Germans were fortifying the French coast in anticipation of an Allied invasion. During their escape they were fired on, but their boat outraced German pursuers and they arrived safely in Plymouth in April 1944. In 1946, Charlet was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for "services in France during the enemy occupation."

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