Remembering Virginia Hall

So there I was driving along listening to All Things Considered when they started telling about an American woman who was being honored for her work during the Second World War. I find it hard to believe it’s been sixty-one years since the end of that terrible conflict. As a Boomer who was a child in the Fifties and a teenager and at the dawn of my twenties through the Sixties, that war was something of a mystery, it loomed large, but mostly through stylized portrayls like Audie Murphy’s exploits on film. The men and women didn’t seem to go much for talking about it. Which I think has haunted my generation. Certainly it is we, the children of that generation, who’ve been giving the greater attention through research, biography and film over the last decade or so.

For all these different reasons, I suspect I listend more closely to what is known about Virginia Hall, this one-legged woman who parachuted behind enemy lines to spy and participate in various resistance activities.

Here’s the story on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6615482

Here’s another fascinating recounting: http://www.judithlpearson.com/wolvessynopsis.html

And one more, the Wikipedia bio which includes a link to her CIA file: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Hall