This article includes stories about women who were killed in military service during World War Two. Some readers may prefer a warning about that in advance, as the details can be very sad. I have done my best to tell these stories in a way that does not feel exploitative, and I feel that they are stories especially important right now, full of information that would be helpful for navigating the world in 2025.
Noor Inayat Khan, codenamed Madeleine during her service with the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) was the great-great-granddaughter of an Indian sultan. Born in Moscow in 1914, though her family were pacifists, deeply religious Sufi Muslims, Noor decided that the global threat posed by fascists with a penchant for ethnic cleansing meant that she must become personally involved. Later her younger brother, Vilayat, feeling much the same way, volunteered for minesweeper duty.
“Technically,” scholar Danielle Wirsansky explained to me, “she was a princess, through her father, and her mother was American; she was biracial. She grew up in France, like, very multicultural. Her father was a teacher of Sufism, which is a form of Islam, so she was raised in this sect. Sufism is very interesting, the tenets it has. Leadership at the SOE almost didn’t choose Noor, because her values and beliefs really didn’t align with intelligence work. She was a pacifist and she didn’t believe in armed conflict. She didn’t believe in lying, which is a very necessary part of being an agent, of surviving. She was also pro-India, and anti-British in that sense. But she had decided that she wanted to help the war effort, help Britain win the war, and then afterwards fight for India’s independence. Noor is fascinating.”
Khan’s story, like too many of the 39 women who served in the SOE in France, before and after Normandy, has an incredibly tragic end.
A few weeks ago I was driving home and, as always, listening to WFSU, my local NPR station, when I heard the voice of doctoral student Danielle Wirsansky. A Fulbright scholar, Wirsansky work is focused on the contributions made by women members of the SOE, specifically the 39 international women who served in behind enemy lines in France pre-Normandy.
Lovely reader, please understand, I reached out to Wirsansky as soon as I could. I’m sure most of you will be familiar with the desperate challenge of hearing something personally important on the radio, and then needing to safely navigate to the next location without forgetting the details of what you just heard, wrecking anyone’s car or losing one’s mind.
I managed, and when I reached out to Danielle I did so hoping I didn’t sound too unhinged in my enthusiasm. Luckily, and as I should have felt safe presuming after hearing Wirsansky speak, she was more than happy to talk to me about her research and the ways her work overlaps with mine.
The Second World War, the many ways the war effort was impacted by fashion, the many contributions by women which remain largely forgotten, and the many stories of heroic resistance against fascism, are this writer’s favorite. Those dark, war torn years are filled with important information, with hard-learned lessons that are very much applicable to today’s many, seemingly impossibly complex, international conflicts.
The SOE began outside the bounds of traditional British practices for war, finding success in impossibly dire straits by using “ungentlemanly” tactics. These were soldiers interested in results so it should surprise no one that they quickly established a section to include women in a more active role. To understand that women like Noor Khan had and wanted to make helpful contributions to make for the war effort, when, traditionally, women were seen as essentially useless to a military campaign, required a rather unusual manner of looking at things. If you do not already know, potentially criminally insane plots were the specialty of the SOE, deviance was very literally the nest into which the section had hatched. The idea that women could contribute was probably an easy sell when weighed against some of the antics the boys got away with. (Please see SAS: Rogue Heroes [MGM+] and Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare [Hulu] for excellent, fictionalized versions of the birth of the SOE and a lot of wonderful, based-on-true-stories, about the innovative ways these lads found rid the planet of despicable Nazi scum under constantly dire and impossible circumstances.)
“Noor didn’t, as far as I know, ever fire her weapon or use it in the line of duty,” Wirsansky told me. “But she was one of SOE’s longest-lasting operators. She ended up losing the rest of her circuit, and it ended up just being her. And SOE headquarters were like, ‘you need to come home. It’s not safe.’ And she refused, she wouldn’t come home.”
Khan joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in 1940 and trained in wireless radio telegraphy. After being recruited to the SOE in 1943 and completing their training (one report notes how bad she was at jumping), Khan, already a capable wireless operator, was given specialized training for operations in occupied territory and became the first woman radio operator to be sent behind enemy lines in Paris. To be clear, women had been serving in France before Khan, but they mostly did courier work. It was the success of those women in the field which allowed women to take on roles which had previously been prohibited to them on the basis of gender.
On the night of June 16-17, 1943, ten days shy of a full year before the Normandy Landings, Khan was secretly flown to a field near Angers on a Lysander transport plane with a small contingent of agents. Met by agents and local members of the resistance, the contingent made their way to Paris where they met up with the ‘Prosper’ sub-circuit and Kahn began her work as ‘Madeleine.’ Almost immediately, less than a week after her arrival, the resistance network began to be picked off by Germans. Noor Khan was a small feminine woman. She was thin, almost childlike in appearance, which belied her fortitude and inner strength. A harpist, Khan possessed the skills most desired for covert wireless use; piano players were equally valued. Everything I have read or been told about her suggests that she made excellent use of the fact that she was constantly underestimated.
Near the end of her life, when Noor refused to come home from France, the agent leaned into biases and presumptions about her, a Brown woman, which helped her survive for a few crucial days.
“She managed,” Wirsansky told me, “to evade capture for about three months. She ended up being betrayed by someone who was connected to their circuit. Renée Garry may have betrayed her, because she thought that Noor was stealing her boyfriend, SOE agent France Antelme. She was just jealous, she turned Noor in. And in prison, at least in the beginning, they didn’t take her very seriously until she tried to escape, and almost succeeded.”
“After that,” the Fulbright scholar continued, “she was treated very, very harshly, kept naked and in chains. I don’t want to describe her as delicate, but she just had a very artistic, very creative kind of personality and background. Like, she illustrated children’s books, and she loved to paint and had pursuits like that. It seems like that kind of situation and environment would be especially harsh for her. Somebody who’s so opposed to violence to be undergoing that level of violence.”
When WWII finally ended, it still took a long time, sometimes years, to find out what had happened to all those who had gone behind enemy lines and seemingly disappeared.
“Vera Atkins, (F) Section’s intelligence officer, took on the mantle of finding all of the missing SOE agents,” Wirsansky told me, “and she’s the one that uncovered what happened. There were four women executed at Dachau, where Noor was executed. Their stories are all incredibly tragic, but I think Noor’s potentially most of all. There is no paperwork or real concrete proof that these women were executed in there, though historians generally accept that they were. But there are different retellings, depending on witnesses, of how these women died. In one version, all four SOE agents at Dachau were executed together. But there’s another version of the story that says three of them were killed but Noor was kept alive and was tortured and assaulted by Gestapo soldiers overnight before being executed the next morning. In that version, her last word was liberté.”
History is always relevant and it is packed with solutions uncovered in the past. If it is true that we need to study history in order to avoid repeating its worst travesties, then the opposite must also be true; we must study history with an eye towards solutions and what has worked. Because the past is part of present, what has happened affects us. I could not talk about Noor Khan, who was only 30 years old when she died, without thinking about Kateryna “Meow” Troian.
Troian, was a 32-year old first-person view drone operator with Ukraine’s 82nd Separate Air Assault Brigade, when she died on June 8, 2025. Her death was at the hands of Russian forces; Troian died during an operation near Pokrovsk, after completing more than a thousand successful missions and serving from the Ukrainian Donetsk Oblast all the way behind enemy lines, in the Russian city of Kursk. There are a lot of Ukrainian women on the frontlines and as women did during WWII, they find many myriad ways to serve.
As with the example of Noor Khan, as in innumerable generations before her; it has always been true that women have gone to war. As long as humans have been fighting with armies, some of their numbers have been female. Their contributions, especially in the past, might not always be recognized, but that has never stopped women from giving their lives to fight fascism and those who wish to do regular, everyday people harm. Clothing was vital to the work of these women, and I was thrilled to have found an expert to discuss this with me.
Danielle Wirsansky is writing her dissertation and is already in possession of multiple degrees from Florida State University. She has a bachelor’s degree in theater and a second bachelor’s in creative writing, with a minor in history, as well as a master’s degree in history. Back in 2013-2014, Wirsansky, then studying theater, she began to work with FSU’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, and chose to work with Dr. Nathan Stoltzfus, then the Dorothy and Jonathan Rintels Professor of Holocaust Studies, on his research into the WWII Rosenstrasse protests in Berlin. The work inspired Wirsansky’s master’s degree thesis on the experiences of women who worked as British spies during the war.
“I’m currently working on my PhD in history,” Wirsansky told me, “where I major in modern European history, 1790 to the present.” Continuing to work with Dr. Stoltzfus, now professor emeritus, she has been conducting international research which will allow her to do a gendered analysis of SOE agent experiences, tracing a path from individual recruitment through the end of the war, or in many cases, execution after capture by an Axis power. From my own writing, I knew before our conversation that what these lady spies wore was going to be crucial to both their work and their chances at survival, but I was very curious to learn about the details.
“The way they dressed had to be very specific,” Wirsansky explained. “They needed to be able to pass as completely French, not some non-native that parachuted into France. It was incredibly important but it wasn’t really the expertise of the average military man. So they were hiring out a lot of instructors and other people, especially for training to get these agents prepared before people went out in the field. They had theater teachers, as an example, to make sure they were speaking in the right dialect, and that their accents were good, like, dialect coaches. And how to behave in a natural way, how to behave under pressure or under interrogation, they had to learn all sorts of things, even etiquette. My favorite example is from Inglorious Basterds, the German versus French or British way of holding up your fingers to show the number three.”
Preparing for our conversation, I’d looked deep into the stories of these women; all of them were fascinating. I asked Wirsansky to tell me about some of her personal favorites. (*The Imperial War Museum, where Wirsansky has spent months doing research, has extensive online collections related to the SOE, and specifically the women in SOE, F.)
“Vera Atkins,” she told me, “who was the assistant head of the SOE, F (the French section), the section that I study, was particularly involved in dress and in style, and she helped to purchase or curate agent’s looks. It very much depended on what region or what area they were being parachuted into. Do they need to look like rustic people living in the countryside or farmers? Or, are they being dropped closer to a big city and need to look more cosmopolitan?”
Something that is important to understand here is the difference in manufacturing practices in France, even outside of Paris, and basically anywhere else in Europe. Similar to the differences in finger signals, fixtures on clothing, collars and cuffs, even zipper manufacturers were distinct and different for clothing made in the UK or even elsewhere in Europe.
“The placement of pockets could be different,” Wirsansky said, “even the cuts of clothing were different. British clothes tended to be boxier in cut, they wore more sturdy, practical shoes. The French, even if they lived out in the countryside, were more fashion forward,everything from seams to hems could be different and little things like that could really show an agent out.”
French seams, known as couture anglaise, which means ‘English Seams’ in France, a naming convention which could be called paradoxical at the very least (and is too complex to fully explain here and now) which were much more common in the 19th century than they are today, are one example of an inexplicably complex system that the British and their allies needed to quickly master to have any hope of surviving long enough to turn the tide of war.
During actual production, when attaching the individual pattern pieces, the parts which make up a garment; there are many ways that a maker can deal with the raw edges of the two pieces of fabric they are joining together, a process known as ‘finishing.’
In clothing production today these edges are mostly serged to prevent fraying, or, in the case of particularly cheaply made clothing like fast fashion, the destined-to-dissolve weave or knit is commonly (unevenly trimmed) and simply left raw.
French seams, which both require more materials and require more construction time than other finishing options; the seam allowance is long enough to allow the raw edge to be folded back and hidden away with tiny, invisible stitches. It is a beautiful way to make a garment and it adds more that cost and time, there is something intangible about work well done, and without someone paying attention to the seams of the spies’ clothes, a lot more lives would have been lost.
“A lot of people don’t think about how this historic clothing was fashioned,” Wirsansky said to me, and I giggled, we had to pause our wonderful conversation so that I could explain to my new friend that she was preaching to the proverial choir.
Almost every country on the globe, Axis, Allies, and those pretending like neutrality was a reasonable or pragmatic stance to take, was forced into rationing supplies for civilians. Hitler and his efficient war machine destroyed the presumption of normalcy-at-war that British and other European senior leadership expected from an enemy. The false flag operation which officially began the 20th century’s most devastating conflict set of a series of events so dull and unexpected that until mid 1941, it was called the ‘Phony War.’
A quip used to express a common gripe; that this particular conflict didn’t seem to have a lot of action, causing many under-informed citizens of Europe, Asisa, and North Africa to understand the seriousness and many potential consequences of the conflict once it actually took off. From the start, part of the early Axis victories came in the form of existential dread. The heavy weight which today accompanies news, the same way it did 80 years ago. We need news as much as it does not serve us; no one likes being blindsided by the defeat of all one’s historic allies, literally everyone, all across the continent, in the UK and far beyond. Which is what happened to all of Europe, in rapid succession, and then it was suddenly clear that the UK was going to be the last unoccupied nation in Europe; even those claiming neutrality we subjugating in one way or another. All of this had impact on what these occupied nations wore, and British spies (and the international spies working with them) needed to know stuff like this in order to plan missions that stood a chance of making a difference.
“Even the materials things were made from,” Wirsansky said to me, “or how used or worn a garment was. The French were not in a blockade, but they had a lot less resources during occupation. So what they were wearing, how they were recycling it, what kind of textiles they were using, it all changed. They didn’t have the same access to new fabrics like the British did. French clothing would be a lot more worn because they couldn’t waste their money or resources on getting new clothes, even if they wanted to stay fashionable. It also affected their makeup. They used burnt cork for mascara and eyeliner or vegetables to make other kinds of makeup, eyeshadow, rouge or lipstick. And the agents needed to be aware of that. The application of makeup and hairstyles, all of those things were different in France.People don’t always realize how different it can be in countries that are so close to each other.”
I asked Wirsansky if one of the “silk code sheet” examples I saw on the Imperial War Museum’s SOE Collections were what I thought they were.
“They are cipher keys,” she told me with a giant smile. “They were really lightweight. They were durable. You could fold it or roll it and it wouldn’t crease, and it was audibly silent to use if they were hiding. it didn’t disintegrate if it got wet, but it was also easy to close or hide because you could put it in your clothes. You could wrap it around your neck or put it in your hair if you were a woman or hide it in a seam or a hem. Silk was really good for things that needed to be burned, to ensure that you left no trace, because silk doesn’t leave that much ash behind. Some people used a poem cipher, but if they weren’t good at that, they could also use the silk code sheet to make sure they were really understanding all their messages.”
“Nancy Wake,” Danielle Wirsansky said, “is one of the most influential spies for me. Her code name was ‘White Mouse,’ which is what I named the theater company I founded. Not all of them, but some of the women, to help them evade capture, would wear their their clothing underneath their harnesses when they parachuted in. So that they could rip off the parachute equipment and be like, ‘oh, no, I’m just a person, not an agent at all.’ Wake took it one step further, one time she parachuted in, she wore an evening gown and she wanted to wear high heels. She didn’t want to deal with two pairs of shoes. She took bandages and wrapped them all around her feet and her heels so that when she landed, she wouldn’t break her ankle. She was very committed to the role and she was posing as a socialite, but it was also the adopted persona that she had. But to go to that length, like, to be prepared to parachute in heels, I think is a little insane.”
The extant objects which have survived the decades since WWII, we’re used to them being easily identifiable, simple to classify.
“Mathilde Carré was suspected of being a double agent,” Wirsansky said. “She came back on a break, she was pulled out of the field, and she went out to shop for this necklace, and she gave it as a gift to Vera Atkins, who I mentioned earlier. And while she was out shopping for the necklace, MI5 bugged her apartment.”
Carré, known as La Chatte, was supposedly a member of the resistance, but she reported many members of the Franco-Polish resistance network, Interallié, dozens of whom were arrested by the Germans during their occupation of Paris. Carré, who did some truly bad things, was trying to save her own life after being caught by the enemy and eventually, after being caught became something of a triple spy. The whole story is incredibly complicated and I would very much like a dedicated showrunner with a large budget and taste for decadent production values to start filming episodes of a series based off of this true story, like, yesterday.
Jokes aside, all of this is pretty unfathomable; the danger, the pressure and potential consequences. Talking to someone who loves their work like Wirsansky does, the stories and sacrifices of these women feel very relevant. They are being replayed in Ukraine as I write these words, and the same will be true when you read them.
“It was very important,” Wirsansky told me when I asked about this. “They were trying to be choosing people that could really handle the situation. Because it was incredibly stressful, incredibly dangerous for women, even more so than men in the exact same positions, because the Geneva Conventions didn’t provide the same kind of protections for women agents. Women were not considered ‘militants’ under the Geneva Convention. They weren’t protected, the writers of it couldn’t even imagine women as militants. That’s part of why they were used, because they were less detectable or suspected. But it also put them in greater danger, even if they were doing the same thing that the men were doing.”
The work of the women of the SOE, even if they have not been properly remembered by the public; that part of our shared history proves that anything can be accomplished, even under unimaginably dire circumstances.