Pearl Witherington Cornioley
Pearl Cecile Witherington was born in Paris, France from British parents on June 24, 1914. In 1940, she served as the assistant to the Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. After the invasion of France, she escaped France with her mother and sisters. She arrived in England in July 1941 and joined the Air Ministry where she worked for two years before offering her services to the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
On the night of September 22, 1943, Pearl parachuted into occupied France where she worked as the Stationer Network's second courier (Jacqueline Nearne, Stationer's other courier, worked in France for the network until April, 1944).
After Maurice Southgate, the head of the Stationer circuit, was arrested in May 1944, Pearl and the Stationer's radio operator divided the enormous network and Pearl took charge of the northern portion, which she named Marie Wrestler, and assumed for herself the code name Pauline. With her fiancé Henri Cornioley as second-in-command, Pearl kept the fighters of her network armed and organized even as their numbers reached approximately 3,500 after D-Day. Because of her leadership these men were able to disrupt the rush of many Germans to the Normandy coast.
After witnessing the post-war publication of many over-dramatized, fictitious accounts of female SOE agents, Pearl refused for decades to give any interviews that would result in a memoir. However, when she met French journalist Hervé Larroque in 1995, she finally agreed to a series of interviews which resulted in the French-language memoir titled Pauline, published in 1996. The English translation -- which Pearl approved before she died in 2008 -- was edited by Kathryn Atwood and published in 2013 as Code Name Pauline: The Memoirs of a World War II Special Agent.
“In Paris, I found myself surrounded by Germans; they were all over the place. They played music, and people would go and listen to them! All along rue de Rivoli, as far as you could see from place de la Concorde, there were enormous swastika banners five or six floors high. I just thought, This is impossible.Imagine that someone comes into your home—someone you don’t like—he settles down, gives orders: “Here we are, we’re at home now; you must obey.” To me that was unbearable.”
“We could see the bombing in London and we heard of the battles going on in Africa and other places. But what made me really furious was the occupation. When I arrived in Paris from Normandy, shortly after July 14, 1940, notices were placarded, “Mr. So and So was shot last night.” There were notices like that on columns along rue de Rivoli. Those poor people had been caught outside after the curfew, taken to a police station, and if there was any action whatsoever against the Germans during the night, they were shot.”