Sonia d’Artois, who has died aged 90, was a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and parachuted into France before D-day to support the resistance by working as a courier and explosives expert. She had been brought up in France, and was 20 years old at the time. Codenamed Blanche, she was to pose as Suzanne Bonvie, a representative of a Paris fashion house who had been sent to the country to recuperate from a serious illness.
She was originally due to be dropped into the Saône-et-Loire district of eastern France to be the explosives expert for the SOE’s Ditcher circuit, which had a French-Canadian organiser, Guy d’Artois. The two had trained together and he had fallen in love with her after she winked at him before their second training jump. They persuaded their officers to pair them together, but when they got married during a weekend in London before their departure, Maurice Buckmaster, the head of SOE’s F Section, changed the plans, fearing that their relationship might leave them both more vulnerable under torture.
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