The celebrated World War II spy and Baltimore native who became known as the French Underground’s “La Dame Qui Boite” — Limping Lady — and for her masterful disguises, was as adept at blowing up trains and espionage as making French cheeses.
Virginia Hall once responded when asked why her sensational wartime movielike life had made her a figure of relative obscurity, “No one ever asked,” adding, “Too many of my friends were killed because they talked too much.”
For the last three years, Bill Jones, a Baltimore business, real estate development and government relations consultant, has been placing a bouquet of flowers on Hall’s grave at Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville on Hall’s birthday, April 6, 1906.
He was accompanied by his wife, Maureen, on a recent dreary April 6.
“Normally, I put Virginia Bluebells on her grave but they weren’t out yet,” Jones said, substituting other flowers. “I’ll go back when the Virginia Bluebells are out.”
He was drawn to Hall’s compelling story after reading Sonia Purnell’s “A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II.”
“First off, it’s a Baltimore County story and here’s this woman with a prosthesis who is so strong-willed, and it’s a wonderful story,” Jones said. “I found her to be a real hero.”
Hall, the daughter of Edwin Lee “Ned” Hall, a theatrical executive, and Barbara Hammel Hall, was born in Baltimore into a patrician family. That would defy her later cloak-and-dagger life.
She lived at 2124 Mount Royal Terrace in Reservoir Hill, and spent summers at Box Horn Farm in Parkton, where as a tomboy she roamed the fields and woods collecting all sorts of animals and where her father taught her how to hunt and shoot, and even milk cows and make cheese.
She was a student at Roland Park Country School — Class of 1924 — where she played field hockey and basketball and performed male roles in plays.
She would later employ her theatrical talents as a spy.
Hall had a talent for learning languages and served as class president and editor of Quid Nunc, the school’s yearbook, which in her senior year described her as “cantankerous and capricious,” and defined her as the “most original of our class.”
After Roland Park, she attended Radcliffe, Barnard and in Vienna at the Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Consular Academy.
Because of prevailing prejudices at the time against women, Hall was rebuffed in her desire to be more than an embassy clerical worker or secretary in the U.S. Foreign Service.
Further complicating her determined career path in becoming a Foreign Service officer, was an accident.
While on assignment in Izmir, Turkey in 1933, Hall was out bird-hunting with friends when her 12-gauge shotgun accidentally discharged while crossing over a fence, where she lost her left leg below the knee.
She was outfitted with a wooden prosthetic leg she named “Cuthbert.”
Returning to the consulate in Venice and taking the oral exam for the Foreign Service, she was rejected and told she was not “able-bodied” and the service didn’t hire amputees.
In 1939, she left the State Department and moved to London where as the first woman hired, she joined the British Special Operations Executive, which was known as the SOE, an underground operation that trained her in weapons, communications and resistance activities such as the use of explosives in derailing Nazi supply trains and cutting telephone and telegraph lines.
In 1941, she was sent into occupied France posing as a New York Post reporter and later as an ambulance driver where she worked organizing French resistance fighters, safe houses, spying and relaying valuable intelligence back to England.
The infamous Klaus Barbie, who was known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” called her “the most dangerous of all Allied spies.”
He ordered that posters with Hall’s visage be posted on lampposts and walls of buildings in order to capture and execute her.
Fearless, she would ride trains filled with Nazis while using her acting abilities, posing as a bent-over old elderly woman who limped through the streets once she arrived at her destination.
She used various names and was known as Marie Monin, Germaine, Diane, Camille and even Nicholas.
At one point fleeing the Nazis, Hall on a 50-mile journey traversed the snowy Pyrenees into Spain, made more arduous because of her prosthetic leg.
“Cuthbert is giving me trouble but I can cope,” she radioed London, where a contact unaware of her situation responded: “If Cuthbert is giving you trouble, have him eliminated.”
In 1944, she transferred to the U.S. Office of Strategic Services which sent her back to France where she continued her clandestine activities against the enemy this time posing as a limping milkmaid and answering to the name of Marcelle Montagne.
At night, she retreated to a loft with her wireless radio and using her code name “Diane” sent intelligence to London.
While in the OSS, she met and fell in love with Paul Gaston Goillot, who was also in the organization, and whom she married in 1950.
In 1943, she was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire but the certificate bearing the signature of King George VI couldn’t be delivered because Hall’s whereabouts were unknown.
At war’s end in 1945, Hall and a small group of the Forces Francaises d’Interieur were on their way to the Swiss border when news arrived that the war had ended.
That year, OSS director Maj. Gen. “Wild Bill” Donovan, wanted to bring Hall back home to Washington for a ceremony where President Harry Truman would award her the Distinguished Service Cross.
She would be the first woman to receive it but declined and in a cable informed Donovan she still had work to complete abroad.
Finally, in a private ceremony, Hall received the decoration in his office.
After the OSS was dissolved by Truman in 1947, and became the Central Intelligence Agency, Hall continued to work until she was 60 and had to face mandatory retirement in 1966.
She and her husband lived on a farm in Barnesville where she tended her garden, made cheese and raised French poodles.
She died July 12, 1982 and was buried at Druid Ridge Cemetery.
In 2018, the Maryland State Highway Administration unveiled a historical marker in the 19300 block of York Road in Parkton, near the site of her childhood Box Horn Farm, commemorating Hall’s extraordinary life.
I love this story, and a reminder of, this brave woman.
Who knew? Great story and as always, we’ll told by Fred Rasmussen. Thank you!