Purnell, Sonia

"This is a historical nonfiction book about Virginia Hall, an American spy in France who the Nazis dubbed 'the most dangerous of allied spies.' It tells the story of her youth and her work in Europe during the second world war"--Provided by the publisher.

"The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War. In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: 'She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.' This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization dubbed Churchill's 'ministry of ungentlemanly warfare,' and, before the United States had even entered the war, became the first woman to deploy to occupied France . . . At a time when sending female secret agents into enemy territory was still strictly forbidden, Virginia Hall came to be known as the 'Madonna of the Resistance,' coordinating a network of spies to blow up bridges, report on German troop movements, arrange equipment drops for Resistance agents, and recruit and train guerilla fighters"--Provided by publisher.