Moondrop to Gascony - 9780955720819

On a cold, moonlit night in January 1944, Anne-Marie Walters, just 20 years old, parachuted into southwest France to work with the Resistance in preparation for the long-awaited Allied invasion. The daughter of a British father and a French mother, she was to act as a courier for George Starr, head of the Wheel WRIGHT circuit of SOE. Over the next seven months Anne-Marie criss-crossed the region, carrying messages, delivering explosive arranging the escape of downed airmen and receiving parachute drops of arms and personnel at dead of night---living in constant fear of capture and torture by the Gestapo. Then, on the very eve of Liberation, she was sent off on foot over the Pyrenees to Spain, carrying urgent despatches for London.

Aine-Marie Walters wrote Moondrop to Gascony immediately after the war, while the events were still vivid in her mind. It is a tale of high adventure, comradeship and kindness, of betrayals and appalling atrocities, and of the often unremarked courage of many ordinary French men and women who risked their lives to help drive German armies from French soil. And through it all shines Anne-Marie's quiet courage, a keen sense humour and, above all, her pure zest for life.

For this new edition, David Hewson, a former Regular Army Officer and much-interested in military hitory adds biographical details for the main characters, identities the real people behind the pseudonyms and provides background notes. He also reveals what happened to Anne-Marie afiter the war.