World War II and D-Day spy veteran Pippa Latour Doyle dies aged 102

The sole surviving female Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent from World War II died in West Auckland last Saturday, aged 102.

Phyllis (Pippa) Latour Doyle is being remembered as an “incredible woman” by the Royal New Zealand RSA.

“Our thoughts are with Pippa’s family, friends, and all who had the honour of knowing her.”

Doyle parachuted into occupied France in 1944, where she posed as a teenage schoolgirl to relay intelligence back to the Allied Command.

“Pippa was one of 40 women who conducted clandestine operations on behalf of the SOE in occupied France,” the RSA said.

“In May 1944, at the age of 23, Pippa parachuted into occupied Normandy to gather intelligence on Nazi positions in preparation for D-Day. Over the coming months, she would secretly relay 135 coded messages to the British military before France’s liberation in August.”

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Doyle had been trained in radio skills, surveillance, sabotage, map-reading and self-defence before she arrived, but used her wit and fluency in Flemish to remain undetected among German soldiers.

She had three codenames (Genevieve, Plus Fours and Lampooner) and bicycled around the rural French countryside appearing friendly and talkative, selling soap to mostly German soldiers.

Doyle would hide her codes on pieces of silk, which she would wrap around a knitting needle and put inside a flat shoelace she used to tie her hair.

This method successfully kept the codes secret even after one occasion in which Doyle was taken to the police station to be questioned and searched.

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She was appointed an additional Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1945 for her services during the German occupation of France, and a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour (Knight of the Legion of Honour) by the French government in 2014.