but not odette. and said take a nap and then we will talk about what we will do and she said i don't need a nap. is thinking she just came off the boat i know she hasn't slept in three days. i want to get on with the job i'm here to beat the germans. give me an assignment. he said wow. she is not his career. he sends her on assignment and then arnott comes in and says did you meet her? i heard about this girl and she really attractive? yes. very attractive. >> what is she like? he had to think and this is what he said. she is like an angry giselle. then and agile and beautiful and graceful but angry. feisty. so they saw the spark in the tenacity and the fight in her to fight the germans and knew she was fearless. she was not intimidated by the gestapo, concentration camp camps, none of that and she wanted to fight the germans of peter called london and cabled them and asked if he could have her. she was supposed to go to paris but i want her. and london said no we already have an assignment for her.

and odette framed the entire conversation in a mother's language. she said what happens to my little a l girls if england is . if it isn't just europe but hitler has come about unless democracy england is also taken over, then where do they go, what kind of world are they growing up in, shouldn't i as a mother do everything i can to make it safe for them even if i means leaving them flex so she did. shehe joined the war. she was in the very first class of women to come to the combats of the first women in combat with 39 women like odette. they were mothers, divorcees cut some were about to become grandmothers aged from 22 to 55 and they were recruited by a government agency, secret agency to parachute into france, two armto armand train the french re so that when someday, when d-day arrived, and this was just a word for the day that everybody came back into the fight went back to the continent. when it arrived, ther they wered in the hands of the occupied nation, there was training but when hitler went to the beaches to defend against invading allie

odette sansom isn't the first, there was also a woman named lise de baissac who is a very different.dette sansom was very -- in aristocrat and came from an island off the coast of africa that had been french captured in the napoleonic war england used as a cooling stop on the way to its far east empires and she spoke french, and if she had a british passport and lived in paris most of her adult life that day that hitler marches and she becomes an enemy alien. if she stays in france, she will end up in a concentration camp so she flees and get to london where her brother is already working for the secret government agency, hands her name to the recruiter and for her it is a very commonsense position. why wouldn't i do everything to save france? there is no balance for her. she's the second female paratrooper ever in history, but this is what captured my imagination about the story she was commanding troops in normandy on d-day and we don't know about her. there were soldiers under her command answering to her orders when the allies arrived she was the second behind enemy lines. on the