![]() None the less over the next seven months they organised a score of dropping zones and nearly a hundred safe houses for Sussex agents. As the pathfinder team, they faced great dangers as the Gestapo were now very active and the German radio detection service had become highly effective. Their task was to find dropping zones and safe houses for more than 50 follow-up Sussex teams. In January 1944 Jeannette Guyot was awarded her parachute wings after a short course at Ringway, Manchester.Īfter several false starts due to bad weather, on Februshe landed near Loches, south-east of Tours, in Operation Calanque, with three other French officers. This was in preparation for Plan Sussex, under which, during and after the Allied landings in Normandy, teams of observers would be parachuted into France to provide intelligence on German order-of-battle and troop movements. At last he agreed and she was sent to Praewood House, St Albans, for training in the techniques of military intelligence by SIS and American OSS instructors. Rémy gave her a desk job, but she badgered him to send her back to France. The very next morning in London, Jeannette Guyot met Colonel Rémy (who had escaped by boat across the Channel) and formally enlisted in the Free French forces under the alias Jeannette Gauthier. As a result a rescue operation was launched on the night of May 13 1943, when she and Robert were picked up by a Lysander of the RAF’s 161 Squadron. When the Germans occupied Vichy France, the Gestapo began to close in on Jeannette Guyot. Phratrie, which was rated by Colonel André Dewavrin, chief of de Gaulle’s central bureau for intelligence and action, as the “most extraordinary’’ of all the Free French networks, had several subgroups whose activities encompassed intelligence-gathering, sabotage and helping downed Allied airmen and French civilians to escape from France. There she met Jacques Robert, who had been trained in special operations in England to work for de Gaulle’s Free French and had parachuted into France to establish the “Phratrie” réseau. When, in June 1942, Colonel Rémy’s network was betrayed by Pierre Cartaud and many members rounded up, she fled to Lyon. Unperturbed, she resumed her role as a passeur, accompanying a dozen people a month across the demarcation line. She resisted all interrogation and nothing could be proved against her, but the Germans withdrew her Ausweiss. In February 1942, however, she was arrested and imprisoned for three months at Chalon-sur-Saône and Autun. In August 1941 she met Gilbert Renault, alias Colonel Rémy, chief of the Paris-based Confrérie Notre-Dame réseau (network), and she became one of his liaison officers, carrying mail into Vichy France, while continuing as a passeur. ![]() Until August 1941 she worked for Félix Svagrowsky of the Amarante network as a passeur, using a German-issued pass, or Ausweiss, to smuggle people out of the occupied zone to the north and across the Saône river by boat into Vichy France. Jeannette Guyot was born on Februin Chalon-sur-Saône, where, after the fall of France in June 1940, she and all her family were quick to join the Resistance. “Jeannette Guyot, who has died aged 97, resisted the occupation of France by Germany throughout the Second World War and became one of France’s most highly decorated agents. She was also made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire with the name Gauthier. She had undertaken the most risky assignments, and her work and conduct had been beyond all praise. ![]() When she won the British George Medal, her citation stated that she had shown the highest qualities of initiative, daring and endurance and that she was unquestionably the heroine of special operations on the Western Front. She was also one of only two women awarded the American Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest American decoration after the Medal of Congress, during the Second World War. Nevertheless, Jeannette Guyot was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur and was awarded the Croix de guerre avec palmes. In its funeral, April 13th, 2016, neither her family nor her close friends knew her deeds during the World War II.
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