Arthur Schlesinger Jr., said the title quote. So, in honor of International Women’s Day, let’s remember a courageous woman who died last month and was remembered today with this wonderful obituary by D’Arcy Doran of the Associated Press. No doubt, Pearl would be shocked to learn that equality in military service, at least in the U.S., has still not been achieved. She was 91 before the Royal Air Force brought her her parachute wings. She doesn’t strike me as a woman who was waiting patiently.
“Pearl Cornioley, who parachuted into France as a secret agent during World War II to help arm and organize the Resistance, has died. She was 93.
Mrs. Cornioley was one of Britain’s greatest agents behind German lines, according to Michael R.D. Foot, a historian who has written extensively about British special operations in France. She died Feb. 24 at Blois Hospital in France’s Loire Valley, Caroline Cottard, the secretary at her retirement home in Chateauvieux, southwest of Paris, said Friday. Mrs. Cornioley parachuted into France in September 1943 to work as a courier for an underground unit. It was thought that the Nazis were less likely to suspect a woman. She posed as a cosmetics saleswoman while delivering coded messages. When the Nazis captured the leader of her unit in May 1944, she took over the cell in the north Indre department of the Loire Valley, about 55 miles southeast of the Normandy beaches.
Using the code name Pauline, she led a 1,500-member team in efforts to cut railway, road and telephone communications and start guerrilla operations. In June 1944, the month of the D-Day landings, her unit interrupted the Paris-Bordeaux railway line more than 800 times and regularly attacked convoys, she wrote in her 1995 autobiography, “Pauline.”
The Nazis put her face on posters offering a 1 million franc reward for her capture.
“We didn’t actually have anything to do directly with the D-Day beach operations, but we were in more or less a rear guard — trying to prevent the Germans getting up to them,” Mrs. Cornioley told the Associated Press on her 80th birthday.
C¿cile Pearl Witherington was born June 14, 1914, in Paris to British parents. She was the oldest of four daughters. Her father was an alcoholic and a spendthrift. She once returned home to find all her family’s furniture on the curb.
“I don’t blame life at all for having given me this difficult childhood, because it gave me the strength to fight for the rest of my life,” Mrs. Cornioley wrote in her autobiography.
She took a job at the British Embassy in Paris to help support the family. She and her family were still in France when it fell to Germany in June 1940, but they fled to London when the Germans started rounding up British citizens.
Bored by her desk job at the Air Ministry in London, she volunteered for the Special Operations Executive. After seven weeks of training in armed and unarmed combat and sabotage, she parachuted into France.
After the war, she married Henri Cornioley, a French prisoner of war who escaped and joined the Resistance. They spent the rest of their lives in France. Mrs. Cornioley was recommended for Britain’s Military Cross, but as a woman, she was not able to receive it.
Queen Elizabeth II made her a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004. Mrs. Cornioley also received France’s highest honor, Legion d’Honneur.
But the award that meant the most to her came when Royal Air Force officers presented her with her parachute wings in 2006 in a ceremony at her Paris retirement home.
“I’ve been moaning about the fact the girls who parachuted into occupied countries were not allowed to wear the wings when we came back from the field,” she said. “I thought it was an injustice and really wrong because we went through the same dangers as the men.”
Her husband died in 1999. She is survived by a daughter.”
Associated Press reporter Devorah Lauter in Paris contributed to this report.
