DUNCAN GUY
A SOUTH African-born spy, whose secret activities in occupied France helped the Allies to victory in World War II, was honoured this week.
Phyllis Latour Doyle, 93, who parachuted behind Nazi lines and risked her life gathering vital information on enemy positions before the D-Day landings, was born on a Belgian-flagged ship when it called in at Durban harbour.
During the war, she toured occupied Normandy by bicycle disguised as a 14-year-old French girl selling soap to German soldiers. But hidden on pieces of silk among the brave young woman’s knitting were secret codes used by the slightly built agent – codename Paulette – to send back her messages to Allied Command.
According to a report on the New Zealand website Stuff, Doyle grew up in South Africa and the Congo in a childhood marred by tragedy, which she nevertheless recalled as being a very happy era of her life.
She was the only child of a French father and English mother. Her father went to work in the Congo and sent her and her mother to South Africa when tribal war erupted. He was killed when she was three months old, and her mother remarried soon afterwards.
Doyle was raised with a lot of affection “as my ‘brothers’ were all much older than me – it was as though I had four fathers”.
The Daily Mail newspaper reports that for decades after the war Doyle, known as Pippa, kept her extraordinary past hidden, only telling her children 15 years ago. But this week the modest heroine, living in a rest home in New Zealand, made a rare foray into the spotlight of public acclaim as she was presented in Auckland with the Legion of Honour, France’s highest award for bravery.
With a Parachute Regiment wings badge and honours including the MBE she was awarded after the war and France’s Croix de Guerre pinned to her cardigan, Doyle received the award from the French ambassador to New Zealand, Laurent Contini.
“Pippa stands out as a formidable example for younger and older generations alike,” he said.
As part of its commemorations of the 70th anniversary of D-Day, France is recognising military veterans and civilians who fought in World War II.
Contini said that when mother-of-four Doyle, who moved to Auckland in the 1970s, was told of her award she was “surprised” that we had found her and said, “what did I do to merit that?”
Contini said Doyle “held dangerous positions and undertook perilous missions to prepare the ground for the Allied troops to march on”, and told of his “deep admiration for her bravery and her unshakeable commitment to ending the war”.
What she did began when she joined the Royal Air Force to train as a flight mechanic in 1941, and the secret services spotted her potential. She was fluent in French and was whisked away to be trained as one of the few women agents working for the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
“I did it for revenge,” she told New Zealand’s Army News magazine in 2009, adding that she joined SOE because her godmother’s father had been shot by the Germans.
After the war she married an Australian engineer and lived in Fiji and Australia before settling in New Zealand.
Doyle said it was a “privilege and honour” to receive the medal.