Intrepid Woman

A teenager on a Maryland farm when World War II began, Betty Lussier went to England to help the British fight off an impending invasion. Armed with a private pilot’s license, she joined the Air Transport Auxiliary and was soon ferrying planes and pilots for the RAF, and her memoir describes those days in thrilling detail. After the Normandy invasion, when women pilots were barred from delivering planes to the combat zones on the continent, she joined a counter-intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services. Her experiences with a special liaison unit in Algeria, Sicily, Italy, and France helping to set up a chain of double agents and transmit misinformation to the enemy are described for the first time as she takes the reader step-by-step through some memorable cases that helped bring the war to an end.