A WOMAN who lived a quiet life with her family in Fiji has been recognised as one of the world’s bravest spies.
At 23, Phyllis Latour Doyle, an Englishwoman, was dropped behind enemy lines in France to report back on German forces before the landing at Normandy, which became a turning point in World War II.
After decades of remaining in the shadows, the 93-year-old stepped into the limelight on Wednesday, when she was awarded the Legion of Honour – France’s highest decoration, in recognition of her courage in helping to liberate the country from the Nazis.
According to The Telegraph, Mrs Doyle engaged in a mission to gather information on German positions ahead of the D-Day landings after being motivated in part by revenge for the murder by the Germans of a close family friend.
She was awarded the MBE for her bravery by the British Government but her actions had remained largely unheralded.
Mrs Doyle was one of a handful of spies set up to spy upon and sabotage Nazi-occupied Europe.
According to The Telegraph, she had joined the RAF to train as a flight mechanic in 1941 but the secret services spotted her potential.
Given three separate code names – Genevieve, Plus Fours and Lampooner – she was first deployed in Aquitaine in Vichy France from 1942.
Mrs Doyle was dropped behind enemy lines under a new code name Paulette, into the Calvados region of Normandy on May 1, 1944.
Although then aged 23, she assumed the identity of a poor 14-year-old French girl to make the Germans less suspicious.
She used bicycles to tour the area, passing information through coded messages.
After the war, Mrs Doyle returned to Kenya, where she had gone to school, for her wedding to an Australian engineer.
The couple had four children and moved to Fiji and then on to Australia where they settled.
Eventually, she moved with her children to a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, divorcing her husband in the mid 1970s.
