top of page
Virginia Hall.jpg

Virginia Hall

 “The Limping Lady”

​

Having a prosthetic leg proved no impediment to Baltimore-bred Virginia Hall, who always dreamed of working in the Foreign Service. After attending exclusive U.S. universities to study languages, Hall went to Europe to study and travel in the early 1930s. She later worked as a clerk at the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, Poland. Her next assignment was in Izmir, Turkey, where she accidentally shot herself in the left leg while hunting, thus requiring its amputation. She nicknamed her wooden leg “Cuthbert.”
While working as a code clerk at the U.S. Embassy in London in late 1940, Hall was recruited by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) when the war erupted. The SOE trained her in clandestine tradecraft, communications, weapons, and other resistance activities. Afterwards, she went to work in Vichy France with the F (French) Section of the SOE. Her cover was that of a stringer for the New York Post. For the next 13 months, she organized spy networks, ran safe houses, and delivered important intelligence to the British government. Hall established a secret network of loyal French citizens, codenamed HECKLER, which helped British pilots downed by the Germans to escape to safety.  She was well known to the Gestapo, which circulated a sketch of her with the following order: “The woman who limps is one of the most dangerous Allied agents in France. We must find and destroy her.”
Slender, five feet, seven inches tall, with a warm smile that belied her toughness and leadership ability, “Dindy” Hall was the first woman in the SOE to establish resistance networks out of Vichy. She set up valuable contacts in France and earned the highest respect of her comrades, who dubbed her “La Dame Qui Boite”—the Limping Lady.
When German troops seized France in November 1941, Hall was ordered to leave. She made her way across the Pyrenees to neutral Spain and was jailed in the border town of San Juan de las Abadesas because she did not have entry papers. Befriending a Spanish prostitute, she smuggled out a letter to the American consul in Barcelona.
Released from prison after six weeks, Hall reported to her SOE contacts in Madrid. With a new cover as a correspondent for the Chicago Times, she scouted safe houses and agents and acted as a courier for the SOE network. Returning to London in July 1943, she was quietly made an honorary Member of the Order of the British Empire.
In March 1944, Hall became one of 4,000 women who comprised one-fifth of the staff of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II. At OSS, she asked to return to occupied France. In May 1944, she was sent back to France with the cover identity of Marcelle Montagne, a farmhand in a rural village. The 38-year-old Hall disguised herself as an elderly French peasant. She dyed her brown hair a gray-black color and hid her slim figure under full skirts, woolen blouses, and an oversized sweater. She tended a herd of goats, which she led along the village roads while observing German troop movements. Codenamed “Diane,” she eluded the Gestapo and contacted the French Resistance in central France. She mapped drop zones for supplies and commandos from England, found safe houses, and joined with a secret SOE-OSS Jedburgh team after the Allied Forces landed at Normandy. Hall helped train three battalions of resistance forces to wage guerrilla warfare against the Germans and provided valuable reporting until Allied troops overtook her small band. Although her disability precluded her from conducting guerilla warfare, she planned and organized operations.
On assignment in eastern France, Hall met her future husband, Lieutenant Paul Gaston Goillot, a Paris-born New Yorker and skilled chef. When the war in Europe ended, she and Goillot headed for leave in Paris and cheered General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French Forces, in the victory parade down the Champs d’Elysees on August 26, 1944. She returned to London later.
In 1945, Hall received the Distinguished Service Cross for her heroic actions, the first and only civilian woman in the war to be so honored. She continued intelligence work for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency after the war, retiring in 1966 at age 60. “Her courage knew no bounds,” said William T. Hornaday II, an OSS colleague. She died in 1982 at a Rockville, Maryland, hospital and was buried at Druid Ridge Cemetery in Pikesville, Maryland. Hall’s remarkable life has been chronicled in author Sonia Purnell’s forthcoming book, A Woman of No Importance (April 2019), for which Paramount Pictures has planned a feature film.

bottom of page