Wolves at the Door: The True Story of America's Greatest Female Spy

by Judith L. Pearson

Book Overview

Virginia Hall left her Baltimore home in 1931 to enter the Foreign Service and went to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) when Hitler was building toward the peak of his power in Europe. She was assigned to France, where she helped the Resistance movement, escaped prisoners of war, and American Allied paratroopers. By 1942 she was considered so dangerous to the Gestapo that she had to escape over the Pyrenees mountains--on...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 159921072X
• ISBN13: 9781599210728
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Lyons Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.82 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Great historical learning experience

Loved this. Taught me so much history that I didn't know about. Really want to re-read this!

READ THIS INSTEAD OF "A Woman of No Importance"

I read "A Woman of No Importance" first, it was sooo plain. Nothing about it stood out to me or was particularly captivating to read. It had far less detail about Virginia Hall's life or activities, it was more generalized about the things she was involved in, but not specific to her, herself. This book, however, had fine detail about her, her life, her wooden leg (which is great), and it still had decent detail about the SOE and MI6. I loved her even before reading books that are specifically about her, I even named one of my very bold chickens after her. Virginia Hall (and my chicken) are both bad a** b****es.

Suspenseful, never dull, wonderfully researched

Kudos to the author, Judith Pearson. I almost always prefer first person accounts of those who lived through WWII. However, this book gripped me throughout the narrative. This would make a wonderful movie with Virginia Hall played by an actress of Cate Blanchett's caliber. Exhaustively researched and well written. Thank you Ms. Pearson, I'll be looking for your next book!

A New Look At An Old War

As a old history teacher (retired)I really enjoyed this book. These are the stories that are disapearing by the thousands a day. Judith Pearson did a very good job with her research for this book. The comment in the book that Virginia Hall never told her story, because no one asked hold very true with people coming out of WWII. This gives a fresh new look that the spy game in France during the war was not all blowing bridges and rails, but developing groups that were safe havens. I would highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to know more about Vichy France during the war.

dramatic, little-known story of daring American woman spy in France in WWII

Virginia Hall was a Baltimore-born American Foreign Service officer in Lyon, France, when Hitler invaded in 1940. She quickly made the decision to use her familiarity with the region and contacts she had made as an espionage agent for the Allied forces. She worked effectively in coordinating and directing sabotage, assassinations, and other activities until the Nazis took over the southern part of France which they had allowed to remain nominally indepedent under Petain. After fleeing Lyon to Spain, Hall was brought to London by the British and American intelligence services she had been working with. They had come to prize her abilities in operating undetected, working with the French Resistanance, and causing damage to the German war machine in France. Recognizing that she would be a valuable agent working in France in the time leading up to D-Day, she was sent back into France. After the War, Hall received high awards for her incomparable espionage work from the British and American governments. Pearson--author of other works on personal stories from World War II--tells Hall's daring story in a quick-paced style occasionally going into historical background. An engaging commemoration for this little-known, but major World War II Allied spy.

A Story of Courage in a Very Bad Time

In Leo Marks excellent book 'Between Silk and Cyanide' he says that the average life of a radio operator in the resistance in France was six weeks. Virginia Hall was in France on two tours for a lot more than six weeks. She was the only female in the war to receive the Distinguished Service Cross. Born in 1906, she was not the beautiful young thing that gets featured so often in movies. In fact she even had a wooden leg and became known to the Germans as the 'Lady with the Limp.' She survived the war and worked for the CIA until the mandatory retirement age of sixty. This book is her story, well told by Ms. Pearson who has written a number of other books, mostly on POWs. She has done a supurb job, able to capture the tone of the times while making Miss Hall's story stand out as one of great courage and accomplishment.