Overview

On a cold, moonlit night in January 1944, Anne-Marie Walters, just twenty 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 Wheelwright circuit of the Special Operations Executive. Over the next seven months, Walters crisscrossed the region, carrying messages, delivering explosives, arranging the escape of downed airmen, and receiving parachute drops of arms and personnel in the 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 dispatches for London. Anne-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 her's quiet courage, a keen sense of humor and, above all, her pure zest for life. For this new edition, David Hewson, a former regular-army officer interested in military history, adds biographical details for the main characters, identifies the real people behind the code names, and provides background information. He also tells about Anne-Marie Walters' early life and what happened to her in the postwar years.

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9781504750394

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Reviews

One of the outstanding surveys of the real life of a secret agent. -- M. R. D. Foot, former British military historian and WWII British Army intelligence officer With her clipped British accent, narrator Nicola Barber is a great choice to portray author Walters, whose memoir captures her adventures as a member of the French Resistance during WWII...Barber ably handles all the French names and locations as well as the passages in French...[in this] fascinating look at one woman's contribution to the war effort. -- AudioFile

With her clipped British accent, narrator Nicola Barber is a great choice to portray author Walters, whose memoir captures her adventures as a member of the French Resistance during WWII...Barber ably handles all the French names and locations as well as the passages in French...[in this] fascinating look at one woman's contribution to the war effort. -- AudioFile One of the outstanding surveys of the real life of a secret agent. -- M. R. D. Foot, former British military historian and WWII British Army intelligence officer

Author Information

Anne-Marie Walters (1923-1998), daughter of an English father and French mother, joined Britain's Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) in 1941 during World War II. In 1943, she was recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and trained as an SOE agent in Scotland. Her first entry into France occurred when she was successfully dropped into southwestern France in January 1944. There she joined the SOE network called Wheelwright under the supervision of George Starr, for whom she served as a courier until after D-Day. For her work in occupied France, she was awarded the MBE (Civil Division). She later wrote a memoir of her war experiences, published in 1946 as Moondrop to Gascony. The book won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1947. David Hewson is a former Regular Army Officer much interested in military history. Nicola Barber, is an Audie Award and Earphones Award-winning narrator whose voice can be heard in television and radio commercials and popular video games such as World of Warcraft. She is also an Audie finalist in the prestigious category of solo female narrationfor her work on Murphy's Law by Rhys Bowen and Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth. She has performed on the stage in New York City and at a number of top regional theaters in the United States. Her film and television roles include The Nanny Diaries with Scarlett Johansson, and Law & Order's 2009 season premiere. Originally from England, she currently resides in New York, a multicultural background that enables her to bring a broad range of accents and characterizations to her role as a full-time voice-over actor.

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