Audrey Roche
Audrey Roche is believed to have been the only woman decorated for bravery at sea during WW2; as a Wren whose ship had been torpedoed, she saved a drowning seaman by giving him her lifebelt. As Third Officer Audrey Coningham, she was one of 1,135 passengers in the submarine depot ship Medway, which was torpedoed by Kapitanleutnant Heinz-Joachim Neumann's U-372 on June 30 1942. Audrey, who had been one of 3 Wrens on board, had been swimming for 15-30 minutes when she saw two men clinging together. Audrey pulled off her own lifebelt and put it on the drowning man - Leading Seaman Leslie Crossman.

The escape route - which went through Belgium, occupied France and over the Pyrenees into Spain's Basque country - was set up in 1940 to allow downed British airmen to return UK and escape German imprisonment.

By the time she was arrested, she had brought 118 people, including 80 pilots to safety. The Comet Line itself rescued more than 700 pilots. After her arrest in 1943, she survived German camps before being liberated at the end of WWII.

 
 
Dagmar Lahlum was with the Norwegian resistance in Oslo during World War II and later recruited unofficially to work for MI5.
Dagmar Lahlum was an adventurous fashionista from Eidsvoll, who moved to Oslo at the age of seventeen. At one point during the war, she must have been recruited to the Norwegian resistance. This is the conclusion of MI5. One April evening in 1943, when British double agent Edward Chapman was sat in the mahogany bar at Hotel Ritz at Skillebekk, a popular water hole for German officers and members of the Norwegian national socialist party, his eye fell on a beautiful woman with a décolletage and high heels - smoking Craven A cigarettes in an ivory mouthpiece. The womaniser Chapman contacted her, and did not suspect that 21-year old Dagmar had other reasons to haunt the Nazi nest, than being bought drinks in a fancy bar. Dagmar thought Chapman worked for the Germans, he thought she was a "German whore". Nevertheless, they soon became a couple, one without knowing that the other was also working for the allied forces.

Soon they moved in together in a house that had been taken over after the Jewish Feldmans, who were killed while escaping to Sweden. Chapman saw how Dagmar was suffering from the rumours, and the stamp as a German whore. During a boating trip on the fjord, with a bottle of cognac for lunch, he could not keep his secret anymore. In the twilight hour he took her in his arms, told her that he was a British double agent, and that the Germans would soon send him on a new mission to England. Dagmar was very relieved, and swore to never reveal his secret. At the same time, she was able to tell him about her affiliation with the Norwegian resistance movement.

After having tested her credibilty as a woman of the resistance movement, Chapman unofficially recruited her to the British secret service, according to the MI5 archives. Dagmar was supposed to continue gathering information on the Germans, and Chapman promised to put MI5's contact with her in order as soon as it was safe. At the same time he made sure that 600 NOK was transferred to her every month from his well-filled Abwehr bank account. Dagmar accepted a fine during the treason trials in 1947. She had a few relationships, but never married. As a pensioner, she lived in isolation, and only a handful of family members and friends showed up at her funeral in Oslo in 1999.
 
 
 
 
 
 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2000/aug/12/guardianobituaries
 
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Constance Babington Smith
Brilliant wartime photo-analyst who alerted the allies to the threat of German V1 doodlebugs

Buzz up!
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Dan Van der Vat
The Guardian, Saturday 12 August 2000 01.16 BST
Article history
In late spring 1943, Frank Whittle, the inventor of the jet engine, was detailed to the Royal Air Force staff college. The most interesting time of his ensuing "war course", he told his biographer John Golley, was a visit to the photographic reconnaissance unit (PRU) at Medmenham, Buckinghamshire. There, in the enemy aircraft interpretation section, he met Constance Babington Smith, who has died aged 87.
In December 1940, Babington Smith, an assistant section officer in the Women's Auxilary Air Force, had been posted to the PRU. Soon afterwards, she set up the interpretation section. By 1943, she was heading an 11-strong department analysing photographs taken by RAF high- altitude photo-reconaissance Mosquitoes and Spitfires - and checking for developments in German secret technology. Thus, for example, did the unit locate centres of aircraft production for attack by the RAF and the US Army Air Force.

But, on that day in 1943, Babington Smith took Whittle aside to look at photographs taken of the testing station at Peenemünde, on Germany's Baltic coast. The Germans had flown their first single-engined jet aircraft four years earlier. The first British jet had flown in 1941. By March 1943, the first British jet fighter, the twin-engined Gloster Meteor, had made its first flight.

The detail that struck Whittle about the pictures that Babington Smith showed him was scorch marks on the Peenemünde runway grass. This demonstrated that the Germans, too, had advanced to a twin-engined jet - the Me262 fighter-bomber, which, in 1944, began launching limited, but devastating, attacks on USAAF bomber streams. Another picture showed "four little tail-less aeroplanes" taking off. These were rocket-powered Me163s.

Five months after her meeting with Whittle, came an even more spectacular coup for Babington Smith. On November 28 1943, an RAF Mosquito flew over Peenemünde, and brought back a picture in which she was able to discern what looked like a stunted aircraft on a launching ramp. Thus did she identify a V1 flying bomb being prepared for a test flight. Partly as a result of that discovery, the RAF launched Operation Crossbow, attacking the plants where V1s were manufactured and their launching sites in France.

Inaccurate and unpredictable, the ram-jet V1 "doodlebug" nevertheless had a one-ton warhead and did psychological, as well as physical, damage. Some 35,000 were made, despite 36,000 tons of allied bombs being dropped on their launch sites during 1944 alone.

The Germans were forced to use mobile launchers, but managed to fire more than 2,500 V1s at London, from sites in the Pas de Calais. When the V1 attacks began in June 1944, they were attacked by RAF Tempests, Spitfires - and Meteor jets. While this renewal of the blitz, so late in the war, had a devastating effect on morale, without the assault on Peenemünde - at the very limit of RAF bombing range - the factories and the launch sites, it would have been much worse.

Meanwhile, in June 1943, another interpreter in Babington Smith's unit had made the first identification from aerial photographs of V2 guided ballistic rockets at Peenemünde. In August 1943, the RAF launched its Operation Hydra bombing raid, and set back development on the V2 programme for months. By May 1944, Babington Smith's section had identified a V2 preparing for launch. It was part of that process by which the section also itemised and located the new aircraft that the Nazis were struggling to bring into service.

Babington Smith was one of nine children of a senior civil servant, Sir Henry Babington Smith. She was raised at the family home at Chinthurst, near Guildford, and educated by tutors, and in France. As a privileged young woman, she moved in high society, but she was also drawn in by the aviation craze of the 1930s, and showed her writing talent with articles in Aeroplane magazine between 1937 and 1939. When war broke out, she joined the WAAF.

With victory in Europe, Babington Smith was transferred to the United States, on similar duties for the final stage of the Pacific war. She was awarded the US Legion of Merit, having already been mentioned in dispatches and made an MBE in Britain.

She stayed in America until 1951, working as a researcher on Life magazine. Back in Britain, her writing career began with Evidence In Camera (1957), on wartime photographic intelligence. A book on test flying was followed by five biographies, including works on the flyer Amy Johnson, her own cousin, the novelist Rose Macaulay, and the poet, John Masefield. She became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Babington Smith never married, but, in her later years, she fell in love with Greece, joining the Greek Orthodox church at the age of 60. She also helped to establish the Mosquito Memorial Appeal, which acquired a prototype for permanent preservation at St Albans.

Whittle had been impressed by more than Babington Smith's analytical abilities. There was her perfume, Guerlain's l'Heure Bleue. She wore it, she explained, to counteract the masculinity of her WAAF uniform. Its effect, he observed, was "air commodore's ruin".

• Constance Babington Smith, photographic interpreter and author, born October 15 1912; died July 31 2000
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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