Latour was highly decorated and the last remaining female member of F-section, the branch of the special operations executive in WWII which organised operations in France.

Members gathered crucial intelligence about the Germans’ movements in France, and also cut railway lines and telephone cables, forcing the Germans to send their messages over the airwaves, allowing them to be decoded in England.

Latour was parachuted into Normandy ahead of D-Day.

“Her job was a wireless operator,” Dobson told RNZ’s Sunday Morning. “And unlike a lot of the others who were stationary, she had 17 different sets around about a 100km area, so her job with her Russian courier … they would go and report on German positions.

“Her alias was a 14-year-old girl selling soap… because the [German soldiers] apparently hated their soap, it was like sandpaper, and she had the lovely goat’s milk soap. And she would report on where they were, and of course that was a bit of a death sentence… the next thing the bombers would come in.”

While she was in France, she was constantly in danger and on the move. She foraged for food and often spent nights outside in a forest, not wanting to put those in safe houses in danger.

She had many close calls, including searches at checkpoints with the radio codes sown into a shoelace used to tie her hair up, radio parts hidden under a full commode which was emptied and examined during a search, and a German soldier who fired into the ceiling of the place she sourced the soap from, in case there had been anyone hidden in the ceiling.

Some of the women from F-section who were caught died horribly. They were not covered by the Geneva Convention of war, and many were tortured and executed. Latour herself did not come through unscathed, she was raped by German soldiers before an officer stepped in and stopped it.

And during her time in France, she witnessed many civilians executed.

“She sent 135 messages in her time there, then she was overrun by the Americans,” Dobson said. “Even then getting out to Paris was equally horrendous. She walked to Paris – took her two months.

“She was a smart woman, had her wits about her…”

Source: The untold story of WWII’s last female spy | RNZ