The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

A Woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell is a wonderful biography about an extraordinary woman who played a key role in the defeat of the Nazis in the 1940’s, a woman of courage and powerful leadership skills, a woman of whom most people have never heard, a woman whose life should be instructive to the new Secretary of Defense who thinks women in combat aren’t up to the task.

Virginia Hall, born in 1906, had an adventurous spirit and a desire for a less constrained life than what she had in an affluent family in Baltimore in the 1920’s. She decamped to Paris for grad school, hoping for a subsequent job in the diplomatic service.  That became the first of a series of rejections.

For Virginia Hall, however, there was always a Plan B, and she got a job as a typist in the American consulate in Turkey.  While there, she suffered an accident and the resulting infection led to the amputation of her leg. Along with being a woman, her wooden leg (she called it “Cuthbert”) became  just another obstacle for her to overcome.   The State Department ordered her to an outpost in Estonia, but their unwillingness to provide her any upward mobility led her to quit. At the end of 1939, she got a job driving an ambulance for a French artillery regiment.

Using a job as a journalist as her cover, Hall eventually got a job working for the OSE, an early French resistance organization in World War II. She was their first female hire. In Baltimore social circles, she had excelled at hunting so she was comfortable with guns.

In Vichy, France, the most pro-Nazi region in 1940 and 1941, Virginia Hall developed skills at radio communications and intelligence gathering. She also planned and executed attacks on German convoys, rail services, munitions armories, and communications lines. With forged passports and papers, under a variety of fake names, she used a variety of disguises to avoid detection.  She trained hundreds – and eventually thousands – of resisters in across France in sabotage and killing the enemy. When the United States finally entered the war, she reported to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), always developing strategies to advance the cause. Notably, she even had successes exfiltrating resisters out of brutalist German prisons.

As a spy most wanted by the Nazis, Virginia Hall was largely responsible for liberating the Haute-Loire region of France.  Often based in Lyon, but moving constantly from one safe house to another, she was one of the top extermination targets at the top of the list of Hauptsturmfuhrer Klaus Barbie, the notorious “butcher of Lyon.”  She, on the other hand, was known to the Germans as “the limping lady of Lyon,” (or, sometimes, “that limping Canadian bitch.”)  Barbie had drawings of her on thousands of WANTED posters across the country.

Hall had many close calls, but her determination and courage prevailed. After the war, when the CIA replaced the OSS, the male-dominated agency, many of whom had never served in combat or borne responsibility for carrying out ultra-secret dangerous missions, disregarded her singular contribution to the war success and returned her to desk duty. Once again, she had years of fighting for promotion, always preferring paramilitary work to intelligence gathering. It was a lifetime of accomplishment, always fighting the institutional biases that “women were too emotional to be objective,” or that “she couldn’t be aggressive.” Less experienced male colleagues always saw her as a threat.

When she retired at the age of 60, she was a Lieutenant Colonel, but still not getting assignments that were up to her level of skills.  Ultimately, she was honored in France, England and the United States, where a building was named after her at the CIA training center.

With everything I have included here, it is just scratching the surface of the rich story told by Sonia Purnell in this stunning biography. The book is deeply researched and abundantly annotated. The author draws on materials in various national archives, interviews with military and intelligence officials who served with Hall (some interviews that she did, and others recorded elsewhere by key players long deceased.) There were Hall’s own encoded daily reports to her superiors and lengthy interviews with family members.  It’s all woven together seamlessly, to produce a riveting true life spy thriller about a war hero  whose name I had never heard till picking up this 2019 book. I recommend you do the same. Pete Hegseth take note!