On a foggy night in March 1944, Maureen Patricia O’Sullivan parachuted into a field near Limoges, a hotbed of Gestapo activity in Nazi-held France.
The 26-year-old Dubliner had been sent undercover by Britain’s Special Operations Executive, or SEO, a secret organisation that supported resistance in enemy territory. O’Sullivan later recalled her mind turning “cold and clear” as she waited for the signal to drop. “After I jumped, it was lovely sailing through the sky on my own,” she told a reporter from the London News Chronicle. “I landed only a third of a kilometre from the Maquis [French resistance fighters], who were looking for me.”
For the next seven months, O’Sullivan’s job as a wireless operator was to send and receive messages from SOE headquarters in London. The historian Marcus Binney notes that she worked from several safe houses, usually with someone outside keeping watch. She remained apart from her colleagues to avoid suspicion, using a trusted courier to pass on information.
Still, it was very risky business: German signal vans were always on the lookout for transmissions, and many captured SOE agents had been tortured and killed. The life expectancy of a covert wireless operator in occupied France was said to be just six weeks.
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O’Sullivan was no doubt aware of the stakes involved. Just four months after she arrived in France, four women SOE operatives – Andrée Borrel, Vera Leigh, Sonia Olschanesky and Diana Rowden – were murdered in the crematorium at Natzweiler concentration camp.
In one particularly hairy incident, O’Sullivan was stopped at a Nazi checkpoint while transporting a wireless set in a case fastened to her bike. She was ordered to open the case but quickly came up with an excuse. As she explained in a postwar interview: “I looked pathetic and said it had only my clothes and they were so shabby I was ashamed to show them.
“Suddenly one of the Germans said, ‘She looks like a German girl.’ I said, ‘My mother was German, but she died when I was born.’ [It] did the trick. They went all sentimental and let me through. That night, I started training two men who would carry on in case the Germans got me.”
So who was this plucky young woman?
O’Sullivan was born in Dublin in 1918 to an Irish father and English mother, who died when she was young. As a child, she was sent to live with an aunt in Belgium, attending schools in Bruges, Brussels and Paris. She became fluent in French, Dutch and Flemish, and proficient in German – a great asset for her future career.
By the time the second World War began, O’Sullivan was training to be a nurse in London. She joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in July 1941, and two years later was accepted into the SOE.
O’Sullivan wasn’t initially the most promising candidate for overseas work. One superior described her as having “no mechanical and little practical sense”, and her circuit commander in France was frustrated by her obvious lack of technical competence on arrival.
She proved to be a tenacious and resourceful agent, however, working night and day despite persistent chest pains. The Daily Mail went as far as to describe her as “one of the most valuable pre-D-Day parachutists” for the Allies, referring to her as “Paddy the rebel”.
O’Sullivan was awarded an MBE for her service in September 1945, at which point she was based in Calcutta as a liaison officer for the French. Later she married Walter Eric Alvey and settled in England, but their marriage fell apart.
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She moved to rural Co Wicklow in the early 1970s, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Her time in Ireland didn’t end happily. She came home one day to find her two dogs had been shot dead and her house raided, with some of her war memorabilia stolen. The IRA was believed to be behind the robbery. She left for England and vowed never to live here again, according to her family.
“She was a nomadic person,” her son said in 2002. “She never seemed to settle down anywhere ... Anyway, she felt like a stranger in Ireland.”
This Extraordinary Emigrants article was written by Dr Catherine Healy, DFA historian-in-residence at Epic, the Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin’s Docklands, an interactive museum that tells the story of how the Irish shaped and influenced the world
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